Текст книги "King of flesh and bone"

Автор книги: Liv Zander

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 14 страниц)

When I placed my hand on his cheek, he moaned before he said, “You, my little one, were made for me.”

I breathed against a quiver in my chest. “How can you say that moments after you told me I’m not with child?”

The faintest twitch tugged on his upper lip as his eyes slipped to mine, robbing all strength from my knees. “Child or no, you are precious beyond all, and you have my devotion for eternity.”

Time ceased to exist as his words sneaked through the widening cracks of a wall built from hatred, touching me where I’d vowed he would never reach—certainly not before he returned to his duty.

But he did so with striking accuracy, letting the wall tremble until I swayed off balance. My center of gravity shifted until I clasped his neck, and his head lowered just as mine strained toward him.

Our lips connected.

The ground shook.

I kissed him. God forbid, I stroked my tongue into his mouth, tasting his masculine sounds. I lost myself in the trembling of our lips, the heat of our breaths, the support of his arm as he kept me from swaying even as he staggered toward me a step.

I palmed the muscles beneath his shirt, dove my fingers into his black strands. Heavens, I shook uncontrollably, my muscles torn between the instinctual reaction to pull away from this wrong intimacy and the devastating need to succumb to this fever surging between our bodies. To yield to the cruel god who promised me everything I’d ever wanted and surrender myself to his delicious corruption.

Clasping onto the fading memories of a world cast into darkness, I broke the kiss and breathed some sense back into my heated body. Whenever he said things like that, it was just too easy to forget that this was the same god who’d gnarled my legs. Who’d threatened to let his corpses hunt me down, and who was the reason graves carried grain sacks instead of headstones.

“We should leave.” Before he twisted my head the way he’d twisted my bones. “We’re still a good way from Hem—”

Gripping my collar, he cut my retreat short as his exhale stuttered against my lips. “Now, little one. I choose now.”

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Chapter 19

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Ada

Now.

I shivered at that word, an invisible chain pulling me closer to him, strung together by three letters and forged in the fires of my foolishness. Of course, what he’d offered the night at the tavern had been too good to be true, and what he’d asked in exchange… not nearly so simple.

With his grip on my collar, he pulled hard enough that my head tipped back. He lowered his forehead to mine, locking our gazes as his mouth strained for my lips, pausing less than a hair-width from them before making contact. The tenderness of his kiss stole my senses as he ghosted his lips over mine—the touch so light, the air between them quivered.

He lifted me, cradling me against his chest as he carried me over to the daybed. “Did you believe, little one, that I would let you run from the heat in your cheeks or the flutter around your heart?”

Even as he spoke, his mouth remained with mine, rounding each syllable with a suckle of his lips or a swipe of his tongue. I moaned at the familiar taste, even as the trap around me snapped shut.

Its prey?

My heart.

Caught between the welded iron of a promise given and the lure of sweet words sitting at the center, its rapid pounding drew in the devil who wanted it. A devil who sensed its every sinful stumble, every wicked vibration, every squeeze around an organ that had wilted in my chest for too long. Enosh sensed everything.

Every.

Immoral.

Beat.

Letting him corrupt it as he’d done with my body would be weak. Selfish. Undeniably wrong.

I wanted it so badly.

Wanted to turn my back on the world like it had on me, and instead, listen to the wicked whispers of the devil whose words made me feel special, valued… damnit, perhaps even loved in the most rotten of ways.

I closed my eyes and filled my lungs, yet my voice cracked at the first sound. “I… I hate you.”

“We shall rectify that. You, my wife, learned to love my touch, the hardness of my cock, the power of my thrusts, and the pleasure I bring you.” He lowered me onto the mink, letting butterflies and petals burst into the air as he loomed over my naked body, his lips never straying far from mine. “And you will learn to love me.”

I shook my head, yet our mouths refused to part, caught in a glorious kiss of stuttering breaths. “Not until you open your gates and rot the dead.”

“Love comes unbidden and has no care for precautions, turning us into fools for liars and monsters.” His swollen cock pressed against my heated center, telling me his breeches had vanished, but his hips made no further advance. “That much, I learned of love.”

So he likely knew that Njala had never loved him, which ached me somehow. “Neither is it a decision.”

“No, it is not. Love comes into existence between the flutters of a heart and grows awash in the heat at one’s core.” He cupped my face as our foreheads drifted together, submerging me in the scent of ash sprinkled over snow. “I dare you to look at me and deny how your heart beats faster at the undivided attention I give you.”

Me and no other, making me feel like a woman desired, worthy of this devotion he promised. “I’m not denying it.”

The ground trembled; it ran up along the trunks of the birch trees, letting the branches quiver until small twigs rained down. One caught in Enosh’s hair, which I fumbled from his black strands, only to stare at it in mute shock. Perhaps the god held my weak heart trapped in this moment of intimacy, but his was not as unaffected as he had claimed.

My gaze went from the twig to meet his. “Return to your duty.”

A smile curved his lips, quickly hidden beneath a kiss he pressed to my collarbone, and more toward my breast from there. His tongue trailed a circle around my nipple, rousing the bud into a hard pebble while he kneaded the heating flesh of both. My breathing quickened when his tongue trailed down along my belly. His hands splayed open my thighs, exposing me so fully out here in the forest, but only until his mouth covered the juncture between them in a warm caress of lips.

Arching my spine, I braced my heels against the bone, trying to escape the sudden onslaught of sensation only to shift toward it. His tongue stroked along my folds, lapped at my entrance, and circled my nymph, each movement a smooth answer to my body’s demand. I shifted away, and he eased the pressure. I spread my legs wider, and he buried his tongue ferociously inside my cunt.

I gave in to it all, allowing myself to succumb to the delirium of pleasure that was my husband’s sinful mouth. Glorious shivers wracked my body as his tongue dipped inside, only to draw back and play with the soft, sensitive edges. When my breathing turned to panting, his attention shifted to my nymph, where he gingerly lapped and suckled until a torrential wave of heat flooded my sex.

“Beautiful,” he mumbled against my cunt as he kissed me there until my breaths lengthened and slowed. Then he climbed between my legs, cupped my cheek, and brought my gaze to his. “Look at me.”

His eyes remained locked on mine as he reached between us, where his cock throbbed against my inner thigh. He placed the bulbous crown at my slickened hole, and then…

Nothing.

Instead of thrusting inside, he lowered his forehead to mine. He brushed his mouth over my cheek, allowing a moment between us not dominated by lust or overshadowed by my urge to escape it.

I was a willing captive.

He was a loving god.

Together, we were a man and a woman, making love in the forest, unconcerned with the snapping of nearby twigs or the passing of time as the sun peeked through the thinning forest canopy.

I clasped my legs around his waist, inviting him with a tug. Commencing the act. “Return to your duty.”

“Ah, and ride the lands while my family awaits me at home.” He slowly stroked inside me, adopting an unhurried pace void of his usual urgency. “My mortal wife shall sit on a throne of the dead, motifs of trees and birds and meadows carved into its bone. Is that what you wish?”

I moaned at the warm pressure as he worked himself deeper. “Yes.”

“And there, on your lap, shall sit our son or daughter, black of hair with eyes the color of the sea between the Kilafa mountains.” He nudged his pelvis tightly against mine, letting us share in a shudder that pebbled our skin. “And I shall embrace them, and kiss them, and take them into my arms. Yes?”

I swallowed past a constriction in my throat, only for it to form a knot of warmth beneath my sternum. “Yes.”

 “Then, I shall rock our child and place it to sleep between us on a bed of bone while my beautiful, kind, and stubborn wife looks upon me with such ardor, eternity will seem like a blessing. Mmm… your heart, little one.” He pressed his hand against the valley between my breasts, letting the organ pound against the flat of his palm. “Right here is where it flutters, causing such warmth between the rapid flow of blood at everything I may lay by your feet… everything I could give you.” A kiss to my temple before he whispered, “If only you would love me.”

A task that seemed so easy as he let his words fill the void at my core, driving out this sad loneliness we shared. “If only you would treat me right.”

He drew his hips back and thrust again, working my body to a higher ledge of pleasure with the measured stroke. “Have I not shown you my goodwill since we gave our vows?”

Yes, but Enosh was unpredictable in his godly whims—a constant sway between delicate and domineering. “You hurt me many times.”

“Mm-hmm, yes, I hurt you.” He once more gripped my collar, exposing the sensitive skin above it, and laid siege to it with his teeth until it burned and set me ablaze. “And I would hurt you again. I would break your bones, sour your flesh, meld your skin to mine. I would do all that and worse, if only to have you for eternity. That, Ada, is how much I desire you.”

The sound of my name was my undoing.

Anchoring my arm around his neck, I lifted my lips to his, letting them slam together with such ferociousness, they trembled on impact—as did the ground. Twigs snapped, birds took flight with rapid wingbeats, and somewhere, pinecones must have thudded to the ground. A crk-crk-ckr brought my attention to the hairline cracks veining along the backrest of the daybed.

I broke the kiss and snapped for air. “Enosh—”

“Shh.” His lips reclaimed mine until they throbbed, only parting for one agonizing second as he pulled his shirt oven his head. “Nothing but the bone in the ground growing restless, eager to come to my aid. Touch me, Ada.”

I let my fingers glide over the slopes of his shoulders, over the firm set of pectorals, and down the defined muscles rippling over his abdomen. “Tell me you’re at least tempted to give in.”

“More than ever before.” Gradually, his pace quickened, making my insides convulse with a need for release that shook me to the core alongside the world. “Decades. Centuries. Eons. One day, you will love me. And on that day, when you become wholly mine and nobody else’s, I shall open my gates and return to my divine duty.”

At his next thrust, I pulled him deeper into me. Our kisses lost precision, but my benumbed lips pressed down wherever they reached as I ground against him, meeting him beat for beat.

When my breath caught in my throat and my entire body tensed, Enosh’s back rounded, strong hips pinning me to the soft mink beneath us. Snarls hissed passed his clenched teeth, cutting across my lips as a cry wrenched from my throat.

The world seemed to collapse around us, trees threatening to bury us beneath their branches as we peaked. Only when the tangle of our panting breaths calmed did the forest grow still.

Aside from the groans.

My eyes snapped to the underbrush and my heart gave a massive whomp. “Why are they here?”

Enosh followed my line of sight to the dozens of corpses looking at us from between shrubs and standing on fallen trunks covered by moss. Men, women, children… they bore their milky-white stare into us, their faces smudged, their hair covered in lumps of dirt, grass, and wilted leaves.

A bemused scoff rumbled from Enosh’s chest. “They must have thought their master at great risk.”

“You didn’t call them?”

Enosh regarded me, his air of superiority vanished, the face beneath the mask laid bare to the almost sheepish grin on his lips. “Not precisely… but I am ever-so pleased with their eagerness to protect me.”

Protect him from what?

The question fanned a little spark to life in my core. During our lovemaking, my husband had accidentally made the dead crawl from the ground. My temporary surrender had blown his mask off, right along with his control. Perhaps he was no less trapped than I, exposing a heart he claimed he no longer had.

I placed my palm against it.

A heart that fluttered wildly against my skin, long after his breathing had calmed, right where it bred love with no care for precautions. Should that scare me?

It scared him. I could tell from the way he fled my touch, disguised as no more than a shift to get comfortable.

“Perhaps we made a child now,” I said.

“No, Ada. I’m afraid you will have to gather more patience for your womb is nowhere near its fertile state.” He sat up as leather encapsulated his legs and a fur-lined dress of silky skin formed around me. “We ought to hurry now, so we may reach—”

Something hit my eye.

Both clenched shut on reflex, throwing me into darkness as my ears pricked at an onslaught of groans and whistles. I wiped a hand over my face.

Wet. Warm. Slippery. Blood?

“Stay down!” Enosh’s bark resonated along with a barrage of quick shk-shk-shks, like spades cutting into the ground, and a heavy weight settled on my chest. “The corpses must have led them straight to us.”

Them.

My heart burst into a sprint and my eyes shot open. I blinked once, fighting the burning blurriness in one of them. The outline of Enosh sharpened with the second blink. At the third, my stomach dropped.

Heavens, no!

Red rivulets ran down his abdomen, coming from a gaping wound between his shoulder and his chest, the flesh and skin shredded around the tip of an arrowhead. The feathered fledging of yet another arrow protruded over his shoulder, where they must have shot him in the back.

“Oh my god!” My shaky hand reached for his wound. “You’re injured.”

Enosh only hushed me and picked me up, my body so heavy I could barely lift my arms to clasp his neck. Because he’d once more given me armor, row upon row of bony scales that still formed around me as he hoisted me onto the horse. “One leg to each side, for we shall ride faster than ever before.”

He reached behind and pulled an arrow out under curses. A sudden crack caught my attention, and that was when I saw it. A wall of bone had erected around us, shielding us from whatever wanted to come through.

Arrows, mostly.

Several punctured the bone here and there, though the biting crk of an axe also chipped away at the wall. The more the bone crumbled, the more shouts filtered in, sickeningly cheerful and underlined with the hiss of blades. Wafts of bitterness crept into our shelter, putting a knot in my stomach.

Was there… fire?

“Stay close to me.” Enosh mounted behind me as easily as ever, but I heard the groan of pain as he wrapped his arm around my middle. “Shh… I will not let them harm you.”

I did as told and pressed myself tightly against him, fighting the panic pounding in my chest. Everything happened so fast, yet time seemed to slow as the wall of bone thinned into a cloud of powder.

It surged toward us with the speed of lightning, only to burst into the forest shaped like a thousand bony daggers. They found their way into skulls and stomachs, replacing the twang of bowstrings with the blood-clotting screams of… soldiers.

My heart dragged heavy on its strings at the sight of studded armor, plated helmets, and green standards peeking from all around us. This was no mere mob of pitchforks and priests, but a formidable force barely thinned by those who sunk to their knees. Even before the men collapsed to their sides, they shot up again, taking up arms against their comrades.

Our horse spun, tore through a wall of swords, and dashed deeper into the forest. It weaved around corpses who bit into the necks of soldiers, while Enosh sent wave after wave of bone daggers at them or let ropes of skin strangle them. For a blissful second—not even half a breath—it appeared as though we might escape.

Until the forest floor caught fire.

It started as an orange spark, but quickly ran to the left and right, forming a wall of roaring flames. Thick and tar-black, billows of smoke turned the air rancid, burning my lungs with every inhale.

Our horse stopped.

Spun. Then spun again.

“Catch them!”

Soldiers armed with swords and torches poured in from both sides, cutting off our escape.

Enosh held me tighter. His other hand pressed against my face, blinding me as the horse shifted beneath us. Everything shook. A force thrust me upward. The horse disappeared from underneath me. Excruciating heat engulfed me, and the stench of singed hair crept into my nostrils just as my arse hit the horse’s back once more.

“No…” The word tumbled from Enosh’s lips as his hand slipped off my face, letting the blood chill in my veins.

Another wall of fire spread out ahead of us, letting the flicker of flames reflect on the studded shields of the soldiers before us. They gushed in from a hill to the right, took formation nearby a creek to the left, brought in—

Something thrust me forward.

I clung to the horse’s neck as Enosh’s thighs shook where they framed mine. At his scream, I swung around. All blood sucked from my arteries, sending a chill across my skin.

The bloodied tip of a heavy bolt protruded from beneath his collarbone, only a hand-width away from where my head had been. They must have attached a rope to it, which whipped against the horse’s side each time it danced.

Enosh dug his shaky fingers into my hair. “I gazed through the eyes of the dead and the way home is empty after the last line of soldiers. Let the horse take you to the Pale Court and wait for my return while I fight them and ensure your escape.”

Bile licked the back of my throat. “No! No, no, no—”

“Shh. They will not rest until I am captured or they are dead. It’s far too dangerous for you to remain with me. The corpses will protect you.” His forehead lowered to mine. “I will return to you, Ada. I will always—”

A strong tug unseated him, pulling him off the horse. Just then, a rope of skin braided itself around me, tying me to the horse until I leaned forward and clasped its cold neck. A brittle wall of bone shaped to my left and right. The horse thrust into a canter faster than the wind, nearly throwing me off if it wasn’t for the rope. Hooves boomed underneath me to the whistle of arrows as they pierced and splintered the weakening wall.

It thinned into a thick cloud of bone, from where it turned into a crowd of corpses. They lined my sides, running, stumbling, barraging through everything in their wake as they ensured my escape for what felt like a small eternity. The wind whipped around my eyes and tears blurred my vision. Something stood in our way, but the horse ran right through, and a crk echoed along with a yelp. The tension of the rope disappeared as my veins filled with liquid dread.

Oh no. No, no, no…

This was too fast.

My dress to heavy.

When the horse jumped something, I shifted back. Scales of bone, heavy and rigid, tore me sideways. I leaned forward. I grappled for the mane. Harness. Anything.

With a jerk that vibrated against my clammy palms, the thunder of hooves turned more hollow. Gravity ceased to exist for long moments. Suspended in the air, I was ripped sideways.

I hit the ground a moment later, my shoulder clashing with the massive root of a tree before I skittered over dirt. Pain exploded inside the joint and the skin along my arm burned as splintered bone chips cut into it. My eyes shot to the horse.

It kept running.

Without me.

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