My chest trembled with barely controlled breath. My heart raced. My sex ached for the first time all season, desperate and hot. As Silas licked the bloodred wine from my skin, I fidgeted uselessly against my restraints. Slowly, leisurely, he made his way down my body, every flick of his tongue the most exquisite torture, until he had reached my feet. Once more my toes curled away from him, and before I could roll onto my side, he snatched my right foot and kissed the delicate arch. Our eyes met over the curves and valleys of my body—and I kicked him.
In the shoulder. I could have gone for his head, but the wound on my throat stung as an aching reminder that he was in no mood for real defiance tonight. Still, the warlock scowled up at me, the mirth in his gaze twisting, darkening, and he responded with a sharp snap of his teeth.
“Oh!” I winced against the bite, trying to pull away, but he held tighter and pressed an openmouthed kiss up my calf. Every so often, his teeth grazed my flesh. His hold was bruising, yet his mouth turned tender, and somehow, before I realized it, he had eased between my legs, each one thrown over his broad shoulders. Trembling, I tore my gaze from his, forcing it skyward, wishing the storm would just come already. Lightning danced across the black, followed swiftly by the crash of thunder, and still no rain fell.
With aching slowness, Silas crawled along my body, kissing and nibbling a path up my legs, under my knees, across my inner thighs. His unhurried pace only made the flames crackling in my belly burn hotter, brighter, threatening to turn to hellfire if I wasn’t careful. When he reached the crest of my thighs, hovering just before my swollen sex, my deepest intimacy, the warlock paused. Our eyes met once more, and I licked my lips, breath catching as I shook my head.
“No.” I knew what he intended. Our future read plainly on his smirking mouth, his hooded eyes, his rough hands. If he did it—touched me, kissed me there, of all places—it would be my undoing. In front of all these humans, these devotees of darkness, I would come apart at the seams.
Calloused hands kneaded my backside, the hissing mere white noise now, the drums as distant as the teasing thunder. In that moment, it was only Silas and me—and I prayed for mercy, knowing I would receive none.
“Don’t,” I whispered, my chest rising and falling in uneven beats, my body begging for him to just do it—ignore my words, my eyes, my fear. Do it, already. Put the bloody fire out. Situated squarely between my thighs, mouth a breath away from my damnation, Silas cocked his head to the side, and I swallowed thickly, eyebrows lifting ever so slightly. “Please, no—”
My protests tapered off in a moan when his mouth closed around my clit, a moan that turned breathy with defeat when he sucked at the plump little bundle. Hot and firm, that sinful mouth worked me with practiced confidence. My back arched off the altar as the fire raging inside exploded into a damned inferno, threatening to devour me whole and reduce me to ashes. I strained against my bonds, squirmed against his mouth. Any attempt to peel my legs from his shoulders was met with failure, his hands on my thighs, fingers bruising as he devoured me—not the inferno.
Instinct told me to fight. No submission. No surrender. Do something. Say something. Anything. Yet any further protests dripped from my tongue in an incoherent jumble, as whimpering moans and startled gasps. Silas drove me relentlessly, his tongue delving between my lips, stroking me, plunging deep inside before drifting back to torment my clit.
And my body welcomed the torment with open arms. In no time at all, my muscles tightened. My belly rippled with pleasurable little flutters. My thighs trembled over his shoulders and my hands curled to white-knuckled fists. He brought me to the brink against my will, against my better judgement. My treacherous body adored his touch, his mouth, his tongue and his teeth. It relished the brutal force of his hands on my thighs, the firm sturdiness of his shoulders forcing me open.
A small voice begged me, whispering at the back of my mind, to retreat from the edge, that I flee from the impending abyss.
But I ran toward it instead, sprinted, every breath burning on the brink of oblivion—
And then he stopped. Merciless as ever, Silas withdrew and crept up my body. Blanketing me with muscle and dark magic, he hovered close enough that every nerve ending responded to him. The hairs on my arms stood on end. My nipples ached to graze the hair-dusted planes of his chest. My eyes fluttered open; at some point they had closed, lost to pleasure.
Tenderly, his mouth brushed mine just as he eased two fingers inside me. I inhaled sharply, whimpering and bucking beneath him. He tasted of red wine and my arousal, and his fingers were but a fraction of the hardness pressed against my belly. In that moment, fear and need and desire and outrage crashed together inside me, merging into one, leaving me lost, helpless.
And there was Silas, pumping in and out, stroking my inner walls, rebuilding the pleasure slowly but surely. There stood oblivion, creeping ever closer, and damn it all, I craved the fall.
“Come away with me, goddess,” he whispered, his voice low and gruff, tainted by lust and laced with an unnerving sincerity. The deadly combination made my chest tight, made my pulse flutter. He lingered there, lips a whisper away from mine, hand between my thighs, waiting for an answer. I knew what I wished to say.
And I knew what I needed to say.
Tears blurred his handsome face, and I blinked them back with a shake of my head.
“No,” I rasped. “I won’t.”
He flashed a dangerous smile, and in a breath replaced his fingers with his cock. Inch by inch, he filled me, claimed me, stretched me to accommodate for him. On their own accord, my legs folded at his side, then locked around his waist, ankles crossed, heels digging into the small of his back. The warlock tore a stuttering breath from me with the slightest pump of his hips, pleasure blooming, aching, taking on a mind of its own now that we were one.
I fought my restraints with earnest now, the drums quickening, the hisses escalating. Nothing budged. Pinned between an altar and a warlock, rock at my back and unyielding muscle to my front, I was well and truly… fucked.
Silas scooped one hand under my knee, hoisting my leg higher, spreading me beneath him as he started to rock. The other stroked up and down my side, softly tormenting any spots that made me twitch and dance and whimper. It soon wandered into my hair, which he coiled around a fist, forcing my head back for the first violent thrust. His hips pounded against me, his shaft plunged deep within me; I swallowed my moans, my cries, wishing my body despised him as desperately as it should.
Wishing it didn’t enjoy this ravishing.
Once he set a brutal pace, driving me into the altar, he showed no signs of slowing. Beneath his rocking frame of muscle, I felt both smothered and elevated, conquered and freed. The burn in my core turned sweet and vicious, blistering through my veins, dragging with it a pleasure that, when it finally erupted, would make me scream.
Bearing down on me, Silas left no piece untouched. What his rough hands didn’t tweak, pinch, stroke, his mouth did. Teeth raked down my neck. His tongue licked the hollow of my collarbone. His lips trailed across my jaw. And with every torturous brush of that cruel mouth, his coarse facial hair marked me, scratching across my skin, almost as brutal as the rhythm he set between my thighs.
With oblivion skirting the horizon again, all the rest fell away. The drums. The hellfire. Silas’s flock. None of it mattered as pleasure drilled into my brain, both parasitic and wonderful. I longed to break, to splinter apart in his arms, to truly come like the world was ending, drowned in darkness and death. My hips betrayed me, rocking up to meet him, to take every brutal thrust, and my cries soon spilled into the night, rising with the drums. Filling the clearing, the grove, the whole realm for all I knew. So close—