Rapture's Edge

by J. T. Geissinger

  He’d fix the house later.

  She swung around and faced him, breathing raggedly, fixing her livid black gaze for the first time on his face. “Did you kill him?”

  His answer was swift and emphatic. “No.”

  She took a step closer, eyes unblinking. “Did you and the others plan to take over the colony?”

  “No.”

  Her lips twisted. She took another step closer. “Did you make fun of me, behind my back? Knowing what a fool I was?”

  He took a step toward her, and his voice grew dark. “No, Eliana. No.”

  “How can I believe you? How can I believe anything? I can’t trust anyone—I can’t even trust myself. I can’t trust my own judgment!”

  She was distraught, working herself up again, her voice rising where only moments before it had fallen. He closed the distance between them, took her roughly by the arms, gazed deep into her eyes, and said, “You can trust this.”

  And he kissed her.

  She didn’t fight him as he expected. She melted against him with a low sound in her throat and her mouth soft and warm against his. Her arms came up around his neck, and his arms wound around her body, and they stood there like that, tasting each other, fused together in the darkness of the ruined living room, wreckage all around them. It went on and on until his breath was short and his body was hot and inflamed. His fingers dug into her hips, her waist, her bottom. Beneath the cold leather she wore, her flesh was soft and yielding, and imagining it beneath his fingers, beneath his tongue, made him moan into her mouth and kiss her even harder.

  She broke away with a horrified look. Then she slapped him, hard and stinging, her palm open against his face.

  He sent her a ruthless smile that drained the color from her cheeks. He said, “You know what you need, baby girl?”

  She stared at him, breathing erratically, her dark eyes huge.

  His smile grew darker. “You need to fuck it out.”

  She blinked, huffed a little astonished breath, and said, “I really hate you, you know that?”

  “You hate me because I’m right.” He fisted a hand into her hair at the base of her neck and pulled her back to him. He kissed her again but she struggled, she pushed against his chest. He ignored it and deepened the kiss. It was hard and rough and greedy, their teeth clashing. She bit him on the lip, and he tasted the salty tang of his own blood.

  “That’s it,” he whispered against her mouth, and kissed her again, deep and demanding.

  She pulled back and stared at him for a beat, panting, a strand of blue-black hair caught at one corner of her mouth, a smear of his blood across her full lower lip.

  Then she leapt on him.

  He caught her around the waist as she locked her thighs and arms around him, kissing him with an unchecked hunger that took his breath away. He staggered, knocked into a table, the desk she’d broken the lamp over, until finally one leg hit the couch set in the nook of the bay window and he dropped them both to it.

  She rolled on top of him, tore off her leather jacket, tore off his shirt, tossing it all to the floor in between frantic kisses. She was as starved as he was, heat and shadow above him, their ragged breathing matched. He shoved a hand beneath her shirt and cupped one breast in his hand, pinched her hard nipple, and thought he would come when she moaned into his mouth and rocked her pelvis against his. She sat up and moonlight from the paned window above them painted her ghostly pale, banded in checkerboard shadow. She looked down at him, her cheeks flushed, her lips red with his blood and swollen from his kisses, and his breath caught in his throat.

  He’d never seen anything so lovely.

  She lifted her arms and pulled her shirt over her head, dropping it to the floor. She wore a black lacy bra, delicate and feminine, which ripped apart like tissue paper when he took it between his teeth. He cupped her breasts in his hands and nuzzled them, reveling in her little mewls of pleasure as his lips closed over one nipple and he drew it into his mouth.

  He was rock hard, throbbing, and she ground against him, her hips rocking in a rhythm that had his heart pounding. She bent down and took his earlobe between her teeth, and he thought his heart might fail when he heard the words he’d longed for so many years to hear.

  “Yes,” she whispered, her lips against his ear. “Demetrius, yes.”

  He flipped her over so her back was on the couch and she was stretched out beneath him, squirming. He shucked off her boots and peeled her out of her pants and then she was naked, gloriously naked except for a pair of panties. He leaned down and kissed her again, sucking on her lips, running his hands all over her heated skin. She felt like silk and velvet and nothing else he’d ever touched, and he was so greedy for her he didn’t know if he was bruising her or hurting her, and he couldn’t stop himself in any case.

  He was on fire. Every cell, every muscle, every nerve. Every breath he took was fire.

  He kissed her breasts, drew his tongue down to her stomach, bit her there because she was so tender, her flesh so soft. She shivered and arched against him, her hands at his shoulders, nails clawing into his skin. He put his face between her legs and inhaled deeply and she gasped, shocked.

  She gasped even louder when he shoved aside her panties and slid his tongue inside her.

  Musk and salt and woman, already soaking wet, she tasted incredible. They moaned at the same time. His erection twitched in his pants, aching to be set free.

  He pressed her thighs apart and began to stroke her with his tongue, licking and sucking greedily, swallowing her taste, learning what made her twitch and what made her moan. He slid two fingers inside her, and she arched sharply against the couch and cried out.

  “Not yet, baby girl,” he whispered, stroking his thumb where his tongue had just been. “You don’t get to come yet. Not until I say so.”

  “No, no, no.” She squirmed beneath him, and he put his forearm over her stomach and pressed down. He lowered his mouth to her sex again and began, slowly, rhythmically, to lick her. He slid his fingers in and out, and his other hand fondled her breasts, pinched her nipples.

  “Please, oh, please,” she gasped, arching. Her hands clutched at the couch, the back of his head.

  He drew back and blew a breath over her swollen lips, smiling when she shuddered and called him a dirty name.

  He freed himself from his pants and rose above her with his leathers falling open to his hips, balancing his weight on an elbow. He leaned down and kissed her, hard, letting her taste herself on his lips, teasing her with the head of his shaft which he held in one hand, stroking himself back and forth across the wet entrance to her sex. When he ignored the demands her hips were making, she reached down and grasped him herself.

  He gasped, stilled, closed his eyes at the feel of her hand on him.

  “You’re huge,” she breathed, running her thumb over his head. The shaft pulsed and strained in her hand. He leaned down and suckled her breast again, nudged himself against her, groaned when he felt her heat and tantalizing wetness against the most sensitive part of his body.

  “Oh, baby girl, flattery will get you everywhere,” he whispered, and shoved inside her.

  He did it hard and he did it fast because he wanted to shock her out of her head, he wanted her to forget, to focus only on him. She cried out and arched against him, her breasts crushed against his chest, her body a taut bow from the couch to his. Before she could recover from that, he began to thrust, long, slow rolls of his pelvis that sank him deep inside her, stretched her wide.

  She moaned his name, guttural, her thighs tightening around his waist. He lowered his head again and bit her on the neck, drowning in the feel of her, his beautiful rebel bare and wild beneath him. Her hips met his every thrust. Her nails dug into his lower back.

  He growled something in Latin, he didn’t know what, his immersion in her was so total.

  “Please, please, please, oh, please,” she begged in a broken whisper, nearly sobbing.

  He stilled, framed her
face in his hands. “Not yet.” He was panting, biting her lips, her jaw, her throat, little nips that left a trail of pink behind on her skin. Her shoulder was a delicious heat against his tongue. “Not yet.”

  She writhed beneath him, demanding, clawing at his back, but he put a hand on her hip to still her. “Open your eyes,” he whispered. “Look at me.”

  She did as he commanded, and they lay like that for a moment that spun on and on, breathless, beautiful, their eyes locked together, noses inches apart, the only sound their labored breathing, their bodies drenched in moonlight.

  He flexed his pelvis, once, and her lids fluttered. “Open,” he softly warned and ran his thumb across her lower lip. “Keep them open for me.” He reached down and hooked his thumb around the back of her knee, slid her leg up around his waist, and then thrust deep into her again, watching her face. She made a sound, a low moan of pleasure, and slid her hands up his back, but she kept her eyes trained on his, unwavering.

  “Yes,” he whispered. “Like that, baby girl. Keep your eyes on me.”

  She nodded and bit her lower lip as he thrust again, slow and deep, burying himself to the hilt. Still buried deep inside, he made a slow circle, grinding against her pelvic bone, and she gasped, then moved with him, matching his slow, small motions with her own, building the pleasure to a gathering, exquisite peak.

  Looking into his eyes, she whispered his name. Her fingers dug into his shoulders.

  He slowly righted himself to his knees, pulling her along by her hips, and then he took the leg hooked around his waist and slid it up over his shoulder. She opened to him even more, and he took advantage of it by sliding partly out of her and then slowly all the way back in; he could not go any deeper.

  On the very edge of orgasm, she shuddered. Her chest rose and fell in short, uneven bursts.

  He stilled because he knew how close she was, and he didn’t want this to end. Not yet. He knew as soon as she went over, he’d go over with her. So he ran his hands over her breasts, her hips, turned his face to her leg and kissed a trail up her calf to her ankle, resting against his shoulder, and all the while she kept her gaze on his, half-lidded and shining with heat.

  He reached down and stroked her, just above where they were joined, the nub of her sex wet and swollen beneath his thumb. Her mouth opened but no sound came out. Her hips jerked.

  “No,” he warned, and she answered with a groan of objection. She made a move as if she was going to push out from under him, but he captured her wrists in his hands and pinned them over her head, pushing them down into the cushion. She protested, but he crushed his lips against hers and thrust hard and she moaned, bucking beneath him, biting his lip. Panting, his threadbare control unraveling with every movement of his body, he pulled away to look at her and found her staring right back at him, her brows drawn together, her face contorted in something like agony.

  “Please.” So urgent it was nearly a plea, she said it in a hoarse, broken whisper, and it unwound the very last shred of his will.

  He took both her wrists in one of his hands and cupped her face in the other. He let his hips take over, a primal thrusting that had her moaning her approval beneath him, but he never took his gaze from hers.

  “Yes, Ana. Now.”

  And because her eyes were open he saw the exact moment it happened, when she tipped over the edge and went spinning beyond pleasure into ecstasy, even before her body clenched and arched beneath him. Even before her eyes slid shut and her moans formed the shape of his name.

  “Baby girl,” he whispered, fierce, fire licking along every nerve ending, electricity snapping up his spine. “My beautiful girl…”

  When it hit it stole his breath and sent shockwaves through his body. Pleasure, so acute it was almost pain, rocketed through him, and he jerked, spilling himself into her, growling and grunting like some kind of wild animal, his face against her neck, the beast inside him screaming, Yes yes yes yes yes! Mine! All mine!

  Her nails in his back. Her heart against his chest, pounding wildly. Her body, plush and warm beneath him. The moonlight sketching shadows on the walls and the leafless winter tree in the yard and the car passing by, unseen, somewhere far off in the night. Every little detail of the moment seared itself into his memory like a brand so that even beyond his shaking and hoarse panting and the roaring in his ears, he was aware on some level that this moment would stay with him for the rest of his life.

  Sometime later, when their breathing had slowed and their heartbeats returned to normal, she murmured his name. Dazed, he raised his head and blinked at her, and she stroked his face, smiling.

  “This doesn’t change anything,” she whispered, her eyes soft. “I still hate you.”

  And he had to laugh. Weakly, his forehead pressed against her chest, he laughed.

  It was a long, long while before they spoke again.

  At some point in the night he’d carried her to the bedroom, but she wasn’t awake for that. She wasn’t awake when he tucked her into his side and pulled the blankets over them both, his arm around her, holding her close. His body was heat and muscle at her back, his legs drawn up behind hers. She came awake only when she became aware of his deep voice at her ear, murmuring something that ended with “…forever.”

  “What?” She blinked into the unfamiliar room. A candle in a little saucer on a dresser across the room sent up a merry flame that flickered and spun, a warm yellow spot of light in the darkness.

  He pressed his lips to the back of her neck. “Nothing. Go back to sleep.”

  But she couldn’t, now that she was awake and the ice storm was howling inside her head again.

  He was right, before. His crass way of informing her exactly how she needed to “work” things out had been successful. He had taken the sharp edge of her anguish and dulled it with his body. And for that she was profoundly grateful, because she wasn’t sure she would have survived the night without it.

  The pain of betrayal is a physical thing, a deep, hollow ache in the pit of the stomach that spreads to every organ, corrosive and black. If it spreads to the brain it might even cause insanity, and Eliana was convinced she was halfway there already, but she couldn’t possibly care less.

  Her father had been her idol. She knew on some level he was damaged—she’d seen the way her kin sometimes shrank away from him, blanched and trembling; she’d seen the dark, dangerous light that sometimes crept into his eyes—but she also knew he was gentle and good to her, and though he was within his rights by law to put Caesar to death because he was unGifted, he’d spared his only son. From all accounts, he’d loved her mother and treated her well, he protected the colony, he gave them whatever they needed in order to survive, to thrive.

  But he was a monster. Dominus might even have been the devil himself.

  What she experienced reading the pages of his journal was a terrifying descent into the mind of a brilliant, evil creature, a creature with no soul and no conscience but with a very healthy appetite for vengeance and an iron resolve to turn the planet into his own personal playground. The serum she thought he’d created only to help half-Bloods survive the Transition had a far more sinister application.

  Holocaust.

  He was going to use it to wipe out the human race. Their dream of peaceful coexistence had been a lie written in the sand, meant to pacify her until the tide turned and reality washed all those dreams of peace away in a tsunami of blood and tears.

  Oh, there would be a few left. Enough for slaves who would cook and clean and breed the next generation into servitude. But their entire gene pool would be wiped out within a few generations.

  She realized then what the elders meant when they called her spem futuri, hope for the future. She realized with sudden, horrible clarity what he’d meant when he’d told her the night he died, “Your young will rule the earth.”

  She was the last of Dominus’s Bloodline, a line that had sired kings for a thousand generations while humans were still busy making cave painting
s. A line that until the failure of Caesar had produced males far more Gifted than any of their kind. A line that would go extinct without new heirs to continue it.

  Her heirs. Her and her brother’s.

  Her father had planned to breed them together.

  That’s why he never insisted she marry though all of their kind married young. That’s why he didn’t kill Caesar when it was discovered he was unGifted. Dominus didn’t believe a female could rule, and the colony would never accept an unGifted Alpha, so the crown would skip a generation and go to the male child she would produce with her brother. An heir and a spare, because Dominus intended to ensure there would be more than one male offspring from the joining of his two children.

  He intended to be there. He intended to watch.

  The horror of it, the horror of all of it, had made her literally sick. She retched in a corner of her room at the abbey until there was nothing left for her stomach to eject except bile.

  And Silas, trusted family servant before her father died, trusted friend after, had known about all of it.

  His guilt was implicit. Promised a special place in the new world kingdom imagined by her father, Silas had improvised quite ingeniously when her father had been killed. He’d used her Gifts to get the money to develop the serum and stockpile weapons, used her ignorance to keep her under control.

  One cold, undeniable fact remained, however; it was Demetrius she’d found standing over her father’s dead body, not Silas. Demetrius who’d been holding the gun.

  Demetrius who claimed he didn’t kill Dominus but refused to say who did.

  And something else left her feeling as if her blood had turned to ice water. There was still the possibility, however small, that Silas had told her the truth about the Bellatorum. That Demetrius not only killed her father but knew of his plans for the serum beforehand and saw an opportunity to seize power far greater than just assuming control of a single colony. He somehow knew about Mel and her husband. What if he knew other things?