He said her name in a wan tone that hang from the tongue in a prayer. Serenei appeared to forget for a moment that she was encased in flesh, as if she'd just slip away to the heavens. She hated how easily he thought he could put distance where there was none—how he thought words like don’t and owe meant anything in this space where her marrow itself was screaming for him. Denying it was sacrilege against her nature.
Her lips parted, unsteady breath catching on her teeth before sound followed.
“Don’t mistake me, Bram,” she said, low and rough-edged, mauve gaze fixed to him like a snare. “I bear no clemency, I'm an unclean, wretched thing. I could never pay back anything to anyone. I don’t want to owe you.”
Her voice dipped, a whisper dragged across stone.
Slender hand trembled at her side, then she let it rise again hesitantly until her fingertips ghosted the air just shy of his chest. Close enough to feel his heat, not close enough to grasp at it. She wanted him to feel the gravity of her restraint, how it strained and threatened to break.
“I’m starving for that pulse under your skin. For the way you smell when you sweat. For the weight of you pressing me down until I can’t tell where I end and you begin.” Her throat tightened around the words, but she forced them out, each syllable like dragging a blade free of her own flesh.
“You think I don’t know what this is?” she asked, eyes burning brighter now, more fever than plea. “Every ugly, broken piece of me longs for you.”
A jagged breath slipped through her teeth once more as a pale hand finally reached to him, flat against his chest, palm splayed over the drumbeat of his heart.
“Don’t make me beg,” she murmured the confession—raw, desperate, ragged. Palm lingered over him and her mouth curved into something faint and shivering. “Or make me,” she breathed, the words slipping out like invocation, the hush before thunder.
Fair lashes lowered, but her gaze never broke from him. “Drag it out of me if you must. Strip me down to marrow and I will beg in ways you’ve never heard one beg before. I’m a penitent before an altar. I am blood spilling to consecrate the earth. I’ll beg until my throat is raw and the gods themselves mistake my hunger for prayer.” Exhale.
Her thumb pressed harder against the beat in his chest, as if marking time with it. “Let me give you every cry, every word, every desperate gasp because it isn’t shame that binds me to you, Bram. It’s this vile need. The kind that I feel threatens to unmake me.”
Her fingers tightened at his wrist, halting him mid-motion, and before she could think better of it they were already moving—sliding up the sinew of his arm, over the hard plane of his shoulder, until her palm curved against the back of his neck. She felt the heat of him, the taut muscle beneath skin, the faint dampness of sweat. Her nails grazed, then her fingers threaded higher, catching briefly in golden-brown hair, tugging just enough to draw him down toward her. The air thinned and somewhere deep she was collapsing.
She pressed her mouth to his, no gentility, no testing brush; instead a desperate, trembling kiss that carried the force of her famished core. A breaking-open that felt obscene, holy and necessary all at one—as if the act itself was somehow ruinous because it'd never stop at enough, as if it might consecrate the gnawing void inside her.
“If I've got to suffer in this cruel land, it may as well be at your hands.”
