by Aja James
It now often put into motion activities that she hadn’t even asked for, correctly anticipating her desires and needs.
Point of fact, it had exceeded all her expectations in the selection and assembly of this particular temporary residence. All the statuary were imported and shipped from various museums and private estates. The hired gardeners trimmed the hedges immaculately within an inch of their lives and in the nick of time before her arrival. All the furniture and décor within the mansion itself were hand-selected, cleaned and polished to pristine perfection.
She’d even patted its cheek with fondness or some such emotion when she arrived to take it all in.
But while it knew that she was planning a climactic get-together with her ex-prisoner, it could only guess who the other guest of honor might be.
There was definitely someone else the Mistress was waiting for.
It had specific instructions to find bedrooms that adjoined each other with a private door and decorate them in the feminine style. The Mistress had taken one of the rooms; surely, the other was not reserved for Tal-Telal?
It rather thought the General would be staying in the dungeon-like cellars in the basement, given what it knew of his living conditions when he used to be in the Mistress’s care.
So strange, that after millennia of the both of them having the Mistress as a common link, it and the legendary General had never met.
It had met Lord Wind a number of times, even staying within close proximity to him and the Mistress when they used to live together.
But that was a very long time ago, only for a few hundred years after the Great War and the Purge of the aftermath.
What other secrets did the Mistress have, it wondered.
And was just curious enough to feel a rare thrill of anticipation for the ultimate reveal.
*** *** *** ***
Tal’s stomach plummeted as he raised his eyelids to pervasive darkness.
Save for the bursts of stars that flashed within his imagination.
He blinked hard several times.
The stars were still there, flashing in and out like the tails of lightning bugs on a summery night.
Was it really just in his mind, or was he actually seeing them?
“Tal?”
He turned slightly toward Ishtar’s tentative query, and blinked some more.
The stars were circling each other now, as if trying to get into a specific formation.
He stopped blinking and stared hard, his heart pounding, his breath held.
And then…
An oval that outlined a face he only saw in his dreams and memories.
Two bright dots for eyes, the hint of a nose, the line between her lips, the elegant column of her neck.
“Tal?”
He reached out a hand toward her, cupping the edge of her jaw.
As his thumb stroked her silky skin, he saw the white light that defined the edges of her face blur with a softer glow, illuminating more of her—the curve of her cheeks, the fullness of her mouth, the graceful arch of her brows.
“I—”
He swallowed and tried again, but his voice still came out in a deep, hoarse rasp.
“I see you.”
She put her hand on his and rubbed her cheek against his palm, then kissed it tenderly.
“I can’t see the features clearly. I can’t see colors. You’re like a blurry reflection in a darkened well. But…”
He raised his eyes to hers, staring wide and intensely into them.
“I see you.”
Twin rivers of diamonds trailed from the bright dots that shone where her eyes would be. Tears?
He rubbed his thumb across one cheek and gathered the moisture on his skin, bringing it to his mouth to taste.
Yes, tears. He could see her tears.
“Don’t cry,” he whispered huskily, enfolding her face with both of his hands.
He kissed the tears from her face and undulated against her, reminding her that they were still intimately joined, lighting the fuse of her desire.
“Tal.”
His name was like a prayer and a revelation as she moved her hands down to clasp his buttocks, pressing him deeper and higher into her.
“I can see your whole face now,” he said as he began a torturously slow thrust inside of her, only his glutes clenching rhythmically beneath her hands, the rest of him pressed tight against her.
She sighed long, losing herself in the building pleasure.
Dark Goddess above, but he felt soooo good. She wanted to keep him there forever.
“An orange glow is spreading up your chest,” he murmured, fascinated.
One hand left her face to cup her breast as the ecstasy he stoked within her hardened her nipples and swelled her flesh.
He ground against her clitoris with his pubic bone as he arched higher into her, the mouth of his sex pressing tightly against her G-spot from within.
A blaze of incinerating pleasure engulfed her as she orgasmed hard, from the tips of her toes to the roots of her hair.
“So beautiful,” he groaned as her vagina clenched around him, pulling an answering release from his body.
And in the infinite yet ephemeral moments of their crisis, he saw her face clearly in gorgeous detail as she stared back into his eyes with those arresting purple orbs.
Half tame, half wild.
His feline Mistress.
His forbidden love.
So beautiful, joyful and elemental it almost hurt to look upon her.
He rolled her onto her back and widened her thighs with his hands, pulling almost entirely out of her, only to thrust even deeper, harder, back inside.
“Again,” he commanded, seeing another flush build upwards from her swollen, glistening cunny to her stomach and chest.
It was her turn to chuckle with abandon and delight.
She loved the ferocious, possessive, greedy look on his face. She loved feeling him work in and out of her body, setting off one series of orgasms after another.
And as he stared unblinkingly down at her, reveling in her body’s reactions to his plundering, she lay happily back in bed, a willing slave at his altar.
Dozens, hundreds, of orgasms. Hours and hours of endless, steely, satiny and unbelievably full penetration.
She was sore and quivery, a gelatinous mass of electrified nerves. So exhausted she could no longer keep her eyes open.
It was hard work, lying there and taking all this intense, bone-melting pleasure unto herself.
She stretched with feline grace and yawned. A thoroughly satisfied smile curled her lips as he finally laid his glorious weight on top of her, blanketing her with his heat.
Sheathed to the hilt by her swollen sex, he stilled, closing his eyes. Within moments, his breathing deepened in slumber.
She hugged him tightly to her, and before sleep took her too, she wondered gluttonously when they would wake up and do this again.
*** *** *** ***
The man whose name began with an E didn’t know why he’d followed the woman and the child.
What was his damned name anyway?
Eric? Elijah? Elliot?
Maybe he should just make one up and be done with it. He was frustrated to no end by the limbo he lived in.
He was a psychiatrist without a practice. With only one patient he didn’t really recall but knew enough to reply to with seemingly sound advice.
He was a man with no friends, no obvious familial relations, no personal effects apart from some functional items like clothes, accessories and technology.
No vehicles that he knew of, though he did discover recently that he had several bank accounts scattered across the world and even recalled the information for each to access them.
He had oodles of money. He could buy a small country if he wanted to.
He wondered whether friends, family and co-workers were for sale too.
What did he do to accumulate such wealth? Surely a psychiatrist, no matter how skilled, ho
w sought-after, couldn’t have made that much? And with only one patient.
Not by the age of…what?
He looked in the mirror of his luxurious bathroom, still naked from the shower, his long, thick black hair slicked back from his face.
Why did he have so much hair?
All the way down his back and past his hips like some gothic princeling from a distant past? And hair only on his head, not anywhere else on his body. Not even his face.
Well, at least he never needed to shave.
He’d walked around enough and seen plenty of people—after all, New York City was teeming with crowds—but he didn’t feel an affinity with any of them; none of them looked like him.
The ones who weren’t busy or distracted with daily life, the ones who returned his stare, always looked at him with something like disbelief and awe. Struck dumb was what he’d call it. Usually combined with a double or triple-take.
Did he look that strange?
It must be the womanishly long hair. He must remember to chop it all off the next time he went out.
He stared into the mirror and assessed the visage that scowled back at him.
He had an angular, sharp-edged face. High cheek bones with defined hollows and grooves. Thick, straight, slanting brows over long, wolf-like, double-lidded, green eyes surrounded by dense black lashes. Wide lips narrowed perpetually into a grim line.
Had his eyes always been green? Was it a memory or a dream that his eyes were actually black? He couldn’t recall the last time he’d looked into the mirror to see green eyes looking back at him.
He didn’t look like a happy person. He didn’t feel like a happy person.
Especially since he was parched of hunger and thirst, unable to be satisfied by any food he ate or any drinks he consumed. Starvation might make a man rather miserable and desperate.
But his wretchedness went deeper than his throat and stomach.
He felt as if…
As if he was dead inside.
Or at the very least he wanted to die. Or he was tired of living. Or he was something his psychiatrist alter ego would have prescribed a lot of anti-depressive medications for.
Indifferently, he scanned his body.
He had a tall, broad, leanly muscular build. His hairless skin stretched over unyielding flesh without any cushioning of fat.
Even relaxed, the veins stood out clearly from his skin, and he could see distinctly all of the body’s muscle groups on himself as if he were an instructional dummy for an anatomy class.
Unaroused and uninterested, his cock hung long and thick between his thighs, the weights beneath them heavy, he suspected, from lack of use.
When was the last time he had sex?
He was a full grown male, after all. Wasn’t it healthy to have regular sex?
Well, he couldn’t recall, but he was relatively certain it had been a very, very long time.
He didn’t feel like he was the type of man who had sex with random strangers, though there was a ghost of a memory that he might have tried that route for a time before finding it unsatisfying and giving it up.
And as he didn’t seem to know anyone, or have anyone close to him, there were no non-strangers to have sex with either.
No wonder he was so depressed.
His body was unmarked by scars or imperfections, no birthmarks, no tattoos. Nothing, in other words, to identify him or give him some clue as to the kind of person he was.
Except for a thin, two-inch line near the bottom of his left pectoral, between his fifth and sixth ribs.
He pressed on it tentatively. There was a dull pain, but not from the skin or tissues on the surface of the wound. Instead, the soreness came from within.
As if his heart were hurting.
He shook his head. He was getting fanciful in his thoughts.
The wound looked completely healed, if it was indeed a wound. The line was so thin he would have missed it entirely had he not been so diligent in his perusal. It looked like a day-old papercut, it was so insignificant. Likely, it would disappear within a couple more days.
He scanned the rest of himself indifferently.
How old was he?
He was probably not the most reliable judge, but he thought he might be somewhere between twenty-five and thirty years old.
Medically speaking, his skin and muscle elasticity were those of a young man in his sexual prime, perhaps late teens, early twenties. But the vitality and strength he sensed coiled dormant in his body was that of a man in his physical prime.
Unfortunately, his skin was sickly gray beneath its natural alabaster paleness, probably due to whatever ailment he suffered.
But given that he was an established psychiatrist with at least one patient, the age he surmised from his body and face simply couldn’t be true.
Unless he was a child genius who’d earned his degrees very early, or he’d just started out his private practice and that was why he had only one patient.
In any case, none of the numbers—twenty, thirty, even forty—rang true.
He felt older.
A lot older.
Like he was so ancient, had seen and experienced so much, that he was ready to quit this world.
His apparent wealth, youth and health notwithstanding.
Which brought him back to the woman and child he’d involuntarily followed last night.
When he’d seen the woman walking through Central Park, laughing at a little girl who was eagerly devouring a triple-scoop ice-cream cone that was almost as big as her head, he’d felt…
Alive.
Suddenly happy to be breathing and upright, not buried and forgotten somewhere five feet under.
So without thinking properly, he’d started to follow her. All the way through the park to the subway station where she boarded the C train.
He’d wanted to get on the train with her and would have but for the look of fear in her eyes.
And he realized that he’d been stalking a lone woman and child in the darkness of night.
He’d stayed on the train platform then, as the doors closed against him.
Her eyes continued to track him as she sat with the girl facing him. He could see that she was breathing rapidly from a burst of adrenaline, probably induced by her fear and instinct to protect her charge.
Except.
Except in the last moment when their gazes connected, as the train was pulling away, he’d seen something else flicker in her large, dark blue eyes—
Desire.
*** *** *** ***
They must have slept for almost twenty-four hours, a rest they sorely needed after the tireless way they’d feasted upon each other.
When she last closed her eyes, it had been early afternoon, and now the sun was in the same place on the other side of the sky outside the large windows of their suite, shielded by semi-transparent curtains.
She never bothered closing the thick, blackout drapes, for when they’d arrived in the honeymoon suite, it had been nighttime. She’d gone through the daytime without thought to it either, other than to revel in the beauty of Tal’s body in both artificial and natural light.
Ishtar took the opportunity now to have a very thorough look at him, carefully disengaging her body from his.
His sex was still half-erect, still glistening with their fluids, as if it were ready to resurrect itself at a moment’s notice should she feel the urge to indulge herself with it.
She would always feel the urge.
But right now, she wanted him to rest. She wanted him to heal.
As quietly as possible, she used the phone in the adjoining living room to order room service. She was famished again and he must be too.
She came back to bed to sit beside him as he slept deeply on.
The wounds on his body were still deep and angry looking in places, but his skin had closed over all of them. Even the raised scars had stretched smoother, looking less puckered, less jagged.
His most recent wounds, the
ones she’d given him, were all but invisible now.
But she would never forget that she caused them.
Now that she felt fully herself again, she couldn’t understand the extremes that her moods had swung to before. She’d always assumed that so many years of bitterness had simply piled too high, festering inside of her, infecting her with hateful thoughts and emotions.
But now she wasn’t so sure.
What was it Ava had asked? Whether she’d ever been bitten by a snake?
As if conjured by her thoughts, her wrist buzzed.
“Yes, I’m here,” she said quietly after putting the small bud in her ear, moving to another room.
“How is everything?” Ava’s voice came through loud and clear, as if she were standing right next to Ishtar.
Ishtar sighed. It was a long exhale of gladness and relief.
“He is healing.”
“Oh thank goodness!”
Ishtar heard a few other exclamations from muffled voices in the background, and assumed that Ava was sharing her words through a speaker or common listening device.
“I take it you, ah, made your Bond with him stronger?”
If Ishtar was not mistaken, she detected a sly smile in the human healer’s voice.
“Yes,” was all she said, but there was a wealth of information in that one huskily growled word.
“Thought so,” came the smug reply.
“Listen,” Ava said more briskly, and Ishtar immediately went on alert, “I’m running an exhaustive sequencing of all of the Dark, Pure and human DNA we’ve collected at the Shield. I started with yours, Tal’s and the other female’s whose blood is still active in his.”
“Go on,” Ishtar urged, indicating that she was indeed attentively listening.
“I’ve run an initial comparison and I’ll do a couple more just to be sure, but I thought you should know sooner rather than later in case it turned out to be true.”
“What is it?”
“The other female shares twenty-five percent of your DNA.”
Ishtar scowled.
She didn’t understand, but she had an awful foreboding.
“It means that she shares DNA with you from one parent, but not both,” Ava elaborated.
