Page 67 of Blood

Dimitri reaches for my hands still clasped around the bedpost and releases them. That’s all the permission I need.

I run my fingers across the smooth slope of his shoulders, across his cheeks, through his messy hair, down his chest. Anywhere I can reach, I touch.

I cry out as wave after wave of pleasure tear through me with the force of a tornado. It rips away everything I was and leaves behind someone I don’t entirely recognize—someone who belongs to Dimitri motherfucking Gray.

My fingernails dig into his back as his body stiffens against mine. A low growl vibrates through his chest, and my body instinctively clenches around him.

He comes with a roar that I feel to the marrow of my bones before he collapses on top of me, sweaty and sated.

“Holy crap,” I murmur, desperately trying to regain the breath that left me somewhere between orgasm number one and orgasm number two. I run my fingers through Dimitri’s sweaty hair as he curls his arm around me and shifts our position. I find myself nestled against his chest as he coils around me like a koala. I never pegged—no pun intended—Dimitri as a cuddler. Then again, I doubt Dimitri has ever allowed himself to be this vulnerable with anyone else.

A tiny thrill shoots through me at the fact that I may be the first person Dimitri Gray ever cuddled with.

“I don’t know what the future holds for us, but I’m yours, Violet Dracula, as long as you want me,” Dimitri whispers against the crown of my head.

“And I’m yours too, Dimitri Gray. This goes both ways.” I shift slightly on his chest so I can see his face clearly. “We’re a team. All of us. You were just too stubborn and pigheaded to ever join it.”

A smirk plays at the edges of his lips. “I’m beginning to see that.” He presses his lips to my forehead. “Sleep, Violet, my heart. No harm will come to you while you’re in my arms. I’ll stab anyone who tries to take you from me.”

I feel groggy and languid and so unbelievably happy.

Dimitri...is mine. Fully and truly mine, just as I am his. I can die a happy vampire-but-not-a-vampire knowing that.

Snuggled against a man I once thought hated me, I allow sleep to carry me away on a blissful tidal wave of oblivion.

CHAPTER 23

VIOLET

“This is ridiculous!” Ra—one of the Fomorians on Athena’s war council—bangs his fist against the table.

And when I say Ra, I mean the Ra. You know, the Egyptian deity of the sun.

According to Athena, he doesn’t actually hold any sunlight powers or whatever. However, when he used to roam Earth, he was one of the vainest Fomorians and sought to have temples created in his honor. He used his powers over the dead to steal the souls out of his enemies and transform them into luminescent balls of light—which he claimed to be miniature suns. Thus, Ra’s title and prestige came to be.

If you ask me, he’s a steaming sack of shit with an inflated head incapable of fitting in a normal-sized room.

Ra waits until he has all our attention, his chin hefted upward imperiously, before continuing. “We cannot attack Zeus at Mount Olympus. We need to find a place where we’ll have an advantage.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Ares folds his arms over his chest with a scowl aimed the other man’s way. “Zeus won’t be stupid enough to leave his kingdom. There’s no way we can get him to go to our turf.”

Thor’s brilliant green eyes slide to me from where he sits beside Balor at the table. “We do have something Zeus desperately wishes to acquire...”

And here we go again.

I just barely rein in my eye roll as my guys jump from their seats and begin to argue profusely. Power crackles through the air, raising every hair on my arm.

This meeting is getting us absolutely nowhere, as I knew it would. We’re all too different to agree on anything. I understand why a war council is necessary, of course, but it doesn’t negate the fact that our morals are immensely different.

I thunk my head against the wooden table in Hell’s conference room as I listen to Vin threaten bodily harm. Hux cuts in, his rumbly, accented voice shooting spurts of heat through my body, and then Barret roars something nearly unintelligible.

Is this what my life will be like if I’m the so-called queen? Ugh.

There are a thousand things I’d rather do than be here.

Unwittingly, I lift my head and shift my gaze to Dimitri, who sits farther down the table from me, his features carefully impassive and his white hair brushed away from his face.

Yes, a thousand different things...

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