Page 71 of These Immortal Truths
“You are looking for something that must not exist.” “Khiran—”
“Has the world not taught you, yet?” he snaps, lip curled. “We don’t get to keep the things we want.”
Her breath leaves her, an ache blooming over her chest. When she finally finds her voice, it’s a soft echo from the past. “Am I someone to be kept?”
His gaze is sharp. “That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”
She steps toward him, warmth humming beneath her skin and heart fluttering against her ribs. Her hands reach between them, tracing the lapels of his suit and feeling the heavy rise and fall of his chest beneath the fine fabric. “Maybe not keep, then.” She swallows thickly, dredging up every last bit of courage so she can meet his eyes. “But tohave?”
Have to hold. Have for now—here—in the darkness of her flat and the sound of a city that never sleeps seeping between the brick.
“Anna …” Her name leaves him like a strangled plea.
Her body flushes, she can feel it down to the tips of her curled toes, but the desire outweighs the embarrassment. Anna tilts her chin up. An invitation. “Because I want that, too,” she breathes. “I wantyou.”
His hand traces her temple. “Such a troublesome creature,” he murmurs, but there’s affection lacing every syllable. He leans down, their noses touching and his lips so close Anna can feel them whisper against her own. “This wasn’t meant to happen.” His fingertips thread into her hair, her jaw cradled in his palms and his eyes burning with such an intensity that she’sdrowninginit. “You weren’t meant to possess me so completely. You haunt me, Anna.”
Haunt. Such a peculiar word for someone who can’t die, but she understands. There isn’t a day she wakes up that she doesn’t wonder where he is; not a night where she doesn’t look forward to seeing if the morning will bring him. And she knows, with the same certainty that the sun will rise, that kissing him will only fuel that fire instead of dousing it.
But fear is for mortals, and she’s already faced flames once before and emerged from the ashes unscathed. Reborn.
Kissing him is like that.
Soft, gentle pressure as she closes the space between them; a single match burning in the dark. That split second delay before its flame catches the kindling.
He surges against her, his lips desperate and bruising as her fingers tangle in the soft dark hair at the back of his neck. One of his hands settles on her hip, drawing her closer to his chest even as his steps take her back, back, back until it feels a little bit like they’re dancing all over again. Then her shoulders meet plaster, and his body becomes a wall she doesn’t want to escape.
He is wildfire, burning away the oxygen faster than she can take a breath. Her fingers scramble to undo the buttons of his collar, but the way his lips drag against her pulse makes her hands tremble.
“Anna,” he murmurs between kisses along her jaw. “You will be the death of me.” Anna feels a tug of cloth, hears the sound of glass beads raining and scattering along the floorboards as her dress pools lower on her chest—the straps constricting her shoulders gone. His teeth drag against her collar, hands clenching in the fabric of her dress in the small of her waist.
“You can’t die,” she reminds him, but the words are more breath than voice. The buttons of his shirt join the beads scattered on the floor. Beneath her naked palms, his skin feels cool compared to the fever warming her blood. She’s desperate for more touch, more friction. Boldly, she hooks a knee over his hip and tastes the groan that spills from his lips.
“Yet you’ll have me begging for it,” he pants, shrugging out of his shirt. He grins against her lips. “What do the French call it again?”
She smiles at the joke and pulls him closer. The feel of skin on skin, the fingers tracing the laced hem of her silk chemise, pulls his name from her lips like a prayer before she answers. “La petite mort.”
The little death.
Only, she thinks they may have it wrong, because as her legs lift and wrap around his hips, as she feels him pressed firmly between her thighs, Anna thinks she’s never felt so alive. She wishes her stockings were off, wishes she had thought to wiggle out of her dress and chemise instead of having it bunched around her waist, but his kisses are drugging and she can’t bring herself to untangle her fingers from his hair. When his hips flex, grinding against her, she gives up on the thought entirely.
There is no knowing how long she has wanted this—wanted him. Loving him came to her the way snow melts into creeks, then rivers, then oceans. Time has engraved him into her heart the way the rivers have carved canyons and glaciers have cut fjords. And as his hands push past the folds of her chemise and curl against her, Anna knows each caress is only going to make her love for him grow deeper.
Khiran gives a shuddering sigh against her parted mouth as she cants her hips against his hand. “You’re so—”
“Don’t say it,” she says, but the way his fingers move against her slick flesh robs the order of any commanding edge, so she adds, “I’m well aware of what I am.”
He grins against the line of her jaw, his breath a hot whisper in her ear. “I doubt that, but you’ll learn. If it takes me centuries, I’ll spend each and every one showing you how devastatingly beautiful you are.”
She doesn’t know how to respond—can’t hold the words long enough to put them into order—not with the way his thumb is circling against her. Her fingers tighten in his hair, spine arching and the back of her head meeting the plaster. She can’t tell if the shadows dancing on the ceiling are real or just her. “Khiran—”
“Shh,” he murmurs against her neck, laying a gentle kiss against her pulse. “I know.”
But he doesn’t, because even though he’s plucking at all the right strings, it isn’t what she wants. She wants to watch his face change, feel his breath hitch. She wants to know what it feels like to make a god tremble. “You,” she gasps, bringing her mouth to his. “I want it with you.”
Maybe it’s the shadows, but Anna has never seen his eyes so dark—bright waters on a star-studded night. If she looks long enough, she thinks she can find entire universes in his gaze. He doesn’t ask if she’s sure, doesn’t try to dissuade her. Anna appreciates that he trusts her to know what she wants; that time has taught him her ways as surely as it has taught her his. There is no fumbling of buttons, not for him. The fabric of his trousers, the cold metal of his belt buckle, melts away like water, and leaves her pressed against nothing but his warm, bare skin.
More magic. Funny how she had never thought of the ways it could be applied here. She almost asks him to take the dress too, but the way his hand fists at the fabric at her hips as he presses against her stokes a desire she didn’t know she had. Then he’s sliding against her, into her, and her lips part around a quiet gasp.
