Page 111 of The Stolen Throne
We’re so close, our breathing mingling as we stare at each other. His fingers at my hip dig in, sending a surge of yearning through me, tightening in my belly, in my chest. Everywhere.
Kiss me. I want him to lean in so much. Just kiss me.
“Hells,” he mutters, then brings his mouth down on mine hard.
Elation sweeps through me in a starburst, and I’m kissing him back, drinking him in like someone who has been lost in the desert.
Forget the hells. This is heaven.
“Damn it, Meren.” He grinds the words out, then cups the back of my head the way I love and goes back to kissing me.
I’m all things joyful relief and burning need. The taste of him, the feel of him, is like coming home. He’s been right there, with me, and I’ve missed him so much.
We break apart on a gasp. He tips my head to the side so he can feather his lips down my neck. His hands turn bold, sliding down my back, slipping under my cloak, spanning my waist, as his mouth makes his way back to mine.
I sigh into the kiss. Goddess, the way he kisses.
His touch takes away every worry in my world and replaces it with both peace and such aching want that I turn restless in his arms.
He’s not losing it. He’s with me.
Is this working because of the curse? Can he touch me now? Can we be together because of whatever it is in me that calms the darkness in him?
He nips my lower lip and soothes it with a kiss that is hard and hot and out of control. I whimper into him, swallowing his answering groan, his shudder against me raw and real. Sensations arc through my body like lightning waking my skin, waking my soul.
“Take what you need, love,” he urges in a voice so deliciously dark I tremble at the sound. “We’ll give you whatever you want.”
Wait.
His fingers dig into my flesh, but it’s different now. Behind my closed eyes, the night around us changes. The darkness changes. So does his kiss, taking on an edge. Almost angry.
Even the air around me changes, chills, the warmth of the fire and the man against me gone. I pull back on a gasp to find his face a mask of blankness, not entirely Shadow, but not entirely Reven, either, those inky shadows flowing from his back like spidery arms. They curl around so they’re cocooning not him but me. No, not cocooning. Caging.
Fear plunges my need into a snowbank.
I try to wriggle out of his arms, but his hand flashes out, grabbing me by the wrist, which he lifts up. Cain’s golden cuff gleams in the firelight.
A muscle on the side of Reven’s jaw ticks, his turquoise eyes going hard as diamonds.
“I—”
“Don’t speak.”
He squeezes his eyes shut, rolling his shoulders. He grabs me by the waist like he has to hold on to me to anchor himself. Then those spidery shadows suck back inside him. Slowly. Agonizingly. All of it a visible struggle punctuated by the way he’s gripping my arm. Unconsciously, because he’s focused only on his control, but he’s going to leave bruises.
“Go.” The word is guttural, punching from him, his eyes still closed.
I have to peel his fingers away, but I manage to work carefully out of his grasp and slowly back up.
He’s shaking so hard I’m surprised his teeth aren’t rattling loose. He looks…sick. Pale, sweat beading his forehead. Fighting.
My heart shrivels at the sight. At what this means.
I’m his weakness. The walls he put up between us weren’t him taking away my choice, like I thought. Those walls are protecting him from me. He’s isolating himself, denying himself, to protect me.
A lonely ache for him—for us both—wells up inside and threatens to take me to the ground. He meant what he said that night in the desert outside the zariphate camp. He’d let the world burn as long as I’m okay. And that world includes him.
The pain of what I have to do now—do for him in return—feels like that glass spike skewering me in my gut all over again.
