Her skin grew cold, in need of body heat, although she could see herself flushing. Blood rushed to the surface of her skin, softening it. She was becoming liquid. The call of her need siphoned every other instinct out of her. Her core was hot. Slick. She felt it running down her thigh.
The small groan she heard on the other side of the door made her grab onto the shower door. It cracked. She felt it start to give under her fingers. Loosening her grip took more strength than it should have. Her focus was shot; it actually took her two tries to get the door fixed.
No. He needs to calm down. You heard him. He’s not going to function any other way. At least, he thought so. She wasn’t so sure, and his refusal to even entertain the idea of letting Mavrak out and paying attention to that side of himself was starting to piss her off.
Still, she would play the game his way. For a little while longer. She wasn’t a creature high on patience, but she’d give him what little she had left just to make him more comfortable.
He better get his shit together fast though, because she was going to have him, soon, whether he was ready for it or not.
Her pussy wept with the urge to dominate and mate with him.
Mentally cursing, she jumped into her shower and willed it on before Zeniel sensed any more of her needs—or worse, smelled them.
And, he better fucking appreciate how hard she was trying for him.
Gods damn it, she’d always been horny, despite her past, but she’d never really gotten worked up for a man before. She’d tried to mess around with guys, but it never worked out. She had only ever been able to orgasm alone, and once she’d discovered that, she’d been an addict constantly on the pipe.
The vibrator wouldn’t be able to do anything for her now though, even if she were to reach for it. She was hungry for a lot more than an orgasm.
A lot more than penetration even.
Her body was hungry for Zen’s cum, and it was a feeling she’d never thought she’d experience. It was the same feeling she got when her stomach cramped and she was starving for food, but centered in another area.
She needed to stop thinking about it, yet here she was, a hamster refusing to get off the obsession wheel. She soaped up, taking extra time washing her hair under the cold spray. She tried to focus on the task, on the feeling of her hair sliding between her fingers, but then she was hit with an image of Zen playing with said strands, of them sliding over his naked body.
This shit was pointless. She wasn’t really getting anywhere. It was time she admit to herself that there would be no focusing on anything else until her body was fed.
Six times, maybe fifteen.
With that thought in mind, she finished rinsing off and got out of the shower. One thought had her dry and dressed in tight black yoga pants and a dark purple tank top. Barefoot, she tip-toed to the door before slowly easing it open. She peeked around it, her hair falling like a long black curtain over one shoulder.
She expected to find Zen still deep in meditation. Or at least halfway there. Instead, he was sitting at the edge of her bed, head bowed, fingers lost in his burgundy hair.
She all but flung the door the rest of the way open. “Zen?”
The sound he made was almost a whimper. The veins on his hands bulged starkly as he tightened his hold on his hair. He started rocking back and forth. Eve flashed before him, reaching out to him.
“No!”
“What?”
Zen flew off that bed like a missile, his face turned away from her, and his intention was clear as fucking day.
Oh, hell no. He wasn’t going anywhere. He wasn’t fucking running from her just because Mavrak was about to come out.
With that thought in mind, she flung herself after him—grabbing onto his shirt sleeve—just as he dematerialized.
Chapter 14
The hold she had on him served as a conduit in terms of direction, even once they were both without form. Her molecules tangled with his, spinning through the fabric of reality. She could perceive it, even without a mind, and she was grateful. Without it, she might have lost him.
That was something she was determined to kick his ass for, whenever they actually came to a stop. Mere seconds later, they did, and so hard that her knees dug into wood, splinters flying in every direction.
Wait. Wood?
Panting on her hands and knees, Eve looked up, her eyes squinting as they searched out her prey. The suicidal urge to kill him reared its head once more. That motherfucker. He’d tried to leave without her, tried to leave her all over again, after all they’d been through in the last few hours.
After everything she’d been through the last few weeks.
Her nails dug into the floor, the sound of wood peeling grating in the air. Four feet away from her, by the wall, Zeniel kneeled, also on his hands and knees. He wasn’t looking at her. Didn’t matter. Those red irises of his threw a glow on the floor, one so intense that it shot back up and illuminated his face.
He was in full war demon mode—those eyes, the moving marks on his face and arms, the damned cheekbones—and he was beautiful to her. Absolutely beautiful.
It hurt her; grated into her organs, stripping ribbons free just as her nails were doing to the wood beneath her. He’d tried to leave again. She told herself that he felt justified—and didn’t give a fuck. Because she’d never be able to just walk away from him. The fact that she was chasing him now proved that.
But for him, it seemed easy to just turn around and flee.
“Are . . . are you all right?”
Those dual tones detonated pure awareness inside her. It turned her on. Which was an understatement. Ismini had confessed to her that hearing Dyletri’s voice warped and split in two did the same to her. Evesse hadn’t understood, not until she’d heard Zeniel and Mavrak talking to her from within the same voice box.
She sunk her fingers deeper into the wood and gritted her teeth. She had some self-control. She was not so fickle. She was pissed off at him, and she wasn’t going to let something as stupid as being horny for him get in the way of that this time.
Right?
Zeniel’s eyes fell to her hands, like two flashlights shining red light at her fingers. In the glow they gave off, she saw the deep grooves she’d left on the wood floor. When she looked up, worry had overtaken the male’s face.
Those eyes . . . Zeniel wasn’t the one speaking to her, for all that there was two tones in his voice. It wasn’t the color of his eyes that gave it away, but the way he was staring at her hands. She knew Mavrak had taken over. Zeniel would have stared her in the eyes.
Exhaling, she forced herself to nod, not trusting her voice. She wanted to curse and beat the shit out of Zeniel. Unfortunately, that wasn’t who she was dealing with right then.
The nod Mavrak gave her in return was . . . shy. Hesitant. He still refused to look her in the eye. Suddenly, he jumped up and stood. He seemed distressed and frantic as he looked around the room they were in.
Staring at the ridiculously huge width of his shoulders, and the way his T-shirt stretched across his back, hanging on for dear life, she was hit with another case of the want-nows. She was also hit with the knowledge that what stood before her was the most complex contradiction she’d ever come face-to-face with.
And that was saying a lot considering she had to look in the mirror every day.
One half of him was—or had been—so self-controlled. So calm. Yet it was that half that walked around the world with such confidence. As if he owned everything. Including her. The other half of him, the war demon before her, was supposed to be the raging one. The killer. The demon. Yet, as raw and tumultuous as Mavrak was, he was the shy one.
As he began to move around the room, it called her attention to where they were. Easing back into a kneeling position, she let herself take a good look around. They were inside a large bedroom. It looked like a master bedroom—in an old, rundown, apparently abandoned house. Everything around them was broken, rotten, dilapidated, or wors
e.
A fact her R’mann seemed determined to fix all of the sudden.
He flashed around the room at top speed, waving his hand over this and that, willing it back into pristine condition.
She was a balloon with a needle jabbed into her side. Except that, instead of air, it was anger leaking out of her with a steady hiss. She curled one hand around her side, as if that was going to help shit. Whatever. It wasn’t like she could actually take out her anger on the male before her. Not until his other half made an appearance.
She stood, watching as he returned the large fireplace back to its former glory. Considering the furnishings around her, she’d have to guess that this was an old Victorian home. Where the fuck were they?
“Is this where you’ve been staying?”
Zeniel froze, halfway across the room, with his back to her. He turned his head, but stopped himself from actually looking over his shoulder at her. He was tense, panting; he wanted to look at her, was dying to. His need hit her, jamming that damn needle deeper into the latex she seemed to be made of.
He was afraid to look at her; she could see it in every line on him. And she knew why, too.
She opened her mouth to ask him to turn around when he gave her a quick, terse nod, before flashing over toward the bed.
“What are you doing?” she asked when he willed that, too, back to sparkly-new condition. His response was immediate.
“My R’ma deserves better,” he mumbled under his breath.
The latex was shredded, dropping to the floor in pieces, leaving her stripped of any barriers. Defenseless. Her anger was free to fly away. Without it, there was only room for the need she felt.
And it wasn’t just about the sex. It went beyond that. She wanted to curl into his lap, and possibly crawl into his skin. Merge with him until they were one being and she felt him in every fiber of her soul.
Damn. She was getting good at the romance spiel, wasn’t she? Next thing she knew, she was going to be writing Valentine’s Day cards for Hallmark and shit. Her. Evesse.
Sol would never let me live this shit down if she knew.
Zeniel looked around the room. Not finding anything else to fix—hell, she doubted the place had looked this good even back in its glory days—he made his way to the front of the bed. He all but fell onto it, his weight dragging him down into a slumped, seated position.
God, his shoulders. Any higher and they’d pass the top of his head. And the look on his face as he stared at the floor?
Unable to stay back any longer, she took a tentative step toward him. After that, it was just a matter of letting her body do its thing, her feet rushing to bring her closer to her male.
“Do you prefer I call you Mavrak?”
It hadn’t occurred to her until then, but it was necessary that she find out. Knowing how long he’d been ignored made the ache in her burst into a bittersweet chemical reaction that had her torn between hugging him and mounting him.
Fuck it, she was going to do both.
Zeniel didn’t look up at her face, but his eyes hungrily followed her steps as she got closer.
“You can call me whatever you are most comfortable calling me. If Zeniel is what you prefer . . . we are one and the same, aren’t we?”
She stopped a mere inch before him, gasping. “Y-you are aware of that?”
Brow furrowed, he blinked in confusion, and the look on his face was adorable to her. “Of course I am. Zeniel . . . my other half is, too. But he hates me for what I have done. I don’t blame him. I wish I had more control. It just hurts so damn bad when I hear . . . everything. It hurts right now.”
The sins. He meant the sins he was forced to hear and see.
Tears filled her eyes and one slid down her cheek before she could blink it away.
“It is easier for Zeniel to ignore me. I . . . not him, I mean. His subconscious. Mine. The guilt . . .” he trailed off, running a hand over his head in frustration.
He didn’t need to find the words. They weren’t necessary. She knew exactly what he was going on about.
She opened her mouth to say something, but nothing came out. Hell, she could barely even breathe at that point. God, even a God had his mental limits, and her mate had been pushed past his. Torn apart, not by his own hand, but by whatever had been done to him during his imprisonment.
When Eve had been fifteen, she’d been put in a foster home. The trial had gone in her favor, despite her mother’s desperate need to see her punished. But with no place to go, there had been no choice but for her to be entered into the system.
The first home she’d stayed in, she’d met a girl her age. Makayla had come from an even more fucked-up background than Eve. Sexual and physical abuse was just the beginning of her traumatic smorgasbord.
Unable to deal with the pressure of all that pain and horrid knowledge, Makayla’s subconscious had done the only thing it could to protect itself: it’d fractured. Splintered into two apparently separate personalities. Two bright, intelligent, very aware personalities.
Both of which had known that they were one person, and that they suffered from a really complicated illness.
It was thanks to Makayla that Eve learned about DID—Dissociative Identity Disorder. It was the brain’s way of coping with extreme trauma. It compartmentalized itself, sometimes to an extreme where it broke.
Looking at her male, at the way he sat on that bed, everything about him so heavy, even his aura, Eve had no doubt that they’d broken him.
They’d fucking broken him.
But she’d known that, hadn’t she?
She took the last step up to him, and although he didn’t lift his eyes, he moved his legs further apart, making room for her. When she cupped his face between her hands and lifted it, he closed his eyes and hummed in his chest. All the heaviness seemed to leak out of him, just from her touch.
She swallowed, caressing his cheekbones with her thumbs. “What exactly did they do to you?”
He didn’t open his eyes, and fuck her, he even smiled a little at her touch. His hands came up, spanning the entire width of her upper back and sides. He pulled her closer, resting his chin above her breasts. “What they had to.”
Bullshit. That’s the first thought that Eve had. They could’ve found another way to—
What?
Zeniel was born because Mavrak’s psyche was broken. Maybe it wasn’t what they’d set out to do, but it’s what had occurred. A tiny part of her, the one that was starting to get an inkling of how the Universe worked, understood that everything happened for a reason. No matter how fucked-up.
But the part of her that was besotted with the male in front of her refused to accept it. Refused to entertain the idea that there hadn’t been another way to help him. Fuck it, she was just straight-up enraged at the idea of him being put through five hundred years of torture.
“Please tell me,” she whispered, lowering her head and laying it on his. “I want to know.”
Zen pulled her even closer. Eyes still closed, he rubbed his nose back and forth, right above where her tank top ended. With a groan, he pressed his lips to her skin.
Eve trembled at the feeling of his lips opening just enough for him to flick his tongue lightly against her flesh. He exhaled harshly at her taste. The hum that left him traveled past his clenched teeth and right into her skin. Whimpering, she latched onto his dark red hair, yanking strands free of his pony-tail, pulling just hard enough to tilt his head back.
“You’re trying to distract me.”
His lids rose slowly to half-mast. The way he looked up at her stole all the strength out of her legs. He caught her before she could fall, using his hold on her upper back to lift her as if she was nothing more than a piece of paper. She let him position her on his lap, but stopped him before he could bring her flush with that delicious cock of his. If she felt it, she was definitely going to forget about questioning him.
“Mavrak, please tell me.”
He froze the moment that na
me left her lips. His eyes closed again, and a small shudder went through him. “I want you so bad.”
“Stop trying to distract me. Please tell me.”
He sighed. “They beat me. Starved me. The first two centuries, the lack of sustenance doesn’t matter. After that, it begins to take its toll. Eren—the dimension my father was from—is far from Enzyria, and by then, my temple had been moved to the Valley of the Gods there. So I had no real sustenance, and eventually, it weakened me enough.” He paused and shrugged one shoulder. “They needed to weaken me so I wouldn’t fight back. It worked.”
Eren. Eventually, Eve was so going there and hunting some fuckers down. One day. Soon.
“What do you mean when you say they beat you? What exactly did they do to you?”
He shook his head, and nuzzled her jaw, inhaling so hard it sounded like a hiss.
She bit down on her lip, feeling her gums tingle right before her incisors shot down. “How did they stop you from punishing them?”
He exhaled. The warm air that rushed out made her entire body tingle. For a moment, she thought he wouldn’t answer her question. Then, when he did, she really wished he hadn’t.
“They kept burning or cutting my eyes out. Without them, I can’t hurt anyone.”
She circled her arms around his neck, tightening them as much as she could. Zen choked, then chuckled, bringing her in closer.
“It had to happen,” he whispered in her ear, rubbing his parted lips across her earlobe.
“We will agree to disagree on that one.” She was breathless, and with good fucking reason.
He pulled back, his stare boring into her eyes. It took her by surprise. He’d been shy a few minutes ago, too shy to really look at her. Now, he seemed only curious, his brow scrunched up a bit as he stared at her.
“You truly . . . you do not hate me.”
“I would never hate you.” Fuck, her throat was tight, the words barely making their way out.
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