Page 43 of The Surrender

I collapse against him, my body shaking, my mind fading.

And regardless of the punishment to come, I call my name, my true name, the oneshegave me, "Qora!"

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“Do you know how the world will end, little dove?”

QUINTESSA

“Merikh,” I breathe the whisper with my eyes closed, neck arched, and skin panting from his tongue laving at the blood crusting my skin.

Merikh rises to tower over me. A bitter chill knifes up my spine from those blood orbs pinning my whole body in place. My lungs claw and claw but find no breath from the vampire who looks more like the dark and wild monster I beheld in the Wailing Woods the first time.

Wind from the mountains all around the castle howls just beyond the alcove, transforming it into a wind tunnel. But they cannot hope to suffocate the deep, silken growl releasing from his throat. It launches frost into my blood.

I don’t realize I’m pressing so hard against the back of the alcove until the thorns pierce the skin of my lower back. Pain splinters into my nerves. I shift against his marble-hard body, but he’s immovable, and the thorns are too thick. Too dug in. Like barbs. Tears prick the corners of my eyes.

“If you value your life as I do,” he whispers in my ear, voice growing louder but deeper and lower to mirror his hawkish glare, “you won’t fucking speak or move. I don’t even want to hear one little sexy whimper out of your throat.”

My heart does a little somersault, and I say dryly, “My whimpers are sexy?”

He spins me around to face the wall. So fast. Too fast, I don’t have time to adjust before my hands flatten...right onto more thorns. Still, I bite my tongue and choke on the sob in my throat when his fingers caress the seraph-silk fabric at my lower back where it clings to the blood trickling down to the crack of my backside. My cheeks turn red from mortification.

His hands come down on the belt, the belt Kyan said is “the finest and purest of gold refined in the kilns of heaven”. One barely-there touch, and he unclasps it. The sumptuous skirts of starry satin with its silvery stones of six-pointed star designs fall with the release of the belt, bunching around my bare feet. The cold, shaded air hits my thighs and my backside covered in little more than thin lace.

I hiss deeply from the icy pads of Merikh’s fingers tracing the wounded skin where the thorns have embedded. When he seizes one of my wrists, I tug back on instinct until he twists it painfully to see the cluster of thorns pricking my palms. Before, the rain had diluted my blood. Is it stronger to him now?

His chilled breath feathers the side of my face. I gulp down another sob, but frenzied breaths rush from my nostrils. Those fingers travel lower. He releases my wrist. My nerves spin the second he rips the bloodied lace from my rear. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice him shoving it in the pocket of his waistcoat. Oh, gods, I’d be so turned on by that if crucifixion-worthy thorns weren’t rooted in the flesh so close to my spine. Especially with no other diversions.

Or with the monster god all others fear breathing his icy hunger along my spine, down, down, down.

His nose rubs the skin right above the top thorn. I stiffen.

Merikh pauses there—snarls, “Too much fear in your blood, Quintessa. Deep breaths,” he finishes in a lower, steadier, silkier voice.

As much as I want to speak, I bite my tongue because...the emotion clots and swells throughout my blood to burn my throat with more tears...he called me Quintessa. So, I draw breaths through my nose, exhale through my mouth. And shiver when he brushes his bitter cold mouth all the way up my back to my shoulders.

“If I had my venom, I could lick the wounds closed.” He touches my shoulders, digs his fingers into my neck muscles beneath my hair, and peels off the saint seals from my throat and chest.

I swallow, hands unashamedly shaking with the pain flaring from the thorns. All I want is to hold my quivering stomach where nausea threatens to sear my throat with bile. My chest heaves with dreaded breath. Best to just freeze and let him have what he wants. Like Kyan said, don’t fight. Just surrender.

“Do you know how the world will end, little dove?” he purrs in my ear while he rips at the stitched angel hair and sprite thread of the bodice. The star stones clatter to the ground, each one like the rapid beat of my heart. While fingering the thin lace of my bralette, Merikh tangles his other hand within my hair and utters, “The poets say it will end with fire or ice. Others, a dying, cold star. And others say a twilight world between death and life. Not with a bang as when it shattered into being. No, a whimper.

“I despise poets...” his voice hardens to a cruel, diamonded edge before softening again, “But I imagine, little dove, it will sound much like your whimpers.”

I gasp when his mouth rubs the space just below my ear and down the side of my neck. He settles on my jugular.

“Do you know it’s the loudest who are the least powerful? Those who need to roar to usurp their dominance?” His fingertips caress my naked arms where gooseflesh has already blossomed. I shudder when his thumbs nip at my underarms, prompting me to lift until he palms my lace-covered breasts. “It is not the hot and monstrous ready to burn the world down. No, little dove, it’s the cold and dark and unfeeling.”

In one split-second, Merikh tears the flimsy fabric from my chest and turns me to him, leaving me naked and trembling with his shadow devouring my small white body. After his bloody pupils descend, his nostrils flare, and a vein throbs in his brow, Merikh seizes my throat in what is possibly the softest, most delicate grip ever.

A sob lodges in my throat from how he studies me with those eyes. Like he’s about to reach into my throat, yank out my heart, and hold it pumping in his hands. My blood would trickle down his arm while he debates on whether to squeeze it to a pulp and drink it—or whether to open the hollow of his chest where he may feel its warmth, any warmth for the first time.

“Merikh...” I say in barely above a whimper, the ones he claims to love.

I take a tentative step toward him as I try to hold the stitches of my sanity together. With dread swelling everywhere, I stretch a hand toward his chest, quaking more when he doesn’t blink or so much as flick his eyes down. But my fingers find their strength when I curve them onto his white tunic, loosening one button to press my fingertips onto three of his scars.

Sucking in a deep breath, I circle my thumb upon those scars but don’t rip my gaze from his once as I whisper, “I know what it’s like to be cold. To be dark. To feel...unfeeling.”

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