Page 81 of Kazimir

You are beautiful like this; I sent.

Her answer came tangled with breath. Then make me worse.

I nearly laughed. Instead, I dropped my forehead to hers and drove deeper.

The pace changed. Not wild. Never careless. But fuller. Each stroke stronger, less diplomatic, the line of my body over hers turning from shield to pressure. She took it with a greed that undid me. Her hands moved from my shoulders down my back, nails scoring lightly enough to provoke, not damage. I kissed her mouth until neither of us could quite remember whose breath belonged where.

Then the hunger for her blood rose.

Not abrupt. Not feral. Familiar now, and because it was familiar, more dangerous. I lifted my head, watched her pupils widen in understanding, and traced the side of her throat with my mouth before I spoke.

“Tell me.”

“Yes,” she said instantly.

I let my fangs descend.

There remained something profoundly intimate in her willingness to bare herself for that. She turned her head without fear, exposing the long white line of her neck, pulse beating quick beneath skin still flushed from my taking. I licked once where I meant to pierce. Tasted salt, warmth, Devon. Then I bit.

Her body bowed under me.

The first rush of her blood hit my tongue with that same impossible brightness I had come to crave and revere—celestial and living, light given flavor without losing force. It moved through me like a bell struck at the center of my bones. Not mortal copper. Not vampire dark. Something sunlit and severe and intoxicating enough to make restraint feel like sainthood. I drank carefully and still nearly groaned from the power of it.

She cried out my name and clutched at me, hips moving faster now, riding the twin hungers as if they had become one current.

The surge through my veins was immediate. Strength sharpened. Senses widened past their ordinary cruel edge. The room’s every detail brightened: the fire’s resin scent, the weave of linen under my hands, the tiny hitch in her breathing before pleasure overtook speech. My cock thickened harder inside her as if her blood had reached there too and made appetite a commandment.

Then her fangs came.

I felt them before I saw them—a subtle shift in the line of her mouth when she turned her face back toward me, eyes dark and blazing. It still fascinated me every time. Those delicate white points, not borrowed from me exactly, not wholly native to what she had once been, but ours now in some way the world did not yet have language for.

She touched my throat with her mouth in asking.

“Yes,” I breathed against her skin.

Her bite was not tentative.

She pierced just above my collarbone and drew my blood in a measured pull that sent a shock through me so hard my hips stuttered. I hissed and then thrust deeper in answer. The feeling of her taking from me while I took from her broke something old and solitary inside my chest. Exchange, not theft. Communion, not feeding. A circuit closing.

She drank.

I drank.

The bond opened so wide it no longer felt like a thread between us, but a chamber we both occupied.

I felt her pleasure as if it had found residence in my nerves. She felt my awe, my possessive tenderness, my savage gratitude. Fear for the coming battle moved through us and emerged changed—not gone, but forged into something more useful. Determination. Shared hunger. The certainty that whatever came for us would not be meeting a vampire and an angel arranged in convenient opposition. It would be meeting an answer neither heaven nor underworld had anticipated.

The room brightened.

Not dramatically. Not some vulgar burst. A low gold luminance gathered at the places where our bodies joined—her throat at my mouth, my blood on her tongue, the line where my chest pressed to hers, the deep hidden place where I moved inside her. It spread softly over sheets and skin, enough to turn shadow honey-pale and make the carved bedposts seem briefly less made of wood than witnesses.

Devon shuddered beneath me, the pulse of her climax gathering.

I felt it coming before she did.

There, I sent, tightening my fingers against her hip and circling her clit harder. Let go.

She did.