Page 33 of Once Upon a Dark October

Chapter Thirty-Three

“ Y ou need a bath,” I said. “And a long drink.”

“Perhaps you can just lick it off me,” Morrigan suggested. She lay flat on her back in the middle of the bloodstained crypt floor. Her fingers flexed idly above her stomach to evaporate them, her eyes closed. Scarlet speckled her hair. Her clothes had been soaked from lying in it. “More enjoyable for us both.”

“That’s the best idea you’ve had all evening.”

Straddling Morrigan’s hips, I reveled in the heat radiating between us, both exertion and arousal. She didn’t fight me in spite of her fatigue—she never did—when I slid her tunic up, exposing her stomach and the lower curve of her breasts. Her skin, like mine, had a mist of sweat across it from what felt like endless hours of training bouts. But she was already panting for me, her nails claiming me from behind, pressing us closer, closer . Morrigan lost herself to the wild, desperate need that raced through her and rocked into my hips. The pressure was grazing, the contact between us not quite enough for her.

The moan she gave me when my hand settled between her legs, when my thumb found the pulse there, rebounded off the stone. My name fell from her open mouth, filling every shadowy corner of the room.

What a gift it was to have someone I once feared so vulnerable beneath my hands. She bled for me without thinking. Every day she tore herself open for my fledgling hunger. And let me rip her apart in the brutal knowledge that somehow, some way, we would set her right again. A thousand agonies she’d suffered for us.

Purpose , she’d said. Perhaps that was the secret.

I often wondered if her body thrilled at the pain.

After everything my burgeoning, stumbling blood magic had done to her, her body broken and twisted and wounded at my command, the only thing I wanted now was to love her. I needed Morrigan to feel safe. To be treated with care and gentleness at my hands.

But it wouldn’t be here, on a dusty stone floor still haunted by her bloodstains and torment.

I straightened, a fading pink mark of my rough lips left on Morrigan’s stomach above her navel. She chased me, her fingers wrapped around the back of my neck to bring us together again, sealing our mouths with a bruising kiss. It killed me to break from it.

Her tunic fell back into place as she sat up. “Where are you going?”

“Nowhere without you,” I promised. “Follow me.”

The two of us stumbled through the estate’s darkened halls like we were a pair of forbidden lovers desperate not to get caught. I led the way, but the path was treacherous with Morrigan stopping every few moments, our fingers entwined while she stole a clumsy kiss. We hushed each other as if any of our coven-mates would care—Morrigan’s hips pinning me up against a wall once or twice, my fangs scraping along the artery in her neck, my tongue too ardent and thirsty to wait. The first taste of her blood-mottled skin stoked my hunger anew .

But my pleasures and cravings weren’t important to me now.

That wasn’t so for Morrigan, who had somehow removed the borrowed tunic from me before we got to the doors of the solarium. She’d left it wherever it had fallen like a discarded rose petal.

The world beyond the frosted-glass doors of the solarium seemed apart from everything else entirely.

“The best-kept secret in the estate,” Morrigan said, approving. “I’m glad you’ve found it.”

We hadn’t even needed to light candles. The moon was almost full, its glow bright enough to trickle in through the thin curtain of fog, the rest of this quiet sanctuary drenched in nighttime shadows. It was more than enough to see by.

But for all the fire within me raging for her, there was still moment’s reluctance. I could still smell her blood dousing the air like a phantom. I could still hear the terrible agony I’d caused.

Morrigan seemed to read my thoughts. “It was only training, Ella.”

But it had been real. A reminder of the devastation another blood sorcerer could bring.

“Forget everything else,” she said. “None of that was real.”

“But—”

Her finger silenced the rest. “Hush, my darling. Whatever we do down there means nothing but survival. It’s not real, Elspeth. I promise you it isn’t.”

Waves crashed loudly with the coast so near, but all I heard was Morrigan’s heart and mine.

“This is real.” She placed my hand over the swell of her breast. “I know you can hear the beating of my heart. The way you make it quicken—that’s real , Ella.” Morrigan pulled us close, heart to heart. Her fingers skimmed along my ribs and down to my stomach.

“Touch me,” she growled, with a little arch of her hips. “You cannot break me, not like this. But we don’t have much time. ”

“I’ll have you in any form you take.”

“Yes, but,” Morrigan groaned, dipping her head so her tongue flicked across my nipple, “I want you now —need to feel your body against mine.” I exhaled sharply when her fang grazed the stiffened peak, the sensation bolting through me. “Unravel me. Take me until I can’t feel anything but ruinous pleasure.”

Morrigan’s clothes were sticky, melded to her skin. The dried blood had turned abrasive and tight. I had to peel them from her, piece by piece, a pang of hunger jabbing at my fangs, saliva gathered in my throat.

Blood had leaked through the fabric. In the pale cast of moonlight, it speckled her skin like charcoal. Knowing I’d made her such a canvas soured my hunger for it. But I hadn’t intended to let go of my promise.

“Up here.” I patted the cushioned bench, tossing a blanket out of the way. “So I can get a proper look at you.”

Her smirk was sinfully crooked. “Is that so?” I felt it on her lips when she kissed me, hard, a parry of fangs nicking my mouth. Morrigan grabbed me again—tongue-first, it seemed—to soothe the clumsy laceration.

Morrigan kneeled on the cushion, obliging my order with a wicked eagerness. The two of us stood bare under starlight, thin beams dusting silver across our skin.

“By the stars, you’re an utter mess.”

“I quite enjoy being your mess.”

“Oh, do you?” I planted a fist on my hip, brows knotted. Morrigan’s eyes blazed with want as her gaze raked over me, naked to the waist before her. I wanted to play her game a little longer. “And I suppose you’re expecting me to clean you up again, is that it?”

Her tongue flicked across her bottom lip. “Counting on it.”

I closed the small gap between myself and the bench, Morrigan curling forward ever so slightly to reach me with our height difference. I tilted my face to brush her lips with mine, breathing in her quickened exhale.

“Well,” I drawled, the words drawn against her mouth, “I think that’s rather presumptuous. I’d like to see you beg me for it.”

Morrigan broke away and whimpered low in her throat, the sound ricocheting between my legs. Her gaze darted to my lips. “ Please , Ella, my darling. I’ll never get all this blood off me myself.”

I shook my head. “You must do better than that.”

Her heavy breaths fanned over my mouth again. “I need you,” she pleaded, that whimper creeping in once more. “I need your clever tongue on me ravishing every inch of my skin, devouring with that fledgling hunger. I want you to taste me until my mind is so numbed with pleasure that I forget everything but your name falling from my lips.”

That’ll do.

My mouth latched onto Morrigan’s neck. A searing bite, then a cleansing sweep of my tongue to rouse the hunger. Morrigan’s moaning made the craving all the more intense. I knew well enough now what sounds she’d make for me. The soft, gusting cries as I lapped at her bloodied skin. The whimpers and growls and moans whenever my fangs gave leisurely bites here and there—across the planes of her stomach, the side of her breast, her collarbone, the tender ache below her navel.

My laughter gentled against her skin.

“What is it?” Morrigan asked gruffly.

“I dreamed of this,” I confessed. “The two of us here—nothing except starlight and the sea. But seeing you right now, waiting for me, wanting me… It’s lovelier than anything I could’ve dreamed.”

A hot tendril of pleasure flared anew at the sight of her legs spread for me.

“Turn around, then,” I told her. “Let’s see if anything more can be done about you.”

My fangs grazed Morrigan’s ass cheek and she jolted forward, the tips of her fingers stark with the effort of pressing to the window.

I reached my hand around her, skirting along her sternum down to her rigid abdomen, seeking Morrigan’s obvious arousal. I thumbed at her clit, her sighing moan breaking around us. Tracing two fingers down the length of her slit, my fingertips pressed into her until I felt the pliant muscles there flutter around them.

Morrigan sighed again, this time louder, mingled with a needful whine, so shamelessly wet on my fingers.

I watched her for a moment that stretched into another, admiring the sheen of sweat that’d painted her lithe body, the moonlight that made the silver of her hair so luminous, the way her breasts heaved with each anticipating breath, with each shift of her hips.

“Open your legs a little wider for me.” She planted her knees further apart, and I held her upper thigh when I finally drove two fingers inside her. She took my rough thrusting with cries that became grunts, her thighs flexing whenever she bore down on my slick fingers. “You’re more of a mess than when we started, aren’t you?”

Morrigan’s body bowed, her palms flush to the ocean-streaked glass as she worked herself on my fingers. I settled a knee on the bench cushion and she flattened to the window, the chill raising bumps on her skin. None but the sea bore witness to Morrigan’s pleasure as I took her against the window, mist and spray from the waves lashing the outside. It was everything I thought it’d be—a veil of starlight and fog and ocean, Morrigan’s breaths clouding the glass, her body pulling tight around my soaked fingers.

Moonlight trembled over her shifting muscles, the curve of her backside, her damp hair. It found the desirous rush that wet the inside of her legs when I swirled my thumb across her swollen clit. Blood and ocean waves crashed inside my head .

When my fingers slipped from her, Morrigan’s moaning growl fogged the window, but I knew what she wanted, what she needed to relax into that glorious release. I licked a trail up her inner thigh, nudging her knees further apart, indulging in the pearly-slick arousal beading down her skin.

My fangs pierced the firm muscle of her thigh, and at the first taste of her fresh blood, Morrigan’s pleasure finally splintered. Her body shook around my starved fangs, and I watched her slump into the window’s cold embrace. She pressed herself to it with a few slowing thrusts, her eyes squeezed closed, a long moan set free.

I memorized the image of her there—dappled in moonlight and sweat, a halo of constellations above, bared for me and the ocean sweeping up over the rocky cliffside. Her mouth was still agape in wordless pleasure, hips moving gently, her spine arched, the beautiful column of her neck exposed.

A dream come to life.

Afterward, Morrigan and I curled up together beneath a quilted blanket listening to the sea’s nocturnal lullaby, mist dotting the window above us. There wasn’t much room on the bench, but again I held no complaints when Morrigan pulled me on top of her. Tucked into her body, our legs entwined, I tried to remember the autumn constellations that marked the sky. We had argued whether or not the one visible through a smudge of thickening fog was the Northern Hourglass or Serpentes Minor—the Sky Serpent.

“Ask Bella later,” she said, sleep finally finding its way in, muddling her syllables. “She has all kinds of books about the stars, maps and charts and everything you could think of.”

We settled into comfortable silence. So comfortable, in fact, that I had figured she’d fallen asleep. Her heart’s languid cadence seemed to suggest it. But I couldn’t drift off that easily, my mind still racing.

“Sonia knows I’m yours now,” I whispered .

Morrigan’s fingers slipped over my hip. “Good,” she answered. “She’ll never have you again. Never make a demon of you.”

“She probably thinks I’m dead by now.”

“Then we’ll both enjoy the look in her eyes when we walk into that ballroom,” Morrigan said through a yawn. “She’ll see the two of us, hands clasped, and know she’s already failed.”

“That’ll make her dangerous.”

“Sonia has nothing,” she promised, nosing into my hair, “except her own rage.”

“ And an army of possessed dhampir, an angry coven, and the power in her blood—”

She hushed me softly. “Yet she hasn’t seen how dangerous love can make us.”

I turned my head just in time for her to find me, her sorcerer’s eyes sparkling like jewels. “Is that hope I hear?”

“Your stubborn optimism seems to have found its way in.”

Morrigan kissed as though she’d never again get the chance to taste me.