Because I'm terrible. Valkurius. ♛ My character will seduce yours
She smelled like cigarettes and cheap liquor, like a bad dream in a dirty alley. She smelled like a place he’d never go, a place so distant from home that it seemed an insult to indulge. Through the smoke she watched him, brilliant eyes narrowed in suspicion mixed with a certain sort of draw to danger. She didn’t trust him, and rightly so. Avrea lingered for a reason he did not know, but there she was, a brilliant palette of monochrome against the darkness of the dingy wall behind her.
Valkurius stood out as much as he ever did in Thayd with his clean suit and crisp beard, and in the dim light of the bar, his golden eyes were nearly luminous with mechanical augmentations. Like a predator he watched, but she was no prey, not with her straight-backed pose and languid drape of crossed legs, not with the casual way she gestured with the long cigarette between her fingertips. Not the way she stared at him unwavering as he played his little game, as he wove twists within their conversations like a man all too willing to keep secrets to himself.
The little Aurin narrowed her eyes and lifted her chin, testing the tip of a fang with her tongue. “Some might think you’re a man running.”
"Aren’t we all?" The Cassian rocked back with a tilt of his head, molten gaze narrowed on her seeming. For all the cool detachment, there was something burning, something bonfire hot in the way he watched her. She wasn’t a predator, but she did not bow beneath his focus.
The brush of fingertips—flesh on leather—was a strange thing, a tingle of warmth sweeping through nerves. They paused, watching, unafraid and thinly veiled in their observation. Around them, the music clanged a racket distant from the drum of pulse, Exiles wandered with trays and drinks. Far in a corner, a woman laughed.
They stared, tense and taut.
Pretense was a thing only because he could feel the tension in her as he strode his calmest toward the door, but as it swung open to the darkness of the alley, his fire stoked its heat higher, higher until sturdy fingers found the front of her shirt, until a sturdy grasp tucked beneath her arms to lift her from the ground. The brick and steel was cold against her back through the thin fabric of her attire, but she didn’t notice, not for the wave of flame surging through her.
He was on her like a beast, his superior weight and height pinning her, but she did not relent, did not mewl like an innocent. Long thighs squeezed astride his waist, ankles hooked, and her clawed fingers found snowy hair and buried in pale locks. The grip left prickles along his scalp, and the Cassian growled low in his chest against her throat, teeth finding skin, tongue pressing against the throb of blood just beneath the surface. The sound was not in warning but encouragement, and one hand slipped from its brace against the wall to grapple, to squeeze with nigh bruising force at the curve of her hip.
She smelled like cigarettes and cheap liquor, but she tasted like sin, a sweet nectar, a feast laid out before a man who might as well have been starving for all the way he devoured bare skin. When his mouth found hers, she flashed a fangy grin and bit the soft skin of his bottom lip hard enough that they could both taste the tang of copper. Her hand dove under the collar of his coat and shirt beneath, dragging talons across bronzed skin hard enough to leave the sting of welts in her wake.
Unrelenting, he pressed her back, throwing her thighs askew with greater bulk. She could feel his heat, feverish and searing, and she arched against him with a breathless, purred laugh. Another yank to snowy hair, another scrape hard enough to bubble crimson, and he growled again, turning his head to snap his jaw about her shoulder, to squeeze with intent to pierce, to press tongue to the softness of her skin.
She tasted like sin, a spicy sweetness so unlike the call for home that she summoned up the siren’s song, a clarion call to beckon him forth.
And for a time, he allowed himself to be swept beneath the waves.
