Arken continued to explore and experiment against my skin with her mouth, reaching her hand back to work my erection with renewed ferociousness—just a few rough pumps before shoving me toward her entrance. My eyes rolled toward the back of my head over the little noises she made, the hums and snarls of approval and self-satisfaction as she took total control of the moment. Taking me, usingmewithout apology. Makingmeher whore.
Yes fucking please.
More familiar noises returned as her slick heat sank onto my cock, the whimpers, the whines—but they gave way to lower, hungrier groans and panting breaths once she found her rhythm, lost in the moment, grinding herself against my hips as means to her own ends. When I attempted to slide my hands around her waist to assist her eager oscillations, she hissed and pinned my wrists back down against the bed, demanding to control the cadence herself. Her nails dug into my skin as she did it, piercing me as if in warning.
“I knew it,” I groaned before a delirious, breathless sort of laugh pushed through my chest. “Oh, I fucking knew it.”
“Shut up and fuck me,” Arken snarled, using one palm to push herself up from my chest so she could ride me harder, take me deeper.
“Shut up and take it,” I growled back, rolling and thrusting my hips to meet her every desperate move.
It only took a matter of minutes after that exchange. As Arken allowed herself to grind and writhe so wantonly against my cock, anxieties and inhibitions nowhere to be found, I poured all my strength into thrusting my hips up into her, meeting every motion, giving her what she wanted, fucking her until she shattered. She didn’t try to hold steady, didn’t try to wait for me to come with her or hunt down my release first—shejust let go, allowing herself to come undone for the sake of her pleasure and her pleasure alone.
Beautiful. Fucking beautiful. Such a good girl.
“Fucking Hel,” she murmured as her body came down from the stolen orgasm, though she kept herself seated on my cock.
The frantic energy that had been radiating off her in waves seemed to slow down and settle—but it did not fade away. Whatever I had managed to awaken in this woman tonight, it lingered as she caught her breath—a hand clutching at my chest for balance.
I was still hard, twitching and throbbing inside her, waiting to see where she wanted this to go next as something wicked seemed to tug at the corners of her mouth. She looked down at that hand of hers for a moment, head tilting in fascination with the way her fingers were splayed beneath my clavicle and glimmering with Light.
Her golden gaze flicked to my face, and then back to her hand. And then back to me once again—this time, staring straight into my godsdamned soul. I didn’t know what she was thinking. I didn’t know what she wanted. I was too transfixed by the intensity in her eyes to wonder until I felt her fingers curl, the manicured little tips of her nails just barely digging into my chest…And then, they dug in harder.
Much harder.
She dug her nails into my chest so hard that I had to bite down on my lip, wincing. Far be it from me to discourage fuckinganythingabout this, but thankfully, my reaction only seemed to encourage her. When I shuddered beneath her, Arken’s breath hitched. A devious little smirk curled across her lips. Her eyes flashed with something dark, something savage, and something…hungry.
Holy Hel, was she about to?—
I gasped audibly as in one swift, aggressive, and very fucking intentional motion, Arken Asher clawed her way across my chest, dragging her nails over my skin until?—
Oh my gods. Abyss fucking take me. She actually broke skin.
A low hiss slid through my teeth as I broke our searing eye contact to stare down at my chest, confirming my suspicions. What a godsdamned sight to behold. There, across my heart, were five lovely red lines where droplets of blood were already beginning to form and pool across the surface of my bare skin.
Skin that my girl had torn open with herbarefuckinghands.
I had never been harder in my fucking life.
“Fucking Hel,Arken,” I whispered. “You have no idea what you’re doing to me right now.”
She really didn’t.
Because the softest of my affections for her had already grown so deep over the course of this last week. Every tender moment that Arken and I shared had torn through the fragile flesh of my still-beating heart just as easily as her nails had torn my skin. She had embedded herself deep within that husk of muscle and tissue, pumping pure adoration through my veins with every pulse. It was the sweetest drug—the type that made me want to place Arken upon a gilded pedestal so I might study her from every exalted angle and bask in her glow.
But those were not the only feelings that had intensified. Not by a long shot.
With the gin in my system and Arken’s newfound desire totakeon full display, the gates of my own self-awareness were thrown wide, and it could no longer be denied. As much as this woman inspired and awakened all that was good in me, as much as she fed the parts of me that craved her Light and her warmth…
Arken Asher fed my ravening dark in equal measure.
The other side of my affections for Arken were not reverent, they were vulgar. Carnal. Driven by an urge to claim, to possess, and tocorrupt.This side of my heart had sharper teeth than my mouth, and it was bloodthirsty. It wanted toconsumeArken’s warmth and her Light, to devour them with the same ferocity that wanted to protect her.
I, too, wanted both. Because yes, this darker half of me wanted to takeeverythingfrom Arken, but I also wanted to give, I wanted to?—
Oh, gods.
I wanted to give her everything.