by Slade, Jessa
He swore, stiffening as if he meant to hold back, so she rocked against him again. His cursing devolved into a hiss of breath when he matched her move, but slower, as if to gentle her.
“More,” she said.
“As the lady commands.” He leaned down to kiss the column of her throat. “Or is it the tigress who asks?”
She arched her neck, shivering at the hot touch of his lips and the cool brush of breath. He groaned low in his throat then set his teeth to her pulse, biting down. Her shiver turned to a spasm of pleasure as he pinned her to the bed with teeth and cock.
Her arms spread-eagled, the clutch of her fingers shredding the cushion beneath them, he drove her to the edge of ecstasy with each rocking thrust. She orgasmed with a cry that echoed the beast within, maybe a little choked off but core-deep, and stars exploded behind her half-closed eyelids.
No, not stars. The glowing fluorescence of the lighted crystals had flared as she came and did again when Raze thrust into her, as powerfully as before but with less of that maddening phae grace, caught in his own release.
She brought her hands to his broad shoulders, steadying him. He gave a hoarse shout and one last jerk that sent the room plunging into darkness.
Yelena opened her eyes wide, but even for her inner tigress there would’ve been no way to see. Raze’s harsh breaths gusted the damp strands of hair stuck to her cheek.
He lowered himself to one elbow—his male bulk driving her into the torn cushion with carnal possession—freeing up one hand to brush across her face, smoothing her wayward locks. She realized, with a too-little-too-late touch of wariness, he could see in this absolute dark.
He murmured something, words in a language she didn’t know. The geasa in his skin flickered, and above them in the cavern ceiling, the crystals glimmered to life. The will-o’-the-wisps reemerged from wherever they’d been hiding. More like stars this time, distant and cool. Very much not like the dark male, hot and heavy against her flesh.
He leaned down to kiss her, a lingering kiss that made the soft, achy pulse inside her flutter again.
When he raised his head, his gray eyes glowed with a sated light of their own. “You taste as if I walked into the heart of summer.”
She swallowed, her pulse becoming a soft but deep roar that had nothing to do with her orgasm. “Actually, it’s winter outside.”
“I’ve felt neither since the phae retreated after the Iron Wars.” His lips quirked. “Let me taste once more that I might reacquaint myself with the difference.”
When he raised his head again after the kiss, she found herself clinging to him. She was holding him so tightly, the geas scars were flattened to nothingness under her palms. Not until she forced herself to let him go did she feel the scratch of forever-wounded skin.
“I must taste the same,” she said before he could speak. “I didn’t change.”
A shadow moved across his gray eyes, and her skin prickled as if a touch of winter had moved into the cavern. “Apparently I wasn’t as intense as I needed to be.”
Despite the circumstances, she grinned. “Oh, don’t beat yourself up. Any more than you already have. You were lovely.”
“Lovely?” He pushed himself upright on one arm, biceps bulging. Probably with masculine indignation.
She started to scoot away, but he snagged her close again. “So. Lovely?” His voice dropped an octave.
She sniffed, trying for indifference, but the scent of hot and bothered male was too delicious not to take another breath. “All you phae are gorgeous and impossible to resist. Everyone knows that.”
“That is not what they say about me.”
If his low tone had held self-deprecating charm, she would have laughed. But instead, she heard the cracked note of another wound. He had to tell the truth, she remembered, so she let him hold her.
“What do they say?”
“I am called Raze the Ruiner. Though not often to my face. They do not find me so lovely as you do.”
She touched one fingertip to the skin on the left side of his chest. The symbol carved there looked like half a heart with a cross above it. She dredged up a memory of a Twelfth Night Shakespeare production she’d done in college in which the midwinter saturnalia festival had been decorated with symbols just like this. What looked like half a heart was actually the curve of Saturn’s deadly scythe. “Ruined because of your scars?”
“Ruiner,” he emphasized. “Because I did this to myself. And because some believe I spoiled the court’s chance to take the sunlit realm for itself.”
The other meaning for the symbol was the element of lead, she remembered, ruler of the dark. No wonder he lived in a cave. “That was a long time ago.”
“Those confined to the phaedrealii do not fade. And they most assuredly do not forget. Or forgive.”
Her finger curled away from his chest of its own volition. This being she had taken into her body had fought in wars several millennia before she’d even been born. Werelings like herself tended to be long-lived, but, like humans, grew old and died. Meanwhile, Raze the Ruiner had been buried for countless ages here in his rocky stronghold.
He caught her withdrawing hand and lifted it to his lips for a kiss. As it had before, the gesture flustered her. That was the power of his touch.
“Why didn’t you change?” The challenging glint in his gray eyes was as hard as diamond locked in stone. “I felt the verita luna rising in you.”
Heat spread over her cheeks. How had he known the tigress was on the prowl? “I got distracted.”
“Ah.” He let her hand go. “I forgot phae are the only ones compelled to speak true when skin-to-skin.”
She scowled, stung into speaking. “You think I unleash her for just anyone?”
He tilted his head. “Forget about me. I’d think it would be for yourself.”
“I’ve held back too long.” The words burst from her like the orgasm had, almost ridiculously easy, as if waiting for the right touch to go off. “What if...”
“What if you can’t find the verita luna again?” His question was softly coaxing but underlain with bedrock. Was this what the truth compulsion felt like to him?
“What if I change and the world still doesn’t?” She closed her eyes. Said aloud, her fear sounded ludicrous.
Strong fingers angled her face upward, and she opened her eyes to meet Raze’s intent gaze. “What did you hope to change?”
“I want the werelings to reveal what we are.”
The temperature in the cavern definitely dropped this time, and she shivered a little.
Though the big body beside her was as hot as ever, his eyes had turned wintry and diffident. “The werelings intend to announce their presence to all humanity?”
She scoffed out a breath. “No. At the last convocation—same as every time before, going all the way back to your Iron Age—the tribes reaffirmed the decision to stay secret. But you asked what I wanted.”
He shook his head ruefully. “You tried to get them to change their minds.” Yelena wasn’t sure which was worse, the dismay in his voice or the lack of surprise. “You are fortunate they didn’t execute you for such insurrection.”
“Assassination to silence dissent is a phae tactic,” she grumbled, annoyed that he apparently already knew her well enough not to be shocked at her rash behavior. “Werelings aren’t afraid of hearing two sides to an argument.”
“Yes, I remember how your councils talked and talked when humans first overran the sunlit realm. The werelings were still talking when the phae went to war.”
She narrowed her eyes at the disdain in his tone. “And yet we now walk freely in the world while the phae don’t.”
If she hadn’t been so close, she might have missed his restrained jolt. Her retort had struck him hard. Cats had a reputation for playing with
their prey, but she had no illusions that while Raze the Ruiner might lurk in this stony solitary confinement, he was no one’s prisoner.
“I’m sorry,” she said, hoping he heard her sincerity. “Not all werelings are free either. My two half sisters live in exile because they suffer from the il-luna. My father and his human wife are afraid the girls will lose control of the change and cause a panic, not to mention too many questions.” She grimaced. “At least in Siberia a roaming Amur tiger is explainable.”
“You think if humanity knew about werelings, your sisters could be free in either shape?” Without waiting for her affirmation, he gave a sharp laugh. “No wonder the portal brought you here. The phaedrealii, for all its trickery, is not as delusional as you.” She stiffened, but he went on, “The court’s failed war should be a lesson to you.”
His derision wasn’t exactly unexpected, but she’d thought if anyone would understand it would be a prince whose people were trapped like her sisters. With a quick twist, she extricated herself from his hold and pushed away. The cavern was definitely colder than it had been, but her hackles were up from anger, not the chill. “Your war was a long, long time ago. A lot has changed in a few thousand years, but down here you can’t see that.”
“You think I’m blind because I live in a cave.” He propped himself up on one elbow. The seemingly relaxed pose only emphasized the breadth of his chest and shoulders and the heavy flex of his musculature. He looked every bit the dangerous predator, but her fingers twitched with the sense memory of his scarred skin.
She clenched her hands, trying to drive back the desire to touch him again. “I went from the taiga to the desert, to live with people who faced atrocities only your cruelest phae could’ve imagined. And yet they are struggling to put their world back together. I have to think there is hope.”
Her voice held more desperation than conviction, so she didn’t blame him for his skeptical snort. “I think the wereling council did not bother killing you,” he said, “because you would likely end up dead without their interference.”
His blunt assessment would have made the council elders nod knowingly. When a local warlord had come to close the school where she’d taught, she’d been too frightened for her students to consider how the attack undermined the very fact she wanted to prove. It was only after, as she lay in her hospital bed, that she despaired; if humans could not live together in peace, how could they ever accept werelings?
Maybe it was no wonder she’d lost the verita luna when any chance of change seemed so very far away.
* * *
His trapped tigress wrapped her arms around herself as if to ward off a chill—or hold herself together—and Raze stiffened every muscle to stop himself from replacing her arms with his own.
He’d touched her and risked the piercing openness of such contact only to discover how she’d come through the portal. And now he understood. Her desire to shatter the secrecy that protected the werelings had an equally disastrous effect on the wards he’d laid so carefully and at such great personal pains.
Perhaps her tigress was concealed at the moment, but her beast’s boldness would overcome any obstacles, whether put up by him or by her own shattered hope.
When he rose from the bed, the phosphorescent crystals brightened, enough to make Yelena blink. A length of gently drifting curtain waved like a silent call for his attention, and when he pushed it aside, a flowing pale gold gown fell across his raised arm.
She blinked again as he held out the garment. “Where did that come from?”
He jerked his chin toward the ceiling. “The spiderling phae must have seen your need.”
Seen her nakedness. He told himself he shouldn’t care for her lush and wild body now that he had the secret of her unexpected arrival in the phaedrealii.
And since he wasn’t touching her at the moment, he could even believe his own lies.
He retrieved his garments, slightly the worse for his earlier eagerness, but from the corner of his eye, he watched her glance up. With a shrug, she tugged the gown over her head.
The silky, lacy folds skimmed down her curves, alternately hiding and revealing the places his hands had been. From the liquid opal shimmer over the gold, he guessed the spiderlings had taken flecks of the ammolite to decorate their weavings. The neckline and back both plunged in a deep V, as if echoing the patterns of the stalagmites and stalactites, and small ammolite beads were strung on faintly visible strands across the gaps, like frozen rainbows arching over her flesh.
He’d never considered how bored the spiderlings must get, serving him. Suddenly grateful they hadn’t bejeweled him, he murmured a thank-you in a general upwardly direction.
While Yelena was smoothing the skirt over her thighs to swing in loose scallops around her ankles, a smaller web drifted down. It settled over her hair, each loose strand afire with more flakes of the ammolite, the iridescence bright against her cinnamon-brown locks. The spiderlings had definitely been saving their finer work.
Yelena touched the delicate weave and shot him a sidelong glance. “It’s sticking to my hair.”
“They like you.”
Her expression was dubious, but she repeated his thanks to the shifting shadows above them. From the corner of her mouth, she asked him, “Were they...watching us?”
“I’m sure they closed their eyes. All eight eyes.”
She huffed out a laugh, and they faced each other across the ravaged bed. He wondered if he looked as wary as she did as her grin faded.
Abruptly, as if she’d come to some decision, she said, “I can’t change because I’m afraid.”
He paused in reaching for his gloves. When she did not continue, he tried to rekindle her smile. “Afraid of spiders?”
She rolled her eyes but some of the stiffness left her. “Of an Afghan warlord and his men. They came to the school where I taught, pistol-whipped me in front of the girls, and held us at gunpoint while they set fire to the classroom.”
Raze clenched the gloves in his fist until the fabric disintegrated. “You should have shifted and killed them.” He would have slain them had he been there.
“I wanted to,” she confessed. “My head was pounding, blood streaming everywhere, the girls screaming. In the confusion, I imagined my sisters were there. And I figured if ever there was a time and place for the legend of a vengeful tiger attack to serve a good purpose...”
When she hesitated again, he guessed, “But you didn’t summon the verita luna.”
“For the first time in my life, when it really mattered, I froze. An Amur tiger, born and raised in Siberia, and I froze.” She shook her head in disgust. “Every meeting of the council has forbidden revealing ourselves. I didn’t know what would happen to the girls, to see me change. And...and I wasn’t sure what I’d do to the men. I’ve never...”
“Never killed.” Raze looked down at his sword hand where the threads of spider silk drifted away like smoke. Had there been a time when he hadn’t killed, before he was the Ruiner? There must have been.
He just couldn’t quite remember it.
Those days had been burned by iron, when he had sent his own to die as often as he killed their enemy. Though her body had been bold, Yelena’s innocence made him feel every moment of those centuries that had scarred him into the being he’d become.
“Were any of your students hurt?” He wasn’t sure why he asked, except that it would matter to her. Outside the phaedrealii, days and nights—entire lifetimes—flew like mayflies, but he supposed mayflies might find their time in the sun more precious for such fleeting delicacy.
She shook her head once. “I distracted the warlord’s men, but they kept us in the burned-out building for almost a week.”
The way she wrapped her arms around herself, with one arm low at her belly, the other hand guarding her nape, made him think he knew exact
ly how she’d kept their attention off her girls: by keeping it on herself, all the while in her smaller, weaker form.
Rage rumbled in his chest. With a mere scattering of portal spores, he could step from his cavern to the sands where she’d lost touch with her tigress and remind every warlord how the first weapons had been made of stone.
As quickly as it surged, the fierce impulse to throw open the wards shook him. To undo all he’d done over centuries? For a tigress trapped in her own skin?
Still submerged in her memories, Yelena didn’t seem to notice his unease. “In the end, the situation worked out better than if I had forced it. The community shouted the attackers out of town. Not another drop of blood spilled—” she touched her head where the strands of the spiderlings’ crown twinkled “—and the village pledged to rebuild with new resources for girls.” She dropped her hands to her sides. “They didn’t need me at all after that. Just as well, since the concussion lingered, and once I realized the verita luna was out of my reach, I had to leave. I couldn’t risk becoming a problem worse than any warlord.”
She took a breath, deep enough to make the iridescent ammolite flare between her breasts. “I kept the beast chained.” Her gaze—dark amber now instead of gold, her tigress far away—shifted, avoiding his. “No wonder she left me.”
The broken words brought him around the foot of the bed to stand before her. He tipped her chin up, skin-to-skin, giving her the look he’d once given his warriors facing the onslaught of cold iron. He knew by sharing with him, she was risking herself just as those warriors had been willing to fight at his word, and her willingness roused a part of him he’d thought left behind on those sunlit battlefields. “Touching my magic wasn’t enough to inspire your change.” For some reason, the truth of that hurt more than the iron had. “You must find it for yourself.”
She lifted her chin higher, out of his grasp, though he wasn’t sure if defiance or resignation made her eyes glint. “Then you might as well let me go.”