Page 39 of Ravished By the Revenant

Her body seizes, her channel clenching around me, her scream scattering birds from the trees. The crystal blazes so bright it turns her skin cerulean, her face washed in the light of my own damnation while she comes on my cock with her hand pressed over my exposed heart, and it is the single most obscene, most holy thing I have witnessed in seven hundred years.

I fuck her through it. When she goes limp and gasping against the trunk, I still haven’t finished, and she cracks one eye open and laughs, wrecked and disbelieving.

“You’re still⁠—”

“I am nowhere near done with you.” I ease out of her, and she whines at the loss. Then I set her feet on the grass and turn her around before her knees decide anything unfortunate. “Hold the tree.”

“Hold the—” She grabs the trunk. “This is how I die. Death by orchard. Tell Shmoo he can have my boots.”

“Tell him yourself. He is watching from the fence and judging us both.”

“What—” She twists to look, and I choose that moment to bend her forward, kick her feet wider, and slide back into her from behind. Whatever she meant to say about the cat becomes a long, broken moan into the bark.

It’s deeper this way. She feels it. I feel it, every clutching inch of her, and I grip her hips and set a pace that has nothing gentle left in it, because gentleness departed the moment she tore my shirt open.

“Aldric—fuck—” Her fingers scrabble at the bark. “The tree—the whole tree is shaking⁠—”

“Then hold it harder,” I say through clenched teeth.

Apples drop around us. One bounces off my shoulder. Neither of us stops. The sounds we make together are obscene—wet flesh and creaking wood and her voice climbing higher, chanting my name like a woman at prayer in a religion of exactly two members.

“You feel me.” I lean over her back, my teeth at the nape of her neck, one hand leaving her hip to slide down over her belly, fingers finding her clit slick and swollen. “Every metal adornment, every scar, every piece of this wreckage buried inside you, and you love it. Say it.”

“I—ah⁠—”

“Say it, Clara.”

“I love it, I love it, you smug undead bastard, I love—” She breaks off, and I feel it building, that deep tightening flutter, so I work her clit in ruthless circles and drive into her hard and fast until her spine bows and she screams her release into the ancient bark, and this time she drags me with her.

There is no stopping it. Her body milks me, and the heat rushes up my spine, and I bury myself deep and roar into her shoulder as I spill and spill, the crystal in my chest coloring everything blue, apples raining down, and she’s laughing and coming and gasping my name, all at once, alive, alive, alive.

We slide down the trunk together in a graceless heap, her back against my ruined chest, both of us wrecked and breathing hard. My spend runs down her thigh. An apple sits in the grass an inch from her hand, and she picks it up, examines it, and takes a bite.

“Unripe,” she reports, chewing anyway. “Worth it.”

“You are eating my apples,” I complain.

“I earned this apple. This apple witnessed things.” She tips her head back against my collarbone and looks up at me, flushed and glowing and smug, then down at the torn edges of my shirt, the blue light pulsing slow and sated between my ribs. Her fingertips trace one parted rib, feather-light, and I hold very still.

“It really does beat faster,” she murmurs. “For me.”

“For you.” There’s no armor left. She tore it down.

She’s quiet for a moment. Then: “Your shirt’s destroyed.”

“You destroyed it.”

“You have a wardrobe spanning centuries. You’ll survive.”

Clara snuggles back against me, cool undead chest and all. I press my mouth to her hair, elderberry and basil and sunlight, and for the first time for as long as I can remember, I do not think about the gate, or the curse, or the day she will find her crack in the wall.

I think only that the harvest has come early to Blackthorn Keep, and I am a rich man.

22

CLARA

Gray dawn light seeps through the shutters, and I’m awake before the rooster for once, which feels like a personal victory over that feathered alarm clock.