Page 14

14

SERAPHINE

T he rain taps a staccato rhythm against the windows as Jackson’s thumb grazes my knuckle. His hands still smell like pine resin and gunpowder from the fight in the warehouse, but his grip is steady. Too steady for someone who just learned the woman who dragged him into this world could level city blocks.

“Primordial,” he repeats, like he was testing the flavor of the word. He leans back into my leather sofa. “So you’re not the cauldron-and-candles type?”

I pull my hand free, skin buzzing where he touched it. “More the ‘accidentally disintegrate the toaster’ type.” The joke comes out brittle. Outside, thunder growls like the sky wants in on the conversation.

His foot nudges mine. “Then I’m lucky they took me and not your KitchenAid.”

“You’re not funny.”

“You’re laughing.”

I press a palm to my mouth, stifling the traitorous snort. Moonlight cut through the blinds, striping the whiskey bottle between us. His third pour sits untouched. My first still burns in my throat.

Thunder cracks. The lights flicker, bulbs dimming as ambient magic prickles my spine. Jackson tracks the reaction, eyes narrowing. “You do that?”

“Storm’s just restless.” I flexed my fingers, ignoring the ozone tang. “They’ll pass by morning.”

He turns my wrist palm-up. Calluses scraped over the scar bisecting my lifeline. “But you don’t.”

It isn’t a question. Rain sheets down the glass now, blurring the streetlights into golden smears. The air tastes like wet earth and the metallic kiss of lightning. His thumb finds the pulse point beneath my ear.

“Jackson.” An argument dies in my throat when his forehead brushes mine.

“Humor me.” His breath warms the space between syllables. “Hero complex this big, when do you ever get to stop?”

Every muscle tenses. His knee presses against my thigh, solid as the oak beams above us. The smell of him—crisp bergamot cutting through sweat and fear residue—floods my senses.

“Not a hero,” I whisper.

“Liar.”

His mouth skims my cheekbone. Heat blooms where skin meets skin, slow as magma rising. Fourteen years of armor cracks. I fists his shirt, cotton bunching under my palms.

The first kiss catches the edge of my lips. A question. The second lands true—molten gold poured into a crucible. His hands cradle my jaw like I am something sacred, thumbs sweeping the hollows under my eyes. I arch into him, fingers skating up the taut cords of his neck.

Lightning flashes. The windows rattle. His teeth catch my lower lip, tugging gently as the storm howls approval.

“Still scared?” he murmurs against my clavicle.

I bite back a gasp. “Terrified.”

His laugh vibrates through me. “Good.”

Outside, the rain falls harder. Inside, we drown in something warmer.

His fingers find the hem of my shirt, calluses catching on the fabric. “You realize my belt buckle’s probably smarter than either of us right now.”

I arch a brow, peeling his button-up open to reveal the scar splitting his collarbone. “You’re being gentle. It’s unnerving.”

“Unnerving?” His hands slide up my ribs, thumbs grazing the underside of my breasts through my sports bra. Lightning flickers, backlighting the smirk he wears like a challenge. “And here I thought we were savoring exposition.”

My laugh snaps into a gasp as his teeth close on my earlobe. The couch creaks beneath us, groaning when I straddle his hips. His belt clatters to the floor.

“Chairman of the board.” He nodded at the whiskey bottle sweating rings onto the coffee table as I tug his zipper down. “Might need a raise after tonight.”

“Shut up.” My fingers tremble against his waistband—brief, damning.

He stills. “Still time to bolt.”

I yank him against me, denim scraping my thighs. “You first.” I stand, seeing if he will go anywhere and all he does is stand to meet me and pull me in for another slow burning kiss.

I start slowly leading him backwards to my bedroom, not wanting my lips to leave his. Worried that if they do, he may leave or I may become smart enough to stop this.

Clothes fall in a trail of fabric shrapnel down the hallway. His palm eclipses the scar low on my stomach—an old mistake, jagged and silver. “This the toaster incident?”

“Waffle iron.” I kick my leggings into the darkness, breath hitching as his lips follow the scar’s arc.

The bedroom door sighs on its hinges. He pauses at the threshold, moonlight sculpting the new scratch along his jaw. “Last chance to pretend we have common sense.”

I step backward, pulling him with the belt loop still hooked in my finger. “Never been a joiner.”

The mattress dips under his knee. His mouth hovers over mine, sharing whiskey-tinged breaths. “How’s the armor holding up?”

Hinges of light frame his shoulders as another lightning strike tears the sky. I let him see the shudder, the split-second flinch. “Feeling a draft.”

He laughs into the hollow of my throat, hands mapping the topography of my spine. Every touch deliberate. Every pause a question. When his thumb slides between my thighs, I grip the headboard hard enough to crack veneer.

“Still scared?”

“Ask me later.”

He shifts and I wait unbearably—muscles quivering, breath trapped beneath my ribs. When he finally slides into me, the stretch blooms like lit fuse wire, slow and molten. My hips arch of their own accord, chasing the sweet agony of his fullness. Heat builds with every measured withdrawal, pressure coiling tighter until time fractures into fragments of callused palms and the primal cadence of our bodies meeting.

He’s thicker than I anticipated, longer than anyone who’s ever had the privilege. Hell, I never imagined to have Jackson Cole anywhere near my house, let alone bed. Yet here we are: his scars taste like gunpowder under my tongue, his hands schooling mine above my head like he’s teaching my bones a new religion.

Jackson moves with infuriating precision, each drag against sensitive flesh calculated to unravel me. I dig my heels into the small of his back, gasping when he rewards the defiance with a deeper angle.

“Fuck your patience,” I rasp, earning a graveled chuckle against my collarbone. His teeth graze the spot anyway, a silent watch yourself , before surrendering to the pace I demand.

Rain batters the windowpanes, syncopated with the slap of skin. My moans dissolve into the thunder as he pins my wrists, our shared breath fogging the air between us. I’d mock the poetry of it if I could form words—the storm’s crescendo mirroring the burn in my thighs, the crackle sharp as the metallic tang of blood where I bite his shoulder.

“Still scared?” he murmurs, a challenge glinting beneath the gravel in his voice.

I choke on a laugh, on the terrifying truth clawing up my throat. His forehead rests against mine, sweat-slick and steady, and for a heartbeat I let him see it—the fracture in my armor, the raw wanting beneath. Then I surge up, claiming his mouth before he can name the weakness. “Keep talking,” I breathe against his lips, “and I’ll retrofit your tongue into a zipper.”

The lie tastes bitter, but his groan as I clench around him is sweeter redemption. Let him think this is about friction, about conquest. Let the storm bear witness to the way my fingers knot in his hair when he quickens—to the forbidden confession of my nails scraping stay, stay, stay into his skin as the world splinters.

Thunder cracks its whip against the cathedral of our recklessness as he drives deeper, his rhythm a perfect heresy to the storm's chaos. My thighs tremble—not from effort, but the heresy of coming undone. Each thrust conducts lightning through my bones, his hands mapping fault lines only he knows how to fracture. The bedframe's splintering moan syncs with the gale, a symphony of surrender neither of us will name aloud.

I arch, teeth finding the salt of his shoulder— bite to stay grounded, bite to remember this is ruin —but he answers with a psalm murmured against my pulse. His discipline breaks first. I feel it in the hitch of his breath, the way his fingers dig hymns into my hips like he's trying to merge our skeletons. My control unravels in the space between thunderclaps, a dam shattered by the forbidden truth: we are not conquering. We are converging .

When the crescendo comes, it tastes like absolution. The headboard's final slam drowns in the tempest's roar as I fracture—not armor this time, but the ice around whatever raw, screaming thing lives in my chest. He collapses against me, breath hot as a benediction, and for three stolen heartbeats I let myself cradle the delusion that broken things can be holy.