Cathedral (Cradle of Darkness 1)

Practically speechless, I shook my head, water droplets falling from my hair. “It doesn’t work that way. I love Ethan...”

“And we have a deal, remember that.” Pressing me tight to the tiled wall, my legs slipping at odd angles due to the tub, Malcom promised, “You will have your Ethan as you submit to me. Your vow was already given. And I’ll take the rest now.” Mouth on mine before I might grasp the need to flee, a tangling tongue drove in.

If a kiss were life, if it were death and rebirth. If it were ownership. That was what was poured past my lips. Into me like blood. So this must be what the change felt like when a mortal was turned, the power flowing from one to another. Swelling empty veins, undoing the rot of a dead heart.

This was how a man in love kissed his bride before riding off to war.

How demons fornicated in the dark.

The very last kiss I’d survive.

I wore Malcom’s ruby locked around my neck. I felt his trousers wet with suds pressed into my skin, his fingers already working between my legs. It wasn’t even a question of friction or skill, it was a moment of being. One instance I was Jade, the next I was nothing.

Because I came so hard, bones broke.

The pain was unbearable, left me sobbing as I rode pure magic and disassembled.

Agony.

A zipper was torn, fingers pulled from my cunt so a ready cock might replace them. Against the wall, soaking wet and slippery. Malcom fully dressed with his slacks hanging around his thighs, he fucked me so hard the tile at my back cracked. And I came again, clawing at his back through his sweater. Shearing the fabric when another wave of toe-curling torment broke from my center to my fingertips.

It was as if his cock were too big, the way I burned and stretched. Which was unthinkable considering the myriad lovers I’d fucked. The ways in which I’d been fucked. The amounts of cocks that had fucked me at one time.

And yet, I was overly full. When his spend began to shoot down his shaft, when even that fluid added to the corked well inside me, I burst.

Split right down the middle and shed my skin like a snake. At least that’s how it felt when he cried out that he loved me.

Swallowing back screams, I found my voice didn’t beg him to stop this madness. I was guilty of the opposite, I begged for more. Harder. To break me. And though he’d emptied his sack, still hard, he ravaged.

Tore at me with his teeth, drank from my breast.

Tiny flutters, minuscule pulsations came from my cunt, feathery light against the intrusion. Edging my enemy past sanity so I might know more of this pain.

“Never stop!” If he did, I’d go mad from want of it.

A world of white and blood where, for the first time in my pointless existence, I felt the truth. There was no pain in this.

Malcom only gave bliss.

Chapter Eighteen

Malcom

She was flawless in my arms. And after the hours and myriad ways I had pleasured her, it almost seemed her blue eyes were even enthralled when they ran over the man who ruthlessly pumped his hips to fill her cunt with cock. Never had Jade looked at me in such a way. Not even when she was young, before her father poisoned her mind against me.

She had never looked at me as the females of my kind did. They begged for my body. I had been called beautiful in hundreds of languages. I had driven women to despair when I denied them.

Until that night, Jade had only seen hideousness.

For brief flickers within our joining, she saw me.

Inside her, moving our bodies into artistry that would make angels weep.

There was some roughness in my bed-sport. Necessary when handling a female saturated in entitlement. But should she whisper a desire, I gave.

And gave.

And took decades of yearning out upon her weaker form.

So many bites and bruises, kissed with loving lips. Healed when I put her mouth to my veins and offered power.

We drank as we fucked, her lips to the crook of my neck, mine to hers. Like husband and wife while I was cradled in her thighs. Which is what we always had been. Fate had made her mine from the day she was born.

Nipples pink, peaked, and waiting, I’d pinch, pulling them from her body until her back arched and she came… again. Full of my cock. My seed. My blood. When I moved within her, felt her velvet slickness, I found home. The words that fell from my lips would have shamed the long-forgotten warlord I’d been.

An eternity I’d waited for this. For slender limbs and guttural moans. For acknowledgment. For Jade to cling to me, arch her hips for what I might give. For me to show her the study I’d made of her body in all the decades I’d observed her whims.