Page 38 of Empire of Death
“But I don’t need it right now.”
“It is a gift,” he said sternly. “My strength. My armor. My speed. I give it all to you,Xivin.”
“Wrath…” I wanted to reach out and touch him, to grip the armor that concealed his flesh from my touch. My father was theonly man I’d ever known who would give up everything for me—even his life. But now I had Wrath, a man who would literally cross the barrier between life and death for me. Who would grant his powers as a god to me, a mortal. He would give his life for mine without hesitation…if he had a life to give.
“Wrath is the name granted to me upon my entry toXian. It never suited me, but as the centuries passed, I embraced it and forgot the name I’d known for my brief time as a mortal. It wasn’t until recently someone reminded me what I’d been called before.”
I waited for him to share it with me, wanting him to speak the name freely instead of me begging for it. He didn’t share details of his mortal life with me, and he was so secretive that I expected he would never tell me. This might be the only piece of him I’d ever have.
His eyes found mine. “Callum Riverside…that’s what they used to call me.”
Inexplicably, I felt tears burn the corners of my eyes like he’d given me another gift as kingly as his strength and his command of the dead. He gave me a piece of himself, a piece of his soul that somehow survived the constant darkness of his existence of servitude. “Can I call you that?”
He watched my emotional reaction without giving a hint of emotion himself. To anyone else, he seemed dead behind the eyes, but I knew his soul was a cascade of feelings. “You’re the only one who can,Xivin.”
When we returned to Skull Island, it was somewhere around midnight. Hawk wanted to leave for the Northern Kingdoms immediately, but I insisted we stay another night at the inn before our departure. I was tired and in desperate need of a bath, but I also just wanted some time alone…or time alone with someone else.
It was a testament to Hawk’s commitment to serve me when he didn’t argue to get his way. He accepted my decisions the way he would accept whatever Mother or Father had decided.
I returned to my room at the inn and felt my muscles ache when I finally took off the armor I’d been wearing almost constantly the last few days. When I stepped into the bathroom, I stood under the warm water of the hot shower and let the sea salt leave my skin and wash down the drain. I missed home for a lot of reasons, but being clean every single day had started to feel like a luxury I could never afford again.
My head was tilted back and my eyes were closed as I enjoyed the feeling of the warm water washing away the dead skin that had been burned from too much exposure to the sun. Then I felt his presence like a weight on my shoulders, a presence so large and distinct that the shower suddenly felt too small.
The base of his chest moved against my back, and then enormous arms wrapped around me like branches from an ancient tree. They tightened over me then pulled me close, anchoring me right against him as the water continued to pour down on me.
My head tilted back against him, and my eyes opened to see him above me.
He stared at me for a while, his hair wet and his skin glistening with drops. Then he gently turned me around to face him before his hand slid into my hair and he kissed me hard, kissed me with the most force and desperation he’d ever shown me. He was always gentle and soft, his mouth issuing caresses rather than demands, but tonight, he was just hungry.
His arm hooked underneath both of my thighs, and he lifted me effortlessly, with a single arm in a wet shower, and he brought me against him as I wrapped my legs around his waist. With our mouths level, our kiss was much easier, and his desperate caresses continued as his hand slipped into my soaked hair at the back of my neck. The water sprayed my back as our kiss heated up the stone walls of the shower. He took my mouth with demanding force and swiped his tongue against mine like he wanted to claim all of me. Then he adjusted me and himself before he lowered my body onto his length and sheathed himself in the place I was most desperate to feel him.
I’d taken him countless times and it was always magical, but when I felt him enter me with such force, I gasped like I didn’t know his body. Like I didn’t know how deeply he could feel me and how far he could stretch me.
Then as if I weighed nothing, he lifted me up and down on his length, his tree-trunk arms doing all the work while I moaned and soaked him to the base. My hands gripped his shoulders, and I watched his hard eyes lock on mine as he lifted me onto his length repeatedly, a weightless songbird to one of his enormous branches. “Callum…”
We made it to the bed, our bodies damp from not completely drying off before we hit the sheets. He moved over me like usual, always wanting to be on top or the one doing the work, while my only job was to put all my energy into taking his god-like dick.
He sank inside me once more as he covered me like a blanket and thrust into me hard, taking me roughly like he had in the shower as if lovemaking wasn’t his interest tonight. He just wanted me with a need that couldn’t be satisfied, like our time apart during my voyage with Jack and the others had made him irate from the lack of intimacy.
I loved it when he took me slow and looked into my face as if he could see the light of Caelum in my eyes, but I also loved it when he was like this, like he was parched and I was an oasis. Like I was the single most desirable woman in the world whom he finally got to claim. With eyes that burned hotter than the forges of the underworld, he pounded into me like the union of our flesh drove him to insanity.
My fingers dug into his hair as he thrust into me, his hard body tightening and flexing with every movement he made. His frame was covered with more muscles than I’d ever seen on another man, like he was simply made differently, part man and part beast, like a powerful steed or a mighty dragon.
I was swept off my feet by the raw magnetism that sucked me in, pulled into the undertow of desire he elicited in me that no other man had ever replicated. But my heart also ached because it wanted more. Images I’d never seen with the naked eye flashed across my mind, a baby tiny in the crook of his massive arm as hesat in a rocking chair by the fire, a scene of him standing beside me in the courtyard outside the castle, but instead of a midnight-blue uniform, it was red and black…with the Rothschild crest in the center of his chest. Him with a mighty dragon that shared his soul…and gave him an immortal life to share with me. Things that had never come to pass felt like memories of the future, moments that would never have the chance to be.
He came to a sudden stop, his hand sliding deep into my hair as he cradled my face. “Where did you go?”
“Nowhere. I just…”
His anxious eyes flicked back and forth between mine. “Did I hurt you?”
“No,” I said quickly. “No, you could never hurt me.”
“I felt you leave.” He was still burrowed inside me, a cliff over my ocean. “Tell me where you went.”
I adjusted my legs, hooked my ankles together at his lower back as I anchored him closer to me. My hand cupped his thick neck, and my thumb traced one of the rivers that protruded from his skin. “I’m back now. Let’s just forget it.”
But his eyes pierced mine like he would never forget it. Like there was more he wanted to say but chose to keep it locked in his throat. Seconds ticked by, and his stare remained hard as stone. But then it finally softened, slightly, like he somehow understood. Understood all the emotions I felt but couldn’t share. “I feel what you feel,Xivin. Your love…and your sorrow.”
