Текст книги "Six Scorched Roses"

Автор книги: Carissa Broadbent

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CHAPTER NINETEEN

I wasn’t sure why I had expected the kiss to be fierce and animalistic, but that first one was quiet, gentle. Sweet.

Vale’s lips were softer than I thought they’d be. His beard tickled my chin. At first, he just brushed his mouth over mine, like he wanted to start by knowing the shape of it, knowing the way I tasted.

Then, his lips parted, the kiss deepening, the touch of his tongue—shockingly shy—meeting mine. My head was cloudy and fuzzy in a way that had nothing to do with my exhaustion.

A serrated breath ghosted over my lips—and that, that one little sign of the intensity of his desire, lit something on fire inside me. Suddenly Vale’s closeness, the warmth of his bare skin, the taste of him, the smell of him, overwhelmed me.

A tiny, wordless sound escaped my throat, and I kissed him back this time. Harder. Deeper.

He met my fervor with enough enthusiasm to leave me breathless.

He held my face firmly, his tongue exploring my mouth, each kiss bleeding into the other. Gods, I had never kissed anyone like this—each movement so intuitive. I never had to stop and guess what he wanted. It was the kind of ease I thought other people must always feel.

One of his hands moved to the back of my head, tangling in my hair. The other wandered down to my waist, his thumb slipping between the buttons of my shirt, brushing my bare skin. That one touch made me gasp.

His tongue rolled against mine, then he withdrew. In my fervor, we’d both fallen back onto the bed.

Everything was hazy, distant.

“You’re injured,” I said softly.

His chuckle was low and thick. “Incredible how much better I already feel.”

But his smile faded, and he gave me a long stare—and I knew what this wordless silence meant, the question he was asking.

I parted my thighs, opening myself to the rigid press of his desire between us.

His eyes darkened, the desire in them so sharp it cut me open, and it occurred to me that maybe I should be afraid—that maybe the hunger I was seeing in Vale’s expression, feeling in the way he held me to the bed, was about more than sex.

I wasn’t, though. No, the fear came from somewhere else. Not from Vale’s roughness, but his tenderness.

He smoothed a strand of hair from my forehead.

“You’re shaking, mouse.”

I slid my fingertips beneath the waistband of his trousers, a light touch over the flesh of his abdomen—soft skin, hard muscle, trembling faintly.

“So are you.”

My voice was rough, low. Vale lowered his head a little when I spoke, like he wanted to feel the words over his lips—stopping just shy of meeting them.

Neither of us moved. Not meeting that almost kiss, not pulling away, our hands both at the buttons of each other’s clothing but not unbuttoning them.

I watched Vale’s face, the panes of his features outlined in blue-silver licks of light that reminded me of the outlines of the roses I gave him. Even with the wounds remaining, he reminded me of a statue—a work of living art, carved from stone, subject to none of the atrocities of time or nature. He was eternity while I was impermanence—a being that embraced the mysteries I spent my entire life stifled by.

How could a being look so similar to a human and yet so stunningly different?

And yet…

Yet…

The corner of his mouth tightened. It should have been a smile, but the expression was so sad it gutted me.

“I always wondered what you were thinking,” he murmured. “When you look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like I’m a formula to be solved, and you’re very intrigued about the answer.”

At this, I couldn’t help but smile. “Intriguing is the word.”

A wrinkle formed between his brows. “An acceptable one?”

The question struck me hard—struck me because I wasn’t prepared for it, for him to ask it that way, shy and tentative.

Like the answer meant something to him. Like the answer meant everything to him.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s remarkable.”

I could never solve Vale and his many mysteries, but I loved them all the same. And in these complexities, I saw a mirror held up to all the things that did not make sense within myself.

For the first time, I saw beauty in all the things I did not understand. And I knew that Vale saw beauty in all those things within me, too.

I slipped my palm up his abdomen and relished the way his muscles twitched beneath my touch.

“I’d like you to kiss me again,” I said. “And I’d like these clothes off.”

“Hmm.” He hummed feigned reluctance against my mouth, but only for a moment, because it was quickly swallowed by his next kiss—and this one was brutal, hard, demanding. He kissed me like we didn’t have any time. Like he was mortal.

His hand slid up my shirt, large palm flattening over my stomach, as if not sure whether he wanted to go up or down—gods, I wasn’t sure where I wanted him to be, either. I wanted both, and quickly.

I broke away from his kiss just long enough to tear my shirt off over my head. A rush of cold air hit me as Vale pulled slightly away, despite my rough exhale of protest.

Those amber eyes moved over my body, taking in my bare skin. The hunger in them was unmistakable now.

You should be afraid, a voice whispered in the back of my mind.

But I’d never been afraid of death.

No, that hunger just fueled my own. My breasts were peaked with desire, begging to be touched—my core slick, begging to be filled. His eyes drank me in for what felt like an age and an instant.

Then, like his own desire had overwhelmed him, he reached for the buttons of my trousers and yanked them open. I lifted my hips to help them off, and I had barely kicked off the fabric before his hand was between my legs.

Pleasure sparked up my spine. A whimper escaped me. My fingernails dug into his back, and my body, of its own accord, jerked to be closer to his—even though he held me down to the bed.

He let out a low groan.

“I was right that night.” His mouth curled into a smirk against mine. He sounded satisfied with himself. “You do want this.”

He’d been right then, and I wasn’t even ashamed of it. I’d wanted him for a long time. That night had been the first time I thought of him when I found my own pleasure in bed, imagining my own hands to be his, and it had only gotten more frequent since then.

Now that his hands were there, circling in on the epicenter of my desire… gods, it was better than I’d imagined.

It was hard to speak, hard to think. He teased me like he knew it, too, though I could see that he was also having a hard time focusing on anything but that, see it in the way his eyes hooded when my breath hitched.

“You’ve been thinking about it for a long time, too.” My hand slipped farther beneath the waistband of his trousers, slid over smooth skin and coarse hair and settling at the rigid length of his cock straining against the fabric, responding immediately to my touch.

I took a moment—just a moment—to run my palm up and down that beautiful length, just softly enough that I knew it would be a little torturous. Just to make sure he knew we were on equal ground.

He smiled into my kiss like he knew it, too.

But then I kissed him hard and ripped the buttons of his trousers open.

Time.

We didn’t have time.

And that realization seemed to crash over him at the same time it did me, because he pressed me to the bed, our kisses frantic and messy, his tongue exploring my mouth, fingers sliding into me—the sudden press of them coaxing a choked moan from my throat, my thighs opening wider for him, though he held me still when I tried to chase the friction my body wanted.

His kisses moved from my lips to my cheek, pausing at my ear—his breath rough against the sensitive skin there, teeth catching my earlobe, something I never thought could feel as good as it did in this moment—then moving down, to my throat. He paused there, tongue pressing against my flesh.

His breath was ragged. My heart pounded. I was sure he could feel my pulse there. Smell it.

For a moment, I thought maybe he might do it.

For a moment, I thought maybe I wanted him to.

But he just skimmed his mouth up my neck, my jaw, moving back to my mouth and kissing me hard. His thumb pressed down at the core of my need, and that, combined with the penetration of his fingers, sent a wave of pleasure through me that left me gasping.

Time.

I pushed him off of me, my eyes meeting his in a way that communicated all of my demands, and started to roll over onto my hands and knees. I wanted him as deep as I could have him.

But he stopped me.

“No,” he said. “I want to watch your face.”

I hesitated, and my uncertainty must have shown in my expression, because Vale smiled—smiled fully, to reveal those deadly fangs.

“All this time you’ve gotten to study me. That isn’t fair.”

And strange how having him at my throat, teeth one heartbeat from my blood, didn’t frighten me, but the idea of letting him do that—the idea of looking into his eyes when I was so exposed—gave me pause.

But his fingers circled my bud, and I let out a strangled moan, and he smirked in a way that said he knew he had me.

And he was right. He could have me however he wanted.

I let him push me to the bed. My thighs opened around his hips. He kissed me languidly as I reached down to position him at my entrance—even the first pressure of his cock there making us both groan.

He yanked my hand back, pressing down on my forearms to hold me beneath him, and thrust into me.

I was so wet, so ready. It took just one single thrust. He was bigger than anything I’d had before, and that first thrust almost—almost—hurt, in every wonderful way.

I didn’t even realize I’d made a sound until he reacted to it, a hiss of pleasure as he buried his face against my hair. He worked at me slowly for those first couple of strokes, my hips rolling and pressing against his movements. Forcing him deep, gasping at every new angle that he hit inside of me.

He pushed himself up enough to look at me, and my impulse was to turn my head, to look away. But he grabbed my chin, held it—held it, so that he was looking right into my eyes.

He withdrew slowly, then pushed back into me, deeper, until my hips were lifted off the bed with the force of it. Sparks shot up my spine, pleasure spreading through my core. My one free hand reached for something, anything, to hold onto, finding his shoulder and clutching so hard that surely I was leaving marks on him.

He held that pressure for a few agonizing, incredible seconds, watching me as each minuscule shift made my breath quicken.

“Yes?” he said, softly.

“Yes,” I answered.

Gods, yes. Yes, yes, yes.

He withdrew again, painfully slowly.

His next stroke was harder still. My moan came out ragged, ripped from me without my permission.

Another stroke. Faster. Forceful.

He was still watching me, his face serious and focused, and I wanted to look away, wanted to hide myself, but I couldn’t—his eyes, the amber gold of a wolf in the woods, transfixed me.

Again.

He was slowly increasing his speed, his pressure. His free hand, the one that was not holding my forearm to the bed, traced the curve of my hip, my waist, circling the peaked hardness of my nipple just as he pushed into me again.

This time, my moan became a cry.

“Yes?” he asked.

“Yes,” I gasped.

Still, we didn’t look away from each other.

He was decoding me, solving me, the way I had solved him. I was being projected onto the wall like I had projected his blood, and I knew with a strange, terrible kind of certainty in this moment that he found me just as remarkable.

He wasn’t the only one. Because even though he had let go of my chin, I didn’t look away from him, either.

No, I barely blinked as he continued fucking me, every carefully measured stroke loosening in control. He was a quick study. He learned fast what I liked, what angles made my moans loudest. Learned what to give me when desperate, nonsensical pleas tumbled from my lips, even when I myself didn’t know.

Every muscle of my body, every shred of awareness, rearranged around him. The pleasure was unbearable, agonizing. I wanted to throw my head back and scream his name—I wanted to bury my face against the smooth expanse of his skin and breathe him.

I didn’t. Because I couldn’t look away from him, watching him watching me, memorizing each other.

And gods, he was beautiful. More beautiful than his blood. More beautiful than his admiration. All of it was dwarfed by the way he looked slowly unraveling, losing himself in his pleasure the way I lost myself in mine, tethered only to each other.

I clutched his shoulder now, and his fingers were tight enough around my arm to leave marks on me. My legs folded around his hips, urging him into me faster, harder. The headboard banged against the wall, an increasing rhythm that echoed my heartbeat.

His lips found my cheek, my throat, my mouth, stifling my cries. And yet he pulled away again, right as he rushed to that pinnacle, his cock driving into me so hard that he had to clutch my waist to keep from sending me against the headboard.

He met my eyes. And I knew he wanted to see the conclusion of this experiment—as much as I did.

“Yes?”

His voice was strained, like it took a lot of concentration to form even that small word.

I took his next stroke with equal force, pushing against him, contracting around him.

“Yes,” I choked. “Yes.”

And he pinned my shoulders down as I lifted my hips to receive those final thrusts, and we watched each other’s faces as we came together. I had to fight to keep my eyes open through the explosion of pleasure that left sparks of white over my vision, that tore a cry from my throat that must have echoed down the ancient empty hallways of this house.

But gods, it was worth it to make sure I saw him, eyes both distant and sharp with ecstasy, looking as if he had seen his goddess herself.

He pushed deep as he came, and I wrung myself around him as if to make sure I gave and took every last shred of pleasure.

The world went quiet. Reality came back in blurry pieces.

Vale’s head dropped, his forehead pressing against mine. His muscles trembled a bit, which I noticed with a pang of guilt. He’d strained himself more than he should have so soon after his injuries, magical potions or no.

He rolled off me and, as if it was nothing other than instinct, his arms folded around me, pulling me onto his chest.

I had never liked being held much. I found it too hot and restrictive. But Vale’s body was just the right amount of warm and cool, just the right balance of soft and firm. It felt like it was built to accommodate the shape of my own.

I let him hold me, and as my eyelashes fluttered with a sudden wave of exhaustion, a terrible dread settled over me.

Vale had been my experiment, my question to be answered. I thought it would be easier to let go of him if I could understand his every unknown. But he was a question that had no answer. And every answer.

Vale wasn’t a cure for anything. He was a whole new disease, one I’d carry with me to my inevitable end.

I didn’t want to let him go. I didn’t like goodbyes. Easier to be the first one to go.

But they come for us all, anyway.

CHAPTER TWENTY

I really didn’t mean to sleep.

I didn’t have time for it. I never did—maybe that was why my body forced it upon me. One moment, I was allowing Vale to hold me. The next, I was blinking blearily into the shadows of his bedchamber. I hadn’t spent much time in this room. It was just as cluttered as all the others—full of books and weapons and mismatched artifacts, like he’d just run out of space to put the vast quantity of things he’d collected over his long life and just shoved them wherever he could.

The smile came without my permission.

Vale. Someone who collected knowledge just like I did. I felt like a failure of a scientist for not realizing what I was seeing the first time I came to this house. I thought it was just full of clutter. But no, all these things had touched him in some way. He was careful about what he kept.

He slept now.

I knew that before I even looked at him. I could feel the steady rise and fall of his chest beneath my head. It was a deep sleep. Good. He needed it.

I didn’t want this moment to pass.

I blinked away sleep and stared into the room. The blue light of white flames now flickered alongside a warmer accent. My eyes fell to the windows. Dim light seeped beneath the curtains. Daylight from an overcast sky.

Daylight.

“Shit,” I hissed.

How? How could I have slept so long?

When I pushed myself up, a wave of dizziness greeted me. My whole body protested. The hard realities of our situation crushed me one after the other.

The dead priests I had burned.

The medicine.

Vitarus.

Time. We didn’t have time.

And I had let myself fall asleep.

Shame flooded through me. Embarrassment, that I’d let myself be distracted for so long—that I’d let Vale see—

I stood abruptly, ignoring my shaking knees and the sway to my step as I crossed the room.

I heard rustling fabric as Vale stirred behind me.

“Where are you going, mouse?”

His voice was weak and sleep-slurred, and I heard those things before I heard the joking lilt to his tone. He was still injured.

“I slept too long.”

He laughed. “I already know you well enough to know that is never true.”

It was true right now, when the world was falling apart. I went to the curtains and peered through them, careful not to let sunlight fall over Vale’s bed.

The window overlooked the back of Vale’s estate grounds. The charred remains of the bodies I had burned were a smear of ashy black bones.

I raised my gaze, and my throat closed.

No.

My knuckles trembled around the handful of velvet curtain.

Vale said, after a moment, “What is it?”

I didn’t even know how to answer him.

The end. That’s what it is.

I had seen once before what the sky looked like before a god appeared. I knew in that moment, all those years ago, that I would never forget the sight. And I knew it now, too, that I would never forget this one.

It wasn’t overcast, like I’d thought. The light had seemed strange because the sky was warped. Sunlight hit the ground in mottled, jerking flecks. Clouds circled in unnatural swirls in the distance, drawing tighter and tighter, and though the thickening mist at its center seemed like it should be dark, like storm clouds, instead it cradled distant fragments of bright yellow light—like little shards of lightning, floating suspended in the air, moving in slow ripples rather than jagged cracks.

The center of it was not over this estate.

No, it was miles away. One look, and I knew it hovered over the town of Adcova.

I couldn’t move. Panic settled deep in my bones.

“Lilith?”

Vale rose and approached me. I felt his warmth behind me, even though I couldn’t turn to look at him. He peered through the curtain, staying away from the light, and released a long exhale.

“I had hoped…” he murmured, and then let himself trail off. Because we had both hoped the same thing—that Vitarus had long ago decided he didn’t give any care to Adcova, and he’d continue to ignore us. Any encounter with the gods was a gambling game, and we had lost.

Of course he didn’t listen to decades of prayer and pleas for mercy. Of course he didn’t listen to dozens or hundreds or thousands of sacrifices in his honor.

This. This is the thing he would notice. What a cruel, ridiculous joke.

Our sins had not escaped Vitarus, and they would not go unpunished.

I closed my eyes for a long moment.

“You should leave now.”

My voice sounded strange when I said it. The words hurt more than they should have.

“I’ll go with you,” Vale said. “Help you.”

“You can’t help. It would make everything worse.”

“And what do you plan to do?”

My lips parted, but I tripped over words I didn’t have. What did I plan to do? What could I do?

“I don’t know when you were planning on leaving, but make it now. Right now.”

“Lilith.”

He didn’t say, “Look at me,” but I heard him ask for that in his tone of voice. And despite my better judgment, I turned.

Vale looked… sad.

I expected frustration. The same expression I was used to seeing on the faces of the people unfortunate enough to love me. But Vale… he just looked resigned, like he knew why I was doing this and that he couldn’t stop me.

“I need you to know—”

“I don’t have time for this.”

“Listen.” His hand fell to my arm—holding me gently. Did he know that it was the same place he held me down last night? “I know you, Lilith. I know that no one can make this decision but you. But let me give you all the information to make it with.”

I should have stopped him, but I didn’t.

“You could leave with me,” he said.

I knew he was going to say it. But it still ached to hear.

“If we run now,” he went on, “you will be gone by the time Vitarus shows his face. We could draw him away.”

I swallowed thickly. “To Obitraes?”

“Anywhere. Everywhere. It doesn’t matter. None of the gods of the White Pantheon can touch Obitraes. But if you wanted to go somewhere else, we could do that, too.”

There was nowhere one could hide from a god.

And it was foolish and naive to think that Vitarus wouldn’t destroy my home, a town that had already earned his ire, out of nothing more than petty boredom, whether I was there or not.

Vale knew this just as well as I did.

“You aren’t a stupid man, Vale,” I said quietly, and he winced.

“No,” he said. “Just a desperate one.”

He stepped closer, his body now flush to mine. His hand released my arm and moved to my chin—touched it more gently than he had last night, but the grip seemed just as inescapable as he looked into my face, our noses brushing.

“You do not have to do any of this alone,” he said.

It wasn’t the first time someone had said that to me. But it was the first time I really wanted—needed—to hear it.

“I don’t want you there,” I said. “It would be dangerous. You’re one of Nyaxia’s children. Any god of the White Pantheon would hate you for it, including Vitarus. The best thing you can do for me is get far away from here and never come back.”

My words were sharp and clipped and cold. The same voice I would use when I told Mina I could not stay with her or sent away Farrow when he asked too many searching questions. Hard as iron.

That tone would usually send them away with a scoff and a shake of the head.

But Vale didn’t let go of me.

“It must be hard,” he murmured. “To bear the weight of so much affection in a life so short.”

My eyes burned ferociously. I had to squeeze them shut, had to clamp down on my sudden shuddering inhale.

No one had ever seen that before. The love in my cold absence. And it was always so easy to just let them believe I didn’t feel it.

All this time I thought I had been studying Vale, but he had been studying me.

For one horrible moment, I clearly saw exactly how precious this… this thing we had built was.

I would never meet anyone like Vale ever again.

Stay, I wanted to tell him. Stay with me. I don’t care if it damns us both. I don’t care if it damns my entire town. Stay, stay, stay.

But I pulled away from him and went to my pack, which was now discarded at the foot of the bed. The rose was a little crumpled, the petals squished to one side. I owed him two. I only had one today, this ugly thing, lopsided and deformed, but still—always—living.

I hated these roses. I hated them so much.

Vale reached for me, but I only pressed the rose into his hand.

I met his amber eyes.

Stay, my heart begged.

“Go,” I said. “I’m leaving, and you should, too.”

Vale knew me better than Farrow. Better than Mina.

To his credit, he did not ask me not to go.

You can feel it in the air, when a god is near. It breaks and shivers, like invisible lightning hanging in your breath, cracking over your skin.

It felt exactly the same as it did that day all those years ago.

I rode as fast as my poor exhausted horse could carry me. The beast was near collapse by the time I arrived back in Adcova, already nearing sunset. I practically flung myself off him when we reached my cottage, throwing open the front door, calling frantically for Mina.

I checked my study, her bedroom, the kitchen. The house was empty.

I wanted to believe she just went to town. But the hairs on my arms stood straight upright.

Maybe a part of me knew what I would see when I opened the back door, the one that led to the fields.

The door opened, and for a moment I was a child again, standing in this doorway, watching my father on his hands and knees in those wretched fields, feeling this same horrible sensation of divine dread.

Mina was out there in that exact same spot, her back to me, surrounded by wild rosebushes.

The air was still. Silent.

She held herself upright for the first time in months. There was no dusting of ivory skin in the dirt around her.

“Mina,” I called out.

My voice wavered. My steps did, too, as I approached.

Mina didn’t turn. Her head was tilted up.

Above us, the clouds circled, circled.

And there, at their center, was Vitarus.