Page 104 of Decadence

Still staring at her with that toe-curling possessiveness, Ikriss wrapped his arms around her and pulled her into his kiss.

His lips tasted of midnight and spun silver.

He was dark spice and bitterness and molten caramel; the most complicated and decadent thing to ever touch her palate.

She yielded.

Of course she yielded.

There was nothing left to do.

Their union was complete.

Chapter Twenty-Two

After the most intense sanitation routine he had ever experienced—his mate was as indeed devious and creative in the pleasure department as she was with food—Ikriss found himself curled up in his sleeping pod with this exquisite creature nestled beside him.

In sleep, he saw yet another side to her beauty. With her back pressed against his torso, her naked form molded perfectly against his—too perfectly—as if she were the last missing piece in his existence.

She’d been sleeping for a long time now. He’d slept too, his arms curled tightly around her as he drifted in and out of familiar dreams.

He visited the icy plains and mountains of his homeland.

He saw his father’s face; almost identical to his own, but hard and weathered from many revolutions of hunting and evading Imperial enemies on the cold, windswept Vaal.

His father had been a stoic, practical man. Like most Aikun, he was mistrustful of outsiders and utterly ruthless when it came to protecting his clan.

But Marakhet and his mother, Dyala, had been the first to welcome Ikriss back with open arms when he secretly paid a visit to his tribe after so many revolutions… after he’d become the very thing they despised.

A tool of the Empire.

It had taken a lot of reassurance and negotiation to avoid a death-match between a lone but armed-the-teeth Elite Imperial Warrior and an entire clan of suspicious Aikun, but in the end, Marakhet’s acceptance had been the turning point for the male hunters, and once the others realized that Ikriss wasn’t going to serve their dead hearts to the despised Empress Vionn, they slowly learned to trust him.

And eventually, after hundreds of secret visits—visits that Tarak actually encouraged and turned a blind eye to—he earned his hunter’s Marks.

If only father could see him now; free from the clutches of the Empire with his destined mate in his arms.

Marakhet would be proud.

Goddess bless his eternal soul.

And his mother would be quietly overjoyed when she met Sienna. Of course, she was still alive, and at a hundred-and-thirty-odd revolutions, she was one of the revered elders of the tribe.

Dyala had been a little more insistent lately. During their transgalactic holo-comms, she’d mentioned more than once that he should find himself a nice human girl like the other nice warriors.

Ah, wait until he introduced her to Sienna. He could hardly believe his mate was eager to visit the planet that had forged him—a place that had such a terrible reputation throughout the Nine Galaxies.

But there was hidden beauty on Kythia, too.

“You will see it for yourself, my amina,” he murmured softly in Aikun, running his fingers through her glorious hair. “I will take you there, and you will be received as a queen of my tribe.”

He couldn’t care less about royal genes inherited from some distant ancestor, but he would treat her as his queen, and he would guard her as jealously as they coveted her.

They would not have her.

The filth of the old empire would never lay eyes upon her again.

She began to stir, her eyelashes fluttering delicately against her creamy skin. Half-asleep, she rolled over and draped her long arms around his shoulders. “Mmmfuhmm,” she said, pulling him toward her, squeezing him tightly as if he were some sort of soft-bodied prey being suffocated by a giant samimi worm.

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