Текст книги "Alien god"

Автор книги: Ursa Dox

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Текущая страница: 23 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

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CHAPTER FORTY-SIX Wylfrael

I waited so long for my bride in the library that I began to fear I’d made a terrible mistake. I stared at the library’s door so hard that the crystal sometimes shuddered with flickers of power I hadn’t meant to unleash upon it.

Maybe I should open the door myself, I reasoned, though I knew it was not reasonable. Maybe she’s already come and she’s on the other side, but the crystal’s too heavy and she can’t open it like this. Maybe, maybe...

But no. There was no maybe about it. If she had come, if she was on the other side of that door, I would have heard her. Plus, small as she was, she was perfectly capable of opening a door.

Even knowing all this, I did end up smashing open the door with my power from my place at the end of the aisle. If she chose to come here and marry me, I did not want a single barrier in the way that would make her pause, that would give her the chance to stop and think and turn back.

“My lord?” Aiko asked.

She was on my left. Shoshen and Ashken stood on the other side of the long, white fur carpet that had been placed here specially for the ceremony. We were in the centre of the library. I stood in front of the huge crystal-grated firestone, and all the chairs and pillows had been moved to the sides. Brekken was there, too, seated between Ashken and Shoshen, long tongue lolling out.

When I didn’t answer Aiko’s vague question, the hound added in his own.

“Where pretty pretty two leg Torrance? Where mate? Where mate?”

“Perhaps I should go help her,” fretted Aiko. “Perhaps she needs assistance with her dress. Maybe I made the skirt too heavy and long after all...”

“The dress is perfect and she is fine,” I snapped, silencing everyone, even Brekken, who only ever seemed to be quiet when sleeping or trying to sneak up on prey.

But Aiko’s question made my gut tie itself up in even tighter knots than it already was. What if she’d tripped? Twisted one of her flimsy human ankles on the stairs, and that was why she did not come? Not because she’d chosen not to, but because she couldn’t. Had she eaten enough today? What if she’d gotten dizzy and collapsed? What if some unknown human ailment had suddenly struck her down, and I had no idea because she was mortal and I was not, and maybe I didn’t truly know her, maybe I’d never know her, know her in the deepest ways so I could give her what she needed.

What do you need, Torrance? Tell me what to do and I will do it.

I should have told her that in the bedroom. I should have fought harder, made my case, made her want to choose me. At the time, I’d not wanted to sway her answer. I’d not wanted to try to persuade her or pressure her. I’d made my offer, and I’d slayed every instinct inside me as I’d done it. Instincts that told me to force the ring onto her hand, to hold her against me so tightly she’d never be able to work herself free. I’d wanted to kiss her. She’d looked so perfect, and I’d wanted her so badly, wanted to burn the image of her in that dress into my memory so I’d remember it when I ripped it off her.

But I hadn’t done any of that. I’d simply said my piece and walked away in silence, even while I howled in my own head.

And now, I waited. And now, she did not come, and I knew I should have submitted to the howling, submitted to the instincts that told me to bind her as tightly to me as I could. I should have kept her trapped, should have never let her choose, because now she was choosing and she was choosing to leave.

To leave me.

She’d still be here on Sionnach. But she would not be mine. I hadn’t thoroughly considered that when I’d made her my offer. I hadn’t considered anything, really. But now I did. I thought about her living in this castle, untouchable and oh, so beautiful. She might even grow to love someone else, might not stay in this castle at all, and I would be the trapped one, then, in my towers of crystal, staring out at a world that no longer made sense.

I thought of all this, and agony rose in my throat. Agony I hadn’t known since the deaths of my parents and the day Rúnwebbe had told me of my fate.

Something inside me was cracking so loudly that the sound echoed in the room. I breathed heavily, staring down at my hands, wondering if my star map was finally going to vanish. There had to be an outward sign of how I felt, a physical manifestation of the darkness closing in.

The sound grew louder, longer, turning from a crack to a creak. I counted the stars on my palms until Aiko’s soft mutter of, “Oh! There she is,” made me tear my gaze away.

I swallowed hard, jaw working. The cracking and creaking wasn’t happening inside myself. It was Torrance, standing in the open doorway, pulling the door open even wider than it had been before.

I’d already seen her in her dress, but seeing her again, now, in light of the choice she’d made, walking towards me, wanting me, wanting me, I was struck speechless. I straightened. She looked a little different this time. There was a face covering of sorts, a veil of thin Sionnachan silk that largely obscured her features. Its edge brushed her bare collarbones, and I wanted to tear it away. To see how she looked. See if she looked...

Happy.

I lowered one of my hands, then extended the other to her. She was only halfway to me, but I could not wait for her to get here, already stretching to touch her, to make sure this was real.

It seemed to take forever for her to reach me, a disconcerting experience for an immortal who swallowed eons like breaths. But it did not matter. I had waited for her to come and now she had come. I could wait a few heartbeats longer. That’s what I’d promised her, after all. That I’d wait for her. For as long as it took.

Torrance finally reached me, her footsteps silent on the fur carpet. Her head dipped, her veil rustling against her creamy skin, as she looked at my hand.

She took it.

And I felt like I came back to life again. I closed my fingers and thumb over the back of her hand and tried to see her through the veil.

“Is that meant to stay on the entire time?” I asked her, my voice sounding nearly hoarse. “I want to see you.”

Torrance gave my hand a squeeze, then raised her other hand to pull back the veil, settling it in a shimmering wave over her hair.

There she is.

My little bride, my accomplice, my beloved. My snow-and-honey-eyed girl. Mine, mine, mine.

Her eyes glimmered with what appeared to be tears, but her face glowed with ethereal calm. Maybe even peace. It was the first time I’d ever seen her look so serene. Like she felt she was standing exactly where she was meant to be. It was not the look of a prisoner who’d crawled back into her cage.

It was the look of a woman who’d chosen freely, and who believed she’d made the right choice.

I drew her hand to my mouth, running my lips along her knuckles, noting the contrast of the cool crystal against her warm skin.

“You’re wearing the ring,” I said against the back of her hand. I could not bear to ask her if she liked it. Not yet, not now.

“It’s beautiful,” she whispered.

Thank the cursed snows of Sionnach.

“But I don’t have a ring for you,” she added.

“I don’t need your ring,” I breathed. “Just your vow.”

I knew from Aiko that there were vows in a human ceremony, though I had no idea what the actual words were supposed to be. I tried to form sentences, but they turned to ash and dust in my head, burned away by the sheer relief of seeing her here. Of having her standing before me, lovelier than starlight, happy with her ring, her groom, her life.

Luckily, I did not need to find my own words. Because my bride shared hers.

“I, Torrance Hayes, take you, Wylfrael, to be my lawfully wedded husband. In sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, for as long as we both shall live.”

She gazed at me expectantly, and I repeated the words back to her.

“I, Wylfrael of stone sky and Sionnach, take you, Torrance Hayes, to be my my lawfully wedded wife. In sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, for as long as we both-” Torrance inhaled unsteadily, and my voice cracked, “-shall live.”

“I promise to love you.” Her voice had lost its solidity and a waver crept in.

“I promise to love you,” I echoed.

“I promise to cherish you.”

“I promise to cherish you.”

“From this day forward. ’Til death do us part.”

“From this day forward. ’Til death do us part,” I vowed. I could no longer stand there and merely hold her hand. I dropped her hand, my fingers rising to cup her delicate jaw. She sighed through a thick throat and turned her face up to me as I pressed my forehead to hers and closed my eyes. I found myself speaking, my own words finally forming out of the darkness. “For this day and all days. For this night and all nights. I will love you, Torrance. Every moment. Every breath. Every heartbeat. Even if it’s only half of one.”

No doubt Aiko and the others wondered what I meant by half a heartbeat. But it didn’t matter if they understood or not. Because Torrance did.

Her hands went to my waist, then slid upwards, palms resting against my chest.

“I promise you the same.”

We stood locked in the embrace, and everything else disappeared. There was only Torrance and me and the choices we’d made. Her face in my hands, her breath on my skin. Husband and wife. Perhaps not fated, but mated anyway.

“Now what?” I asked her, unsure if there was anything else left to do.

She smiled, drawing her hands up high to wrap around my neck.

“Now you kiss me.”

Finally, a human custom I could appreciate. My smile mirrored hers as I bent down to kiss my wife for the very first time.

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CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN Torrance

Aiko had prepared enough food for ten times our number. A long crystal table in a dining room at the base of the Eve Tower was laden with meats, cheeses, various breads and pastries tinted the usual Sionnachan red. Even the wedding cake, that I’d described to Aiko, was tinted red from their flour. A while ago, I might have considered such a thing an omen. The cake to celebrate my wedding to Wylfrael the colour of blood. There was no frosting, just some kind of sticky honey glaze, which meant the red was on full display on the table.

But it didn’t bother me now. In fact, it seemed rather fitting. Blood and beauty, sweet honey and violence. Just like him and me.

Wylfrael eschewed the head of the table, sitting beside me, dragging his crystal chair so close that I could draw the back of my slippered heel along his shin bone. Aiko, Ashken, and Shoshen sat across from us, chatting merrily and drinking ale until their tails and ears began to droop with the effects of the alcohol.

Wylfrael chatted, too. He was easier and more relaxed than I’d ever seen him, a grin almost never leaving his face as he talked and slipped an effervescently grateful Brekken slices of meat. He was Earth-shatteringly (or Sionnach-shatteringly, I supposed) handsome like this. Smiling in his marvellous suit. I couldn’t stop sneaking glances at him as I ate and laughed and conversed, and more often than not, when I looked at him, his eyes were already on me.

“Excuse me,” I said, after devouring a second slice of the strange-looking and absolutely delicious cake. I’d been so nervous all day that I’d basically forgotten to pee for hours. “I’ll be right back.”

I left the dining room feeling Wylfrael’s eyes on my back the entire time.

I used a bathroom located near the dining room but realized I wasn’t quite ready to go back to the festivities just yet. The quiet was soothing, a velvety ebb over my skin punctured only by footsteps on the crystal and the swish of my skirt. I found myself climbing stairs, up, up, up, then through the tunnel and up further, past the bedroom I shared with Wylf until I stepped into the conservatory. All was dark and silent here, and I breathed out into the cool and lightless air, letting my eyes adjust. As they did, the starfinder came into view at the centre of the room. I smiled softly, remembering Wylfrael in there. The night it had fully sunk in, the kind of commitment I’d be making to him. The night that, even though I’d been grief-stricken, even though I’d thought I hated him, I’d cried in his arms and fell apart against his hand.

That seemed a lifetime ago. Wylfrael would have snorted at that, no doubt. At my puny human reasoning, my minuscule scope of time. But so much had happened since then. The wedding that had merely been a means to an end for both of us had become something different.

He had become someone different. He would have let me go.

And I had become someone different, too.

Because I’d chosen to stay.

I couldn’t even hide behind excuses like wanting to help Skalla and my friends with the council’s help. Those were benefits of this arrangement, certainly. But when I’d taken the first step towards the library, when I’d stepped through the door and walked down that aisle, I was doing it because Wylfrael stood at the end of it. Waiting for me, just like he’d promised he would.

“I thought I might find you here.”

For once, I didn’t jump out of my skin at the sudden sound of Wylfrael’s voice in the doorway.

“Hello, husband,” I said, my voice getting surprisingly choked up as I said it. I’d managed to stay mostly tear-free during the ceremony. There had been a moment, walking down the aisle, when the absence of my father at my side had made my eyes sting and my chest squeeze. But I’d just kept my watery gaze on Wylfrael and his outstretched hand through my veil, finding strength in the sight of him.

“Hello, wife,” he said. I flushed at the greeting. I’m somebody’s wife, now.

Wylfrael came up behind me, both of us facing the starfinder. I sighed and leaned back against his solid warmth.

“I had something like this back home. A telescope. My father gave it to me. It’s still in his house.” The soft smile that had danced on my face pulled downward. “I wish I could look through it just one last time.”

“Do you want me to turn on the starfinder?” Wylf asked, his hands sliding up my bare arms and coming to rest on my shoulders.

“No, that’s alright,” I said. If we opened the roof, it would get too cold in here to stay much longer, and I was enjoying being here with him. I didn’t need to take solace in the stars. I wanted to be right where I was.

“Torrance,” Wylf said. He gathered my hair in his hands, inhaling against it before draping it over my right shoulder and speaking against my left ear. “I need you to know that everything I said at the ceremony was true. It was not a show for the Sionnachans. It was real.”

I shuddered, my throat constricting. I nodded, my ear moving against his mouth as I did so.

“It was the same for me.” I laughed. “Against all better judgment, Wylfrael of the stone sky and Sionnach, I seem to have fallen completely in love with you.”

He groaned, long and low, against me, as if he’d been waiting, holding his breath, to hear exactly that.

“You are my beloved,” he said, softly yet fiercely. “You have been for quite some time. Far longer, I think, than you have loved me.”

I snorted.

“You’re telling me, Mister Watch-You-While-You-Sleep,” I said, leaning my head back against his chest.

“Forgive me for the times I loved you and did not know it,” he murmured. “I may be older than you, but in this, I have very little experience. I’ve had relationships before, but I’ve made it a point never to love a mortal. Until now.”

“What changed?” I breathed, goosebumps rising as his lips pressed against the side of my neck.

“You,” he breathed. “You changed everything, Torrance. I’m still wondering what magic you’ve unleashed upon me. Every thought I have is shaped like you. Every breath I breathe tastes like you. I am bewitched, maybe even broken, but I find I do not care as long as I can have you.”

I shook my head, my hair rubbing against his lapel.

“I’m not a stone sky god,” I reminded him. “Or a Riverdark mage. I’m just a human. No magic,” I said.

“I beg to differ,” he said, sliding his hands down to grip my waist. “You’re like a new star in my world. Beloved. Bright. So beguiling that I am on my knees before you, hoping you’ll turn just a little of your light on me.”

I really was going to cry now.

But before I did, I had to tell him something. Make sure he understood.

I spun in his grasp, placing my hands on either side of his jaw and looking directly into his searing blue eyes.

“Everything I’ve told you is true, Wylf. Everything. I wasn’t lying about how I came here, how I was abducted. I just need you to know I’ve been honest with you about that. I didn’t lie.”

His brow contracted, his mouth twisting.

“I believe you.”

I let out a breath, reeling with the relief of his words. My hands slid down to his chest as I sagged forward. I hadn’t realized just how much I needed him to believe me about this. For him to really, truly hear me. See me.

“I am sorry I didn’t before,” Wylf said, vicious regret tightening his words. “I am sorry for many, many things. Your imprisonment. Your pain when I gave you Rúnwebbe’s webbing. I can change none of it now.” He lifted my chin with a gentle touch, his gaze bright with pain and promise. “But I can vow, with all the sincerity and solemnity of the stone sky and Sionnach, that I will do everything in my power to make it up to you, beloved. I will spend every single day, every moment, fixing things. Building and repairing and loving you. Until our marriage, our life, is as beautiful as you are.”

He lowered, and I thought he would kiss me, but he spoke again, his words a physical touch on my lips.

“We began in ruins, you and I. But I swear to you that we will end in splendour.”

This would end, someday. He knew it, and I knew it. I’d die, and he’d go into exile. But it just made here, now, all the more important. One life to live, to love. One half a precious heartbeat to make it all count.

I rose on my tiptoes and pressed my mouth to his, open and wet, inviting and searching. He answered with barely restrained need, surging into my mouth with his tongue, his fingers turning to iron against my skin.

This time, there were no questions, no rules, no hesitations. The dress was stripped away, and Wylfrael laid me down on it tenderly before spreading my legs and dipping his tongue inside me. As I moaned and writhed, I had the dizzying feeling that I was floating, high above the floor, caressed by a frothy, silky cloud lit by starlight.

In a way, I was lit by starlight. Wylfrael’s wings beat in the air behind his custom-made suit, an entire sky for me to stare up at while he circled my clit with his tongue and worked his fingers inside. My breasts and body were blue and glowing with him as I came, shuddering, against his hot mouth.

The azure light intensified as he rose up, leaning over me, positioned between my legs, priming his cock with my slick arousal. I whimpered my husband’s name as he worked his tip over my convulsing entrance, and his hips flexed forward, an unintentional shiver of movement.

“Not yet,” he rasped. “Want to make sure you’re ready.”

“I am,” I murmured. I ran my hands down his body, sliding my fingers under the waistband of the trousers he hadn’t even fully taken off in his hurry. I gripped his hips, trying to pull him into me. He groaned, his eyes fluttering shut for a moment before he opened them again, looking drunk on desire. He lowered himself onto his elbows, his mouth roaming across my chest to my right nipple in a movement that was somehow both worshipful and greedy, like I was something sacred and something to be devoured all at once.

“Wanton little wife,” he rumbled, his voice sliding over me like dark chocolate, rich and heated and making my insides tighten. “So beautiful in her need for me.”

“I do need you,” I panted, my fingers digging into his ass, my hips pulsing against him. That first orgasm had barely made a dent in my arousal. If anything, it had only stoked the flames higher and higher, until I thought I’d be consumed. I threw my head back, hair tangling against white silk, when Wylf suckled my breast, pulling the tip into a taut, aching peak. His tongue was a hot demanding swirl over my nipple, his cock a teasing prod right where I wanted him, just not deep enough.

“Wylf,” I choked out. I could feel reason slipping away, everything I thought and everything I knew being reduced down to pure, primal feeling. Silk below me, Wylfrael above me, and the desperate need to be filled. My hands ran all over him, moving of their own accord, squeezing his ass, running up his suit-clad back, then back down, petting the soft fur of his tail. He seemed to like that. He made a sound of dark delight deep in his throat as my fingers sank into the thick fur, and his cock jumped against me, nudging inside of its own accord.

Having that little bit of him inside me nearly made me come again. My breath caught, escaping my throat in desperate little sounds that I could not hold back. I gyrated helplessly against him, tightening with anticipatory pleasure even as I knew I needed to loosen, to open enough to take him.

“Save me, you’re so tight,” Wylf bit out against my slick breast. He said it like it would make him slow down, hold back, or maybe even stop. But even as he said the words, he braced his straining quads against the backs of my spread legs and began the long, beautifully torturous slide inside me.

I cried out, my fingers tightening on his tail, as if I wanted instinctively to pull him back, pull him out. Not because it hurt, but because I felt I was completely losing myself. That I was splitting apart, atom by trembling atom, to be scattered among Wylfrael’s stars.

“Open your eyes and watch me, wife.”

His voice was thick, a raw command that had me cracking open my hazy eyes.

“I want you to look at me this time,” he said, chest heaving, eyes licking frost and fire over my face. “You didn’t before.”

“Did... did you want me to?” I stammered. I remembered how I’d let my head fall forward on him in the sleigh while he’d slammed up into me from below.

“Yes.” The word lengthened into a hiss as he sank deeper into me. “And after, too, on the ride back. Stone of the sky, how I longed for you to look at me.”

I’d been too confused and distraught to look at him then.

I looped my arms around his neck, locking my gaze onto his.

“I’m looking at you now. I see you, Wylfrael.”

I thought he was going to be the one to break eye contact first. A violent tremor overtook him, and his eyes slid closed. But not all the way. He pinned me with a slitted, glittering gaze as his hips began to pump. My entire body screamed with the sensation of how filled I was. Even my breath seemed too much for my lungs, and it rushed out of me as if to make more room for him. There was probably something pathetic, maybe even toxic, in that. In the fact that I didn’t even care if I breathed, didn’t care if I had to move everything else in my body aside, as long as he was in me.

The silk loop tying back Wylf’s hair came undone, his silver strands falling down on either side of our faces like shimmering curtains. Between that and his wings, I was closed off from the world, inundated by him and surrounded by him. His hips drove harder, his cock spearing deeper, his stars lighting me up from the inside with vibrating points of trembling energy until I quaked. My hips jerked as I tried to match his rhythm, tried to feel more, faster, harder, anything, everything.

“Wylf, please,” I lamented. “I need... I need...”

“I know, beloved,” he said, lowering himself until my nipples dragged tantalizingly over the smooth wool of his jacket. “Just let go, Torrance. Just let go, and breathe, and let me take care of you.” Possessive arousal roughened his voice. “Let your husband make you come.”

On the verge of bursting into tears, I obeyed. I did my best to breathe and tried to soothe my over-tight muscles, letting myself spread, languid and slow like honey.

“Good, beloved,” he growled. “You’re doing so well. You’re perfect. So cursedly perfect.”

His pace increased almost instantly, a ferocious snapping of his hips. At the same time, he bracketed my shoulders with his elbows, smoothing my hair back from my face and placing his forehead to mine. He scorched me with his contradictions, everything in him a collection of contrasts. His hips and cock were ravenous, pistoning into me so hard my body jerked back over the silk with every thrust. But his hands were gentle, his mouth gorgeously tender as he explored my ear, my cheekbone, my eyelid, the tip of my nose.

“I love you. Skies take me, I love everything about you,” Wylf panted between kisses along my jaw, chin, and mouth. “Love how you feel. So wet and lush, wrapped around me like silk. Blast, it’s like you’re shivering on the inside.”

All I could manage in response was a heady moan.

“Let go completely now, Torrance,” he groaned. “Come on your husband’s cock the way I know you need to.”

His words twined like smooth rope inside me, coiling around my pelvis and tightening at the base of my spine until I arched, strained, tried to scream but couldn’t, couldn’t make a single sound around the orgasm that split me open like a sharp but oh, so beautiful knife.

“Yes, beloved. My perfect little bride,” Wylfrael moaned. He captured my mouth, and there was nothing tender about it this time, his tongue sliding deep and claiming just like his cock. I couldn’t even kiss him back. Could only hold myself open for him, for every part of him, as I completely came undone.

Wylfrael groaned into my mouth, the sound making his tongue vibrate as my channel milked him in exquisite, fluttering movements. I was so aware of him that I felt him swell further, stiffen impossibly harder inside me, as if made of smooth, hot, living diamond. Diamond that was twitching, throbbing, bursting. Explosions of ecstasy rocked Wylfrael’s frame, bringing him higher and higher, harder and harder, until every nerve was stretched and singing, just like mine. He came as if he’d never come before, like he’d been waiting a lifetime, a thousand lifetimes, to fill me just like this. A dark and desperate torrent shooting forward like arrow after glittering arrow, the target an unseen, needy place inside me.

Wylf dragged his mouth from mine and whispered, a quick tumble of words I could barely hear or understand. But I knew enough of how he felt, of him, to reply anyway.

“I love you, Wylfrael,” I murmured. “I love you, too.”

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