Page 71 of Empire of Dark
Growling, a feral beast, my hips continued to pound into her, driving my cum deeper with every stroke and riding the waves of hot, sticky bliss in my veins. I let that undeniable electricity between us flow like hot lava, every time one of our bodies would calm, the other would rip it back into the crashes of pleasure.
The devil. This was wrong. So wrong how our bodies reacted to one another.
A real breath made it into my burning lungs and I rolled over on the table with her on top of me, glass and ancient paint digging into my back.
It took long moments before another breath managed to make it into my lungs, so thoroughly had I fucked her.
I still wasn’t ready for this—this bizarre energy surging between us that continued to take me by surprise. I’d thought after a week, it would dull. Lose its luster. Be sated.
But it hadn’t.
If anything, it was stronger. Raging more and more every time we were together until I’d started to wonder if it would eventually consume both of us like a star imploding.
Yet I was drawn in just the same, time after time, waiting for the implosion.
Chapter Eighteen
{ ADA }
As my breath slowly fell back into a normal rhythm, my fingers traced the outer lines of the skull tattoo on Damen’s chest. It had odd pinpricks of eyes in the middle of it—like there was still a soul trapped deep in the bone. Just one of the tattoos across his skin, but by far the oldest, its vibrancy dulled with time.
His naked body under me, Damen took a shuddered breath, then his muscles abruptly tensed. “Venetia. Will she be worried?”
I tilted my head to see his face, my cheek rubbing across his chest. “Well, she didn’t crumble the castle, so I imagine she’s fine. She’s a teenager. She understands full well what is going on between us.”
“She does? What? How in the hell?” He started to jerk upright and fling me off of him.
I flattened my hand on his chest, pushing him back down onto the table. I was comfortable right where I was.
“Because she’s not an idiot.” I scoffed a chuckle. “No one has been supervising what she’s been watching on her phone, so yes, she knows full well what we’re doing. Assuming she doesn’t think you’d actually try to kill me.”
“But she’s a little girl.”
I propped my head up, my eyebrows drawing together. “Have you not noticed she isn’t ten anymore?”
He had the good sense to look chagrined for a moment. “Well…no. I hadn’t actually.”
“She’s sixteen.” I shook my head as I dropped it back down onto his chest. “And right now, all she knows of the world is through that tiny screen in her hand. You realize she needs to be around other people, right? She needs to see what normal society is in order to ever function in it. Has she ever had that?”
“No.” He heaved a sigh and I could feel an argument building deep in his chest. “But you know what she can do. I cannot risk it. Risk her.”
My fingers went back to tracing the ink on his upper arm. “Are you planning on keeping her locked up in this castle forever? You think she’ll stand for that when she’s eighteen? When she’s thirty? A hundred?”
“She’s not ready.”
“And you’re stubborn.”
“So? I’m protecting her. Protecting her from herself.”
His fingers brushed across my back, flicking away the broken shards of glass from my skin—the glass hadn’t slivered in, just stuck lightly to me because of the sheen of sweat Damen had worked me into.
My fingers landed on the cut of his cheekbone, guiding him to look at me. “There will come a time in the not-too-distant future when that won’t be an option. She’ll want to be free. Everyone eventually does.”
“Are you trying to add to my stress level?”
I laughed. “No. Sorry.” My fingers worked their way back down to the skull artwork, like they always did—there was just something intangible about the weathered, ancient lines of the ink that drew me back to it time and again. “This skull, what’s it for?”
I’d traced my fingers over it dozens of times in the last few weeks, but had never asked about it. A skull seemed trite, just like a malefic. Dark and dark and more dark.