Page 46 of A Sea of Vows and Silence (The Naiads of Juile #3)

Pheolix

I drew a deep breath. And held it.

The hollow of Selena’s cheek sat under my thumb, and I grazed it softly, skimming the edge of her lower lip. “You’re trying to kill me, aren’t you?”

“Please?”

I shook my head. “How are you awake? I’ve never known a Naiad to take injuries like yours and not immediately sleep them off.”

I’d seen sirens need a nap after a simple scratch.

Naiads healed fast, but they always required sleep to do it.

As much as I trusted Thaan’s ability to replenish blood and seal wounds, I couldn’t understand how she’d managed to ward off slumber, especially after consuming alcohol and whatever the King had given her.

Her fingertips etched a slow circle in the center of my chest, stirring enough warmth under my skin to fill a glowing hearth with envy. “I’m afraid.”

“Nothing’s coming through that door that won’t go through me.”

“No, Pheolix,” she said. A touch of impatience glistened under her words, though the majority of her voice remained small. Cautious. “I’m afraid of sleep.”

I frowned. “Why?”

Her jaw worked in thought. “I’m afraid,” she said slowly, “that if I fall asleep, I’ll wake up and never see you again.”

Well .

Shit.

Moon and stars and loveless Guardians of Perpetuum. As if it weren’t enough torture to lie here and resist the urge to wrap her completely within myself. How did she manage to say the kinds of things I’d always accepted that I’d never hear?

Her voice did things to my head. Made me imagine things, envision things I had no right to envision. Made me ache to hear more.

“Please.”

“I can’t,” I whispered. So quietly the words almost didn’t exist.

“Why not?” Hurt strung the corners of her eyes. “Why was it so easy to kiss me outside the King’s bedroom, but you suddenly can’t now?”

Because she’d been outside the King’s room.

Because I was jealous. And reckless. And angry.

Because I was a fool.

Because something primal had woken my blood while dancing with her, had prowled viciously in a cage at the thought of another man touching her, had grown claws and fangs at the idea that he’d lay a hand on her—and now tucked itself into the shadows, vibrating between cold fury and fear that if I kissed her now, I wouldn’t stop.

My throat cracked, and I cleared it softly. “Go to sleep.”

“Kiss me to sleep.”

Theia in the sky. Spoiled little siren. She knew how to twist sweet words so that they cut like knives into my soul.

“Please,” she added. “Just one.”

My thumb coasted across her mouth, scraping gently at her lip. I stared at it. Full and rosy and enticingly lush.

“I just want to know,” she said, pulling my attention back to her gaze. “Did you kiss me outside his room because you wanted to? Or did you do it to stake a claim? Did you kiss me for him? Or did you kiss me for me?”

“I don’t know.” I sighed, the sudden weight of guilt thickening the air in my lungs. “Probably both. ”

She closed her eyes. “I want to know what it feels like to be kissed because you want me. Without the influence of anyone else. I want to escape this night. To pretend that kiss was mine and no one else’s.”

My thumb began moving again, cascading over soft skin in the near dark, and I wondered how many times Thaan had sent Selena to Emilius’s rooms before. Wondered how many other human men she’d been sent to ensnare, carving out her own emotions and leaving her skin as hollow as a baited trap.

Thaan’s happy to use my body as a means of strategy.

I’d almost exploded in greedy rage when she’d said it before. Now the words wrapped around my neck, suffocating me with heartbreak hidden in every syllable.

“Just one,” I murmured. “And then you’ll sleep.”

Her eyes opened. “Just one.”

“No more than that.”

“No more.”

Taunting fate sent an icy thrill through my chest, stopping my heart for just a moment. I was asking for trouble. Luring danger with a sharp hook. Danger with bright blue eyes and dark hair and a mouth that hovered just beyond mine, gently parted and waiting.

Thaan would probably murder me slowly. But he might have been planning that already.

Planning to roast my body on a spit over a fire.

To break every limb and throw me out at the sea, leaving me to drown.

He’d warned his drones not to touch the two hive heirs he’d found in any way other than pull them under.

I could still see him, the rage in his eyes as I’d surfaced after breathing for her.

He’d wanted to kill me then. What would he do to me if he found me here now, lying beside her in a bed, contemplating how agonizingly perfect the shape of her mouth was?

I must have gone crazy. I’d spent every minute of the last ten years keeping in line.

This siren had a penchant for sending me lapses in sanity.

She’d done it to me then, dispatching me to the mountains, and she did it to me now.

Even as the need for survival sang a cautionary tune in my head, another much louder voice thundered, I don’t care.

“Moon and fucking stars,” I muttered. “Just one kiss. Don’t move.”

Just a kiss. Just one single, small flash of my lips against hers. I wouldn’t pull her close. Wouldn’t explore the scent of her neck or the taste of her skin. Would barely even touch her.

She raised her brows. “Don’t move?”

But my mouth had already sealed softly over hers.

And immediately, I was lost.

My hands snaked under her hair and past her neck, forearms capturing the back of her head, anchoring her beside me.

She tasted like cool water across my palate.

Refreshing. Invigorating. Charged with an electricity I couldn’t capture.

All pure intention snapped out of my reach, stranding me in the center of her, a labyrinth of smooth skin and glossy hair, of dips and valleys and curves.

Every fiber in my body went taut. Every muscle, every bone, every thought floating in my head. The opposite seemed to happen to her. She dissolved in my arms. Melted like pliant clay, sinking into my grooves. Her hands twined in my hair, the knot I’d set at the beginning of the night coming loose.

She pressed herself against me, loosing all secrets under the thin cotton of her dress. I’d warned her not to move, but she had, and I could feel every inch of her, every sharp edge and every luscious convex.

I was a dead man.

But I suppose if there were ever a reason to die, it would be the one twisted into me now.

The one that aimed razored words when scared.

The one that shattered every plan I’d ever made, shattered them to pieces like glass thrown at a wall, a sharp pair of eternal blue hues the only weapon she’d needed to cripple my thoughts and wipe me bare.

Her mouth was hungry and smooth and soft.

Demanding. She unclasped my cloak, letting it fall to grip the collar of my shirt, pulling me over herself.

I hitched her knees against my hips, too aware of her injuries from only an hour ago.

But she groaned with deep-rooted impatience, bunching the collar of my shirt into her fist as I deepened my taste of her, hiking it up my back and over my head.

Just a kiss, my head cautioned. Just. A. Kiss.

But she delved her hands across my shoulders and down my bare chest, searching my skin with the brand of starvation an underground prisoner might harbor for the light of day.

I stacked my weight over my knees and elbows rather than on her, but Theia help me, she claimed every inch between us, arching her spine and thrusting into me, every roll of her hips a hypnotic spell that left me more dazed.

I left her mouth to traverse the underside of her jaw, feeling my way across her throat.

I don’t know when my hand crept up her thigh, gripping, squeezing as it traveled, teasing her dress up.

Baring her hip, her stomach, one side of her ribs.

I left her neck; my kisses trailed my hand instead.

But I stopped next to her navel, stroking a thumb across the pale, shining notch in her skin left by the King’s blade.

Already faded as though it had happened weeks ago.

A searing fire crackled in my head. Wrath stole through the room, staining the walls a vicious red. And under that, a sharp, shocking douse of shame

She paused, watching me under half-closed eyelids, drunken with exhaustion. “Pheolix.”

But her voice wasn’t as loud as the one in my head. It had finally tamed me, finally shouted over the trance. My gaze shifted to hers.

And I felt myself pull away.

“Oh,” was all she said, watching me. “All right.” Her cheeks tinted, and she tried to sit herself up, to back out of my grasp. I latched on, clasping her thighs underneath me. Locking her into place.

“Tell me you’re not tired. ”

Her chin lowered, expression firming, the ghost of a fight suddenly shining back at me. “I’m not tired.”

My thumb glided just over that mark on her stomach. At the scar that would fade before it ever cemented its place. “Tell me I won’t hurt you.”

“You won’t hurt me.”

For the love of all the stars beyond Perpetuum. It was hard to think with those eyes aimed at me. “Tell me if I leave tomorrow, you won’t regret tonight.”

Selena blinked. She tried again to sit up, to back away, and this time I let her. “Why should you leave?” she nearly spat. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“The agreement was nothing would happen to you or your sister. And it did. On my watch.”

“There’s nothing you could have done.”

I shook my head, leaning back to stand.

There it was, my question asked. And she’d avoided it.

Her hand caught mine. “If you leave tomorrow—which would be unfair and unjust and unfathomably senseless—without taking me tonight , I will spend the rest of my life hating you for it.”

“That’s not the same as living without regret.”

“It’s exactly the same.”