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His kiss was warm and slow, but full of dangerous promise. Sensation swallowed me in a heartbeat. His tongue teased the seam of my lips, and I opened for him with a greed I couldn’t deny – unsure whether I’d lost or won the game, and no longer able to care. Captured by the deepening intensity of his kiss, I could do nothing but feel. I could do nothing but want. His hand slid up along my spine, into my hair, and for one moment I was afraid he’d pull away and force me to think sensibly again.

Instead, he tilted back my head and moved his mouth to the vulnerable skin just below my jaw, kissing a slow line down the side of my neck.

A moan escaped me.

With a silent laugh, he moved back and rested a single strong finger against my lips.

Right. Silence. I gulped in a breath, his finger a heavy brand against my mouth. These branch walls would betray every sound we made – it was madness, to follow the fiery need pulsing below my skin under those circumstances … But every touch we shared was like the release of a breath I’d held for days, like loosening muscles I no longer even realised were cramped. Just the two of us – such simple, instinctive freedom.

‘I’ll be silent’, I breathed. ‘Don’t flee me now.’

His finger slid down my chin, then up my cheek, tracing the line of my cheekbone. His gaze followed, as if committing every inch of my features to memory. Even in the near-dark, the black of his eyes radiated a raw, cautious vulnerability – as if the curtains had lifted and revealed every broken shard below, every flaw and imperfection, every aching scar.

Look at me, he’d said.

‘Do you feel me?’ I whispered.

A shudder ran through him. I lifted my hand and gently dragged my fingertips over the edge of his pointed ears, savouring his gaze like the rich burn of a fine wine, savouring the next tremble that shook him to the very tips of his wings. My mind whirled in a warm, lazy tangle of images, laughter and the glow of magic and strong, unyielding arms around me. My body burned like hellfire, equal parts love and sin.

‘I once hated you’, I added quietly, brushing down over his temple. ‘Do you understand? I don’t just want you to know how I feel about you now. I want you to remember and feel the difference. I want you to realise in the very marrow of your bones that last time you showed yourself to the world, you became the world to someone.’

He was shaking now, as if I was breathing frost and cutting winter winds into his face. I lowered my hands to his shirt and slowly, infinitely slowly, pried open the first button in the shadowy dark, resting my fingers against the taut skin just below his collarbones.

‘Don’t forget that I once saw the worst of you, too’, I whispered, leaning over to the silhouette of his face. ‘And then I found the rest of you, and everything changed. I’m not an idiot, Creon. I know courage and dedication and empathy and selflessness when I see them. So don’tevertell yourself again that you’re being realistic, hating yourself, because—’

His lips silenced me.

He kissed me like a drowning man, like a soul hanging over a bottomless chasm by the tips of his fingers. I’d felt that dark pit inside him with Zera’s bag in my arms, the howling void of loneliness and guilt; now I felt it again, tasted the abyss on his lips as he wrapped his arms around me and dragged me against his shivering chest. Blood rushed to my head, to my fingers, to every place where our bodies met. I clawed into his shirt and rose to meet his kiss, finally surrendering to the hunger that clawed through me.

Iwouldkeep him from plummeting again, damn it all.

He broke away without warning, planting ravenous kisses along my jaw, my throat, my shoulder. Biting down hard on my lip was all I could do not to cry out. In the dark, we were reduced to wandering limbs and hot, frantic breath; I moved on instinct, unable to see more than outlines as I reached for his wings and found the smooth surface on my first try. Creon growled a breath, and I repeated the motion, brushing a long line to that spot just behind the shoulder I knew to be more sensitive than any other place.

He flipped me around in the blankets.

Hands moved feverishly in the night, bunched up my skirt, parted my thighs. Rough fingers slid below my underlinen, and I whimpered as he stroked the slick flesh without mercy, finding the core of my pleasure effortlessly as if no gods or magic had ever separated us. Gritting my teeth, I arched into him, into that heavenly friction of his touch, desperate for more. He pressed a first finger into me in response, and my moans fought a desperate battle for freedom on my tongue.

The world had grown too dark to read signs or the shapes of words on lips. I could barely even distinguish his silhouette against the backdrop or braided twigs and vines, the shape of him kneeling between my thighs. It was torture not to see his face, torture not to know his thoughts, and somehow those unknowns only heightened the sensations Ididfeel, his fingers thrusting into me, his thumb rubbing that most sensitive spot, his free hand stroking and kneading my half-bared bottom. I dug my nails deep into my blankets and struggled to be silent, struggled to swallow every sob and cry, as he coaxed me to my breaking point with the ease of a male who knew my body better than myself.

I had to clasp my hands over my mouth as I came, smothering my unstoppable moans in the warmth of my own palms.

Wings whooshed through the darkness as he lowered himself over me, pulled my hands aside, and kissed me as if he could not help himself, as if he had to taste the remnants of my whimpers for himself. I spread my legs wider, and he ground the bulge of his erection against my slit with a single demanding roll of his hips.

Good sense unravelling, I yelped into his kiss.

He nipped at my bottom lip, hard, an unmistakable punishment. Fuck. Yes. Silence. But how in hell was I supposed to be silent when he once again rubbed himself against me, or when he slipped his hand between our bodies and freed his straining erection with a flick of his fingers? Bodily reflexes had taken over, and my limbs and lungs didn’t care about secrets and alliances. I fought the very breath in my throat, fought my parting lips, fought the cries and declarations crowding up against the flimsy shields of my self-control …

Like they must do for him.

I stiffened for a single breathless moment.

Was this forbidding cage of silence so very different from the restraints in which he’d lived for over a century? Hadn't he felt this a hundred thousand times before, the frustration of words not allowed to come through? Perhaps this was the perfect levelling of our playing field, thebothof us forced into a quiet that went against every instinct and desire – and perhaps it would teach me, if nothing else, to understand.

His cock prodded my inner thigh, hot and heavy and slick with arousal, and I clenched my jaw against the moan that had been about to escape me. I might have trouble keeping silent for others, but Iwouldbe silent with him.

Even as his broad tip settled against my entrance and pleasure pulsed through every nerve in my body.

Even as he entered me in one deep thrust, hard and full of unbridled passion, filling me until I could barely breathe around him.