Page 51 of Claimed

Time has become slippery since Valentin Moretti drank from me during sex, cracked his own Tower open, nearly died and miraculously recovered, threatened an ancient blood brother, almost killed one of his Twelve. And then brought me back to his rooms as if the only reasonable response to looming war was to pin me against the nearest wall and fuck me until I forgot language existed.

He still hasn’t gone back to his apartment in the clouds.

I have a feeling he’s still not ready to return to the bed where the first catastrophe began or the place where my blood named something his mind still refuses to understand. But even more than that, he’s not ready to face the fractured Heartshard Glass, and what ill portent it might deliver.

Instead, we’re in the private suite attached to the Lower Vaults, a place of black stone, low fire, hidden doors and obscene comfort, as if even Valentin’s emergency containment spaces require luxury.

He went a little feral after the call with Dorian.

No. More than a little.

There had been a moment after he crushed the phone in his hand when the pressure in the room became almost impossible to breathe through. His power grew hot and sharp and unstable. I’d felt the high of my blood in him, or maybe the low beginning to take him down again.

I still don’t know which. I tried to ask.

Bad idea.

He shut me up with his mouth.

Then with his hands.

Then with his fat cock, grinding me into the wall until my very sensible investigation into his terrifying condition became a much less sensible investigation into how fast he could make me come while still fully dressed.

The answer, unfortunately for my dignity, was fast.

After that, the night turned strange.

Languid, even.

Valentin doesn’t do soft in any way that would survive cross-examination. But intentional. Relentless. Almost reverent in a way that makes my chest hurt worse than the bite at my throat.

Before I met him, the Vampire Mafia King of New York never slept the way mortals and even some immortals do. But now he barely even rests.

He hovers in wakefulness, present in every second, and I keep expecting him to pull away, to rise and return to his kingly world, to remember his mark and his brothers and the war pressing at the edges of his city.

Instead he stays.

Food appears with jaw-dropping efficiency, and he watches me eat with the same intensity he kisses me, as if nourishment is another way to claim me. He brings water to my mouth, his thumb brushing my bottom lip every time the glass touches it, like he can’t help himself.

He bathes me too, in a bathroom fit for an emperor, and that’s somehow more intimate than anything else. His hands move with slow, careful attention, washing between my fingers, down my spine, between my legs, blatantly and carnally memorising my skin with a possessiveness that shortens my breath.

And when he’s done with that private ritual, he returns me to the sheets.

Again.

And again.

There’s a hush over it all that feels almost spiritual, though Gods know there is nothing innocent about it. He’s building something with his attention. Rewriting my body’s understanding of what it means to be touched, wanted, handled without cruelty.

Valentin Moretti is single-mindedly ruining me for every man, woman and probably several supernatural categories.

It should scare me.

Because somewhere in the distant, sensible part of my hindbrain a warning pulses, that perhaps this is drawn-out punishment for what my blood did to him. But that same hindbrain that keeps waving a little flag and screaming about survival, witch warnings, vampire addiction and giant flashing signs that say perhaps do not let the cursed immortal king become dependent on your blood, idiot, lowers the flag when his hands and cock wreak filthy havoc on me.

And through it all, Selphine’s voice keeps hovering at the edge of everything.

Do not let him drink deeply.