Page 37 of Claimed By the Mothman (Greymarket Towers #1)

The opal on her finger pulsed, as if it was saying: yes. This. This is good. This is right. This is what you were meant for.

Sig tilted his head slightly, gaze falling to the ring’s soft glow.

“Your ring of tangled light is appeased,” he said at last, with the long-suffering tone of a creature denying himself sacred vengeance. “Thus, although I long to do so, I will refrain from dismembering this Edward-ex.”

Nell laughed. Really laughed. Big and loose and unburdened.

“You’re such a menace.”

He clicked once. Smug. “Only to those who harm what is mine.”

Her cheeks flushed in pleasure and she looked down at her ring to distract herself from his words. “You call this a ring of tangled light. What does that mean? And why does it pulse? It’s like it has moods.”

Sig’s wings shifted faintly behind him. “It does. It is not only a ring.”

“That’s not a comforting statement.”

“It is a conduit,” he said carefully. “A vessel. Tangled light is a crude name, but not wrong. It channels resonance and stores it, or sometimes distorts it.”

“Like a mirror?”

“Of a sort. It remembers how you feel.”

“You mean it has memory?”

“Not like yours. Not of events or time. But of tone and intention.”

She snorted. “So it’s a haunted mood ring?”

“I do not know what that is,” he said, antennae twitching faintly. “But it is not merely decorative. I have seen similar artifacts crafted to harmonize with claiming, but this one does not match any of them.”

Her thumb brushed the opal’s surface. “I found it in a pawn shop. I didn’t intend to buy it. But It just…called to me.” She exhaled. “So—what? Now it’s part of the bond?”

Sig shook his head. “It does not carry our shared resonance, although it echoes with it now. It allowed the bond, but I do not believe it belongs to it.”

She stared at the opal, watching it glow in the soft light. “That’s a very cryptic answer.”

“I am a very cryptid being.”

She groaned into her tea, pulling her hand away from him. “This is too much thinking for me after about a billion orgasms last night.”

He clacked softly, a satisfied sound. The ring on her finger gave a single, answering thrum of agreement.

Nell looked up and glanced at the clock over the stove. 9:05 a.m. She should be at the library right now filing overdue scrolls and fending off whispering encyclopedias. Pretending not to notice when Goldie scribbled notes in the margins of the books in the Cryptid Romance section.

As if summoned by guilt or cosmic mischief, her phone pinged in the bedroom. Once. Twice. Then a flurry of buzzes that could only mean one thing.

Goldie was at work. And Goldie absolutely knew what was up. Nell bit her lip to keep the grin off her face.

Sig drifted back to the kitchen counter, now utterly focused on a citrus reamer. He rotated it slowly in his claws like it was an archaeological wonder or an unsolvable puzzle box.

“So,” Nell ventured cautiously, tapping her fingers against her tea mug. “My boss texted. She gave me the rest of the week off.”

Sig didn’t look up, just turning the citrus reamer in his hands like it might emerge with the answers of what fueled the universe.

What exactly did one do with a winged cryptid lover after the best sex of their life? Play Scrabble? Go antiquing? Perform a blood rite in the community garden?

Nell cleared her throat. “What…” she asked carefully, “...what would you like to do today?”

Sig turned the reamer once more and set it down gently. He lifted his gaze.

“I would take you back to your bed,” he said, in a steady and unapologetically dark voice, “and coax every echo of pleasure from your body until your voice gave out and your name no longer mattered.”

Her breath caught on the inhale and her thighs squeezed together. “Well,” she managed, a little breathless. “That’s…direct.”

“But I suspect that is not what you meant.”

Nell blinked. “I mean, it’s not not what I meant…” Down, girl.

Sig’s wings gave a subtle twitch behind him. “You are thinking of something more tender. Something more human. A shared experience.”

Her mouth curved, helplessly fond. “A date, Sig. I meant a date.”

He tilted his head. His antennae flicked forward, attentive. “The day has a date. It is May the twenty-eighth.”

“No, not like on the calendar. A date is…” She floundered for a moment. “...it’s like a companionship ritual. You go somewhere. Talk. Eat. Sometimes there’s hand-holding. And maybe kissing.”

“Ah.” His expression shifted, pleased. “For reinforcing attachment.”

“Yes. Exactly.”

He nodded once. Certain. “Then we will do that.”

Her breath caught. “Yeah?”

“And when it is complete,” he added, his voice sliding into a register that made her skin prickle, “we will return here and make good on what I wish to do today.”

Her thighs moistened instinctively at the words. “That sounds like a plan,” she said faintly.

“You are my beloved, Nell. So I will learn your ways. All of them. Even the ones that require shoes.”

Her heart stuttered. Her throat tightened. “You might not need shoes,” she whispered.

A smile curved his lipless mouth, strange and devastating. “That makes the ritual even better, then.”

—

The water was hot. Nell tipped her head back, letting the spray pound against her neck, her shoulders, her breasts.

Her body was still aching from being so thoroughly used.

She glanced down and saw claw marks. Faint lines—slanted, curved slightly at the ends—left by hands that had gripped her hips while she came apart.

A small, devastatingly erotic bruise brushed the top of her thigh.

Nell turned away from the spray and grabbed her shower poof, lathering it with automatic, trembling hands, trying not to think about the previous night, because oh no, girl, if you think about it we’re never going to get out of this apartment today.

She was working the soap down her arm when she heard a soft click. A cooler breath of air wafted in as Sig stepped into the bathroom and shut the door behind him. Quietly, he stepped closer and put one clawed hand to the shower door.

Nell pointed with a foam-covered finger. “Nope,” she said in a strangled voice. “Sig. Out.”

But her brain was screaming YES . Yes to the heat curling low in her belly. Yes to the feel of his eyes on her. Yes to being the center of his orbit, even naked, soapy, and vulnerable.

“I do not mean to intrude,” he said softly. “But you are unguarded. Luminous. You shine, and it undoes me.”

Even through the fogged door, she could feel his gaze sliding over her skin, as if every droplet of water on her body had become something worth cataloguing and remembering.

His ruby-red eyes began to glow. “You are radiant in water, Nell. And I am losing the strength to watch and not touch.”

Her pulse thundered. The mark between her thighs thrummed.

“I am coming in, unless you tell me not to. Right now.”

The silence draped around them like the steam curling through the room. Nell realized he was standing there because she was naked and wet and glowing, and he was trying— trying —to be good.

And she… didn’t want him to be good.

“Sig,” she said quietly. “If you’re going to get in here, you’d better do it, and you’d better be ready to do something about it.”

She watched, barely breathing as he stepped back, smoothly undid his waistband, and dropped his pants to the floor.

With a grace that did not belong to someone of his stature, he reached for the shower door and stepped inside.

The water cascaded over his chest, his shoulders, his stomach. His fuzz dampened instantly, darkening and curling at the edges. His antennae drooped under the weight of the water.

This shower stall is not built for cryptid courtship, she thought nonsensically as he loomed above her.

Nell tilted her head back, and as she watched, she could swear the space expanded, like Greymarket Towers was watching, approving, and making room.

Sig looked down at her. “I dreamed of this,” he murmured. “Of you. Warm and glowing. Your scent on the steam. The way you would look at me, wet and wondering.”

Nell cleared her throat awkwardly. The water was running directly into her eyes. “Um—”

She was supposed to be the seductress now. But she was blinking through shampoo and trying not to pass out from arousal. Cool. Cool, cool, cool.

“You’re probably, uh…needing to be refreshed a bit,” she said, lifting her shower poof like it was an offering. “After, you know. Last night.”

She winced. Smooth. “Would you, um … mind if I—” She swallowed. “Cleaned you off?”

He clicked low in his throat. “As you wish,” he said, his voice all heat and promise. “But then it will be my turn, beloved.”

Nell nodded, tossed her wet hair back from her face with shaky determination, and stepped in close, raising the poof and pressed it gently to the center of his chest. She moved slowly, deliberately, tracing the poof across the fuzz that covered his sternum, catching against the chitin where it met skin in subtle seams.

She worked her way lower. Down the center of his stomach. Circling his navel. Then drifting along the vee of his hips. As she passed it lightly over his lower abdomen, his claspers stirred. They extended just slightly, quivering and grasping at the air.

He gave a rumbling click that shivered through her bones. “That…” he said, breath catching, “... tickles. ”

A thrill ran through her—hot, deep, and wicked. She grinned and dropped the poof.

“Then maybe,” she murmured, voice husky, “I should use something else.”

Slowly, she sank to her knees, letting the water plaster her hair to her shoulders in dripping strands. She reached up and let her fingertips trail lightly along the inside of his thighs. He parted his legs slightly to give her room, and a ripple of anticipation moved across his stomach.

“You’re beautiful,” she murmured. A bead of water dripped from her nose.