“It’s all right, Lady Sondra,” I said, lifting my hand to touch hers on my forehead. She flinched, blue eyes startled, and I realized I’d touched her with the twig fingers. “Thank you for all you’ve done for Me. I’d like to be alone with Con.”
“I don’t think—”
“Don’t think. Go.” Con pointed the knife at the door.
“Come along, child,” Ambrose called cheerfully. “Tea and cookies will do you good, as well.”
Looking unconvinced, she went, leaving the door ajar. Con shut it firmly behind her, throwing the bolt I rarely used. I wasn’t a person who’d spent much time alone. All my life I’d been surrounded by people, but none that truly cared for me, the person. Even when I’d died, I’d been alone, except for the company of my murderers.
Con came back to the bed, standing over me with the knife, expression set with determination.
“Are you going to kill Me?” I asked the question with vague interest.
His face melted into blank shock. “No. How can you ask that?”
“Put Me out of My misery and so forth.” I waved the twig hand as I said it, then became absorbed in the strange flickering clicking of the green filaments.
“Lia. No.” Con caught my hand, releasing it just as quickly.
“Horrifying, isn’t it?” I waved the twiggy appendage he’d dropped so abruptly.
“Not at all,” he replied, going over to his side of the bed, sitting, and toeing off his boots. “I was afraid I’d hurt you. The new fingers seem so fragile, like I could break them.” He turned back the covers and crawled across the big bed to me, black shirt hanging open where he’d loosened the ties, dark hair falling around his intent face, eyes the gold of the setting sun. Settling himself against the pillows, he set the knife aside and slid his arms under me.
I grasped for balance. “What are you doing?”
“Feeding you,” he replied calmly and in a tone that brooked no argument. Lying back against the pillows, he adjusted me so I sat mostly reclined against him. The heat of his body melted through me, and I doubted I could’ve mustered the desire to resist, even if I’d had the ability. “We’ll start with a wrist and see how that does.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You don’t have to. Let me handle this for you.” Picking up the knife, arms in a circle around me, he precisely placed the edge of the blade against the pulse point of his wrist and sliced. Bright blood welled up and, before the cry of shock passed my lips, he’d pressed his wrist to my mouth. “Drink,” he ordered me. “It’s what you asked for.”
His blood filled my mouth, hot and salty sweet. It reminded me of the flavor of his seed, which I’d gladly swallowed before. But this was his blood. In horror, I tried to refuse, but he held it there in an implacable grip, staring me down. “Try, Lia. Just try this. One swallow.”
I couldn’t. How bestial and monstrous and yet … The hunger took over and I swallowed. Then again.
“That’s it,” he coaxed. “Calanthe wants blood, and so do you.” His eyes closed in satisfaction, relaxing as I willingly drank now, like a babe at her mother’s breast. “I wondered, you know, how you could be both flesh and flower. Now we know, huh?”
The lifeblood filled me, heating that persistent damp chill in my bones, filling the aching hollows where there had been stagnant pools in my death-riddled flesh. I drank until the blood slowed, and it wasn’t nearly enough. The savage need for more drove me and I bit down, drawing hard. Con made a sound part pain, part laugh, and levered me away with his superior strength, gentle but inexorable. “No teeth, blossom. I don’t want my arm in shreds. Hold still a moment.” He contained my thrashing. “You’re already stronger,” he noted, pressing a cloth to his seeping wrist. “Now the other side.”
With equal dexterity, he held up the uncut wrist near my face, sliced it, and pressed it to my mouth. He held me in that embrace as I drank with less desperation, gazing at the ceiling mosaic with my head resting near his heart. It thumped, loud and steady, and my own heart slowed its frantic race, evening out to match his. See? I do have one.
When that wound, too, slowed in its seeping, I let it go, licking the sluggish creep of blood. He levered up to study my face, relief smoothing away the worry. “Your color is much better. And your eyes are brighter. How do you feel?”
Less like I was going to die. The sarcastic thought felt more like myself, and the starving rage had backed off. “Better.”
“Still hungry?”
Yes. But I didn’t say so. At least my mind had sharpened enough that I could control the animal desperation. I wouldn’t drain him to save myself. “No.”
“Yes, you are. Don’t lie.” He shifted me, picked up the blade again.
“You’re out of wrists,” I protested.
“But not blood.” Lifting his chin to expose the clean-shaven skin beneath his beard, he set the point of the knife against his throat. “You’ll have to place this one since I can’t see.”
“Con…”
He looked down at me, chin still raised. “Do it, Lia. Let me do this for you. Please.”
I’ll pay any price. He would, too. With a sigh of resignation, I lifted my fleshly hand and guided the point of the blade to a place where the pulsing blood rose to the surface. “There.”
He grunted and pressed, but the leverage was wrong, the skin giving without parting. “Can you help?”
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Those sharp teeth of yours hurt more, but if we have to do it that way, we will.”
Maybe I was still asleep and all of this was a continuation of the dream. Gathering my determination and courage—how funny that it took bravery to hurt someone else—I pushed the knife into his skin. It took more pressure than I’d expected, but his skin finally parted and the blood gushed out. I made a sound of dismay, and he laughed as he cupped my head and guided me to his throat.
“That’s why I like black,” he said, his hoarse voice vibrating under my lips. “Hides blood well. Can’t say the same for your sheets, but we’ll change them.”
I lay splayed against him, face buried against his skin, his flesh and lifeblood in my mouth, like kissing him but at a more profound level. Sex, even the brutal unraveling pleasure Con had brought to me, hadn’t felt this … intimate. He was feeding me from his own body, out of selfless love, and my heart—so shredded and lonely—flowered in his nourishing heat. My sex swelled, growing slick, and Con’s cock hardened against my belly. Aroused and needy, I shifted, parting my legs to straddle one muscular thigh, my sleeping gown riding up so the leather of his pants provided delightful friction against my naked sex.
I rubbed against him as I fed, in a slow rhythm that echoed our heartbeats. I sucked harder on his throat, a parody and deepening of the love bites that came with sex, and he shuddered under me. Groaning, the sound thrumming through me like distant thunder, Con murmured my name, his arms vising to hold me tighter against him. He flexed his hips, moving beneath me, a sensual undulation that rocked us both. I reached with my intact hand for his cock to free it, but he caught my wrist, stopping me.