by J. R. Ward
Before he was aware of what he was doing, Phury let out a growl that broke through the air like a crack of thunder. John Matthew’s and his buddies’ eyes shot his way, and then the three of them moved back as one. Big-time. Like the pool had caught fire.
Cormia, on the other hand, didn’t look in his direction. She didn’t scramble to cover up, either. Instead, she deliberately picked up her robe and slid it slowly onto her shoulders, all latent defiance.
Which powered him up like nothing else. “Come into the house,” he demanded of her. “Now.”
As she glanced at him, her voice was as level as her eyes. “And if I choose not to?”
“I will put you over my shoulder and carry you inside.” Phury turned to the boys. “This is our business. Not yours. Get gone if you know what’s good for you. Now.”
The trio hesitated until Cormia said, “It’s going to be all right. Don’t worry.”
As they turned away, Phury had a feeling they weren’t going to go far, but Cormia didn’t need protection. Bonded males were mortally dangerous to everyone but their mates. He was out of control, yes, but she held his remote.
And he suspected she knew this.
Cormia reached up and wrung out her hair calmly. “Why do you want me inside?”
“Are you walking on your own or being carried?”
“I asked you why.”
“Because you are going to my bedroom.” The words were pushed out of his mouth by his sawing breath.
“Your bedroom? Don’t you mean mine? Because you told me to get out of yours five months ago.”
His cock was the seat of his beast, straining to be let out so it could let out into her. And the arousal was undeniable: His train was on the tracks. His ticket was punched. The journey had already started.
For Cormia as well.
Phury stepped up close to her. Her body was roaring with so much heat, he could feel it against his own skin, and her jasmine scent was as thick as his blood.
He flashed her his fangs and hissed like a cat. “We’re going to my room.”
“But I have no reason to go to your bedroom.”
“Yes. You do.”
She casually tossed her thick twist of hair over her shoulder. “No, I’m afraid I don’t.”
With that, she turned her back on him and strolled into the house.
He tracked her like prey, following on her heels through the library, up the grand staircase, and to her room.
She opened the door a fraction and slipped inside.
Before she could shut him out, he slapped his palm around the wooden panel and pushed his way in. He was the one who shut the door. And locked it.
“Take your robe off.”
“Why?”
“Because if I do it, I’m going to shred it.”
Her chin lifted and her lids dropped, so that even though she had to look up to meet his eyes, she was still staring down her nose at him. “Why do I need to disrobe?”
With every territorial bone in his body, he growled, “I’m going to mark you.”
“Are you? You realize that would be for no reason.”
“It is for every reason.”
“You didn’t want me before.”
“The hell I didn’t.”
“You compared me to the other female you tried to be with, but ultimately couldn’t.”
“And you didn’t let me finish. She was a whore I bought for the sole purpose of getting rid of my virginity. Not a female I wanted. Not you.” He inhaled her scent and let it out on a purr. “She was not you.”
“And yet you accepted Layla, did you not?” When he didn’t answer, she sauntered into her bathroom and turned the shower on. “Yes, you did. As First Mate.”
“This is not about her,” he said from the doorway.
“How can it not be? The Chosen are a whole and I am still one among them.” Cormia turned, faced him, and dropped her robe. “Am I not.”
Phury’s cock slammed against the backside of his zipper. Her body positively glowed under the recessed lights of the ceiling, her breasts tight and peaked, her thighs slightly parted.
She got into the shower, and he watched as she arched her back and washed her hair. With every move she made, he lost more of what little was left of his civilized side. On some dim lower shelf in his brain, he knew he should leave, because he was about to make a complicated situation downright untenable. But his body had found the food it needed to survive.
And the instant she stepped free of that fucking shower he was going to eat her alive.
Chapter Thirty-eight
YES, she was going to let him.
As Cormia rinsed the suds from her hair, she knew the moment she left the shower, she was going to end up under the Primale.
She was going to let him take her. And in the process she was going to take him.
Enough with the almosts and the nearlys and the are they or aren’t theys. Enough with the twisted destiny they were both caught in. Enough with doing what she’d been told she had to.
She wanted him. She was going to have him.
To hell with her sisters. He was hers.
Although only for tonight, an inner voice pointed out.
“Fuck you,” she said to the marble wall.
She slammed the spigot to the left and threw open the door. As the rush of water was cut off short, she confronted the Primale.
He was naked. Erect. Fully fanged.
The roar he let out was that of a lion, and as the sound reverberated off all the marble in the bathroom, she got even wetter between her legs.
He came at her, and she didn’t fight him as he grabbed her around the waist and popped her off her feet. He wasn’t gentle, but she didn’t want gentle—and to make sure he knew it she bit him in the shoulder as they came into the bedroom.
He roared again and dumped her on her bed, her body bouncing once. Twice. She flipped onto her stomach and started to scramble away just to make him to work for it. She had no thought of saying no, but damn it, he was going to have to chase her—
The Primale leaped onto her back and pinned her hands up over her head. As she tried to twist around under him, he kneed her legs apart and held her in place with his hips. His arousal slipped down and probed at her, making her arch up.
He gave her just enough slack in her arms so she could turn her shoulders and look at him.
He kissed her. Deep and long. And she held her own, finished with being trapped in the Chosen’s yielding tradition.
With a sudden shift, he pulled back, moved a little, and . . .
Cormia moaned as he penetrated her body in one smooth stroke. And then there was no time for talking or thinking or lingering on what pain there was as his hips became a driving force. It felt so good, so right, the whole thing, from the smell of his dark spices and the weight of him to the way his hair fell down into her face to the gasps that left both of their parted mouths.
As his strokes deepened, she moved her legs even farther apart and echoed his rhythm in her own hips.
Tears sprang to her eyes, but she didn’t think twice about them as his relentless momentum carried her away, a knot of fire taking hold where he was pumping in and out of her until she thought she would be burned alive—and didn’t find that a bad thing in the slightest.
They both seized up at the same time, and in the midst of her own climax she caught a vision of him from over her shoulder, his head rearing back, his jaw clenching, the great muscles in his arms standing out against his smooth skin. But then she was too lost to see anything at all as her own body corded and released, corded and released, the greedy pulls on his sex making him moan and twitch as she drew the marking out of him.
And then it was done.
In the aftermath, she thought of the summer thunder-storms that swept over the mansion from time to time. When they receded, the quiet was all the more dense for the fury they’d wrought. This was the same. With their bodies stilled and their breath easing and their hear
ts slowing, it was hard to recall the vivid urgency that had propelled them here to this now-resonant moment of silence.
She watched as dismay, then abject shock, took the place of his single-minded marking urge.
What had she expected? That this dance of bodies was going to make him renounce his Primale status, forsake his vow, and declare her his one and only shellan? That he would be overjoyed that right before her departure they had done on a passionate impulse what they should have completed with reverence and forethought all those months ago?
“Please get out of me,” she said in a choked voice.
Phury could not comprehend what he had done, and yet the proof was there. Cormia’s slender body was under his heavy one, her cheeks were wet with tears, and there were bruises on her wrists.
He had taken her virginity from behind, like she was a dog. Held her down and made her submit because he was stronger. Plowed into her without regard for the pain she definitely had felt.
“Please get out of me.” Her words were shaky, and the word please killed him. She could only request it of him, as she was completely overpowered.
He pulled free of her and got off the bed, stumbling like a drunk.
Cormia turned onto her side and tucked her legs into her body. Her spine seemed so fragile, the delicate column of bones utterly breakable under her pale skin.
“I’m sorry.” God, those two words were such empty buckets.
“Please just go.”
Considering how he’d already forced himself on her, honoring her request now seemed significant. Even though leaving her was the last thing he wanted to do.
Phury went into the bathroom, put his clothes on, and headed for the door. “We need to talk later—”
“There is no later. I’m going to put in to be a sequestered scribe. So I will record your history, but not be a part of it.”
“Cormia, no.”
She looked over her shoulder at him. “It’s where I belong.”
Her head went back down on the pillow.
“Go,” she said. “Please.”
He had no conscious awareness of walking out of her door or going through his own. He just realized sometime later that he was back in his room, sitting on the edge of his bed, smoking a blunt. In the silence, his hands were shaking and his heart was a broken drum machine and his foot was tapping on the floor.
The wizard was front and center in Phury’s mind, standing with black robes waving in the wind, his silhouette jagged against a vast gray horizon. In his hand, balanced on his palm, was a skull.
Its eyes were yellow.
I told you that you would hurt her. I told you.
Phury looked at the tight roll of red smoke in his hand and tried to see anything other than ruination. He couldn’t. He’d been a beast.
I told you what was going to happen. I was right. I’ve been right all along. And by the way, your birth wasn’t the curse. It wasn’t that you were born after your twin. You are the curse. Whether there had been five babies born with you or none, the outcome of all the lives around you would have been the same.
Reaching for the remote, Phury turned on his Bose system, but the instant one of Puccini’s luscious, beautiful operas flooded through the room, tears boiled up into his eyes. So lovely, the music, and so unbearable as he contrasted the magical lilt of Luciano Pavarotti’s voice with the grunting he’d uttered when he’d been on top of Cormia.
He’d held her down. Pinned her arms. Mounted her from behind—
You are the curse.
As the voice of the wizard continued to pound at him, he felt the ivy of the past overtaking him once again, all the things he had failed to do, all the differences he hadn’t made, all the care he’d tried to take, but had fallen short on . . . and now there was a new layer. Cormia’s layer.
He heard his father’s last wheezing breath. And the crackle of his mother’s body going up in flames. And his twin’s anger at having been rescued.
He heard Cormia’s voice, worst of all: Please get out of me.
Phury covered his ears with his hands even though that did nothing to help.
You are the curse.
With a moan, he pushed his palms into either side of his skull so hard his arms shook.
You don’t like the truth? the wizard spat. You don’t like my voice? You know how to make me go away.
The wizard dropped the skull into the tangle of bones at his feet. You know how to do it.
Phury smoked with desperation, terrified of everything that was in his head.
The blunt wasn’t even touching the self-hatred or the voices.
The wizard put its black claw-toed boot on top of the yellow-eyed skull. You know what to do.
Chapter Thirty-nine
Up north in the adirondacks, deep in a cave in Black Snake State Park, the male who had collapsed at the coming of the dawn two days ago could not understand why the sun was shining on him and he wasn’t up in flames. Unless he was in the Fade?
No . . . this couldn’t be the Fade. The aches and pains in his body and the screaming in his head were too much like what he felt on Earth.
Except, what about the sun? He was bathed in its warm glow, and yet he breathed.
Man, if all that vampire-no-daylight shit was a lie, the race was an idiot as a whole.
But, wait, wasn’t he in a cave? So how were the rays reaching him?
“Eat this,” the sunshine said.
Okay, going with the idea, however improbable it was, that he remained alive, clearly he was hallucinating. Because what was shoved in his face looked like a McDonald ’s Big Mac, and that was impossible.
Unless he actually was dead, and the Fade had the Golden Arches instead of the golden gates?
“Look,” the sunshine said, “if your brain’s forgotten how to eat, just open that mouth of yours. I’ll cram this fucker in and we’ll see if your teeth remember what to do.”
The male parted his lips, because the smell of the meat was waking his stomach up and making him drool like a dog. When the hamburger was stuffed into him, his jaw went on autopilot, clamping down hard.
As he tore a hunk off, he moaned. For a brief moment, the tingling approval of his taste buds replaced all of his suffering, even the mental shit. Swallowing brought another whimper out of him.
“Take more,” the sunshine said, pressing the Big Mac back against his lips.
He ate it all. And some fries that were lukewarm, but a godsend nonetheless. Then his head was lifted and he sucked back some slightly watery Coke.
“The nearest Mickey D’s is twenty miles away,” the sunshine said, like it was looking to fill the silence. “That’s why it’s not as hot as it could be.”
The male wanted more.
“Yup, I got you seconds. Open wide.”
Another Big Mac. More fries. More Coke.
“I’ve done the best I can with you, but you need blood,” the sunshine told him, like he was a child. “And you need to go home.”
As the male shook his head, he realized he was lying on his back with a slab of rock for his pillow and a dirt floor as his mattress. He wasn’t in the same cave as before, though. This one smelled different. It smelled like . . . fresh air, fresh spring air.
Although . . . maybe that was the sunshine’s scent?
“Yeah, you need to go home.”
"No . . .”
“Well, then we got a problem, you and me,” the sunshine muttered. There was a shuffling like someone big was sitting down on their haunches. “You’re the favor I need to return.”
The male frowned, dragged in a breath, and croaked, “Nowhere to go. No favor.”
“Not your call, buddy. Or mine.” The sunshine seemed to be shaking its head, because the blurry shadows it created in the cave shifted like waves. “Unfortunately, I gotta deliver your ass back to where you belong.”
“I’m nothing to you.”
“In a perfect world, that would be true. Unfortunately, this ain’t heaven. Not
by a long shot.”
The male couldn’t agree more, but the whole going-home thing was bullshit. As the energy from the food seeped into him, he found the strength to sit up, rub his eyes, and—
He stared at the sunshine. “Oh . . . shit.”
The sunshine nodded grimly. “Yeah, that’s pretty much how I feel about it. So here’s the deal, we can do this the hard way or the easy way. Your pick. Although I would like to point out that if I have to find your place without your help, it’s going to require some effort on my part, and that’s going to crank my shit out.”
“I’m not going back there. Ever.”
The sunshine put a hand through his long blond-and-black hair. Golden rings glinted on his fingers and flashed from his ears and winked from his nose and glittered around his thick neck. Brilliant white, pupil-less eyes flashed with a boatload of pissed off, the bright blue ring around those moonlike irises flashing navy.
“Right. The hard way. Say good night, Gracie.”
As everything went black, the male heard the fallen angel Lassiter say, “Mother. Fucker.”
Chapter Forty
"Did you see the look on Phury’s face?” Blay said.
John glanced across the island in the kitchen and nodded in total agreement. He and his buddies were sucking back relief beers. At a dead run.
He had never seen any male look like that. Ever.
“That was some bonded-male shit, for real,” Qhuinn said as he went over to the refrigerator, opened the door, and took out another three bottles from the queen’s Sam Adams stable.
Blay took the one he was offered, then winced and prodded at his shoulder.
John cracked open his freshie and took a slug. Putting down the bottle, he signed, I’m worried about Cormia.
“He won’t hurt her.” Qhuinn sat down at the table. “Nah, no way. He might have planted us in early graves, but not her.”
John peeked out into the dining room. There were doors shutting. Loudly.
“Well, there are a lot of people in this house. . . .” Qhuinn looked around like he was tackling a bad math problem in his head. “Including the three of us. Go fig.”
John stood up. I have to go check. I won’t . . . you know, interrupt anything. I just want to make sure everything’s cool.
