Page 20 of The Unweaver (Unwoven Fates #1)

A man was shouting.

Dreamlike, Cora spun on her heel and saw Felix charging down the abandoned hotel’s hallway. Fleeing, she tripped on the frayed rug and nearly fell to her knees.

Cor-a , taunted a voice as she ran.

Felix was close and gaining on her. His arms swung out and grabbed her, then he was on top of her. She clawed his face. Clawed until there was nothing but a skull draped in torn flesh and blood dripping into her screaming mouth.

Cor-a...

Pushing off Felix’s lifeless body, Cora struggled to her feet and staggered away. A monster with an ugly jumper blocked her path. She stuttered to a halt before colliding with it. Shadows prowled closer and took the shape of her nightmares, chasing her into a thick fog. Embodiments of the deaths she’d foretold. Corpses she’d reanimated. Deaths she couldn’t escape. No matter how fast or far she ran, they would catch her.

Cor-a…

Through the fog she ran towards a distant wraith. Teddy turned to nothingness as her arms passed through him. Dissolving, he groaned in an awful voice, You killed me, Cora dear. You killed me .

Dashing away, she looked behind to see if the apparitions pursued, but the fog had swallowed them. She slammed into a hard, flat surface and stumbled back, craning her neck up and up at the three enormous mirrors towering over her.

Each mirror reflected a different nightmare of herself. From left to right, she shot her face off, laid in a pool of cancerous tar, and carved her own heart out.

A door opened behind her, spilling in a shaft of light. The silhouette of a man emerged.

Blinking in amazement, she turned back to see if the man was real. Malachy, wearing trousers and rolled up shirtsleeves, stared wide-eyed at the mirrors behind her.

The mirrors rippled like a pond, bringing new twisted reflections.

The right mirror drew her gaze. A tawny goddess with cat’s eyes, a mane of golden hair, and an eight-pointed star emblazoned above her heart stared back.

In the left mirror was a strangely familiar man. With two mismatched halves roughly sewn together, he was not whole. His dark pince-nez glasses flashed, and in the lenses, Cora glimpsed two men wrestling in a frozen tundra while the Doomsday Watch ticked like a bomb.

In the center was the silhouette of a woman with mirror-like eyes, draped in a blank canvas upon which flashing images were projected too quickly for them to register. She reached through the mirror and caressed Cora’s face with a long claw.

Cor-a ...

Malachy roped an arm around her waist and yanked her back against him. The mirrors rippled, and their own reflections appeared in the beveled mirrors of a vanity table cluttered with jars and bottles. Fear was doused by an awareness of his warm, hard body surrounding her.

“My eyes.” Staring at his reflection, Malachy touched their corners in wonder. “They’re blue again.” His gaze dropped to her willowy figure clad in a silk chemise. His arm tightened around her, and she leaned back into him.

“Why did you tell everyone my secret, Malachy?”

His eyes rose to hers in the mirror, blue as a summer sky and full of longing. “Oh, mo chroí . You’re safe with me now. I won’t let anyone hurt you. Haven’t you done enough penance for being born?”

“I’m a monster,” she whispered.

Gently, he swept back her hair and trailed soft kisses down the column of her throat. “You are beautiful, Cora. Let me show you how beautiful you are.”

Fingertips skimmed along her collarbones, catching the straps of her chemise, peeling them down her arms. Silk hissed down to her waist. Her nipples pebbled in the cool kiss of air.

Hooded eyes feasted on her exposed skin reflected in the mirror as his hands feasted on the reality. He filled his palms with her breasts, kneading them soothingly, possessively. Stroking her nipples to aching peaks, igniting heat like a quick from her breasts to her core.

Eyelids shuttering, her head fell back against his shoulder. She arched into his touch, a moan escaping her lips. So sweet and simple the surrender.

He spun her to face him, molding her body against his, a delicious alignment of slender curves and hard planes. Yearning for more, she claimed his mouth in a fierce kiss.

Lips parried in the mating of tongues. Fingers tunneled through thick, soft hair. Need grew as the kiss deepened. Inflaming. Consuming.

With one hand he lifted her until her legs straddled his waist, with the other he swiped everything from the vanity. Glass bottles clattered to the floor. He set her down on the vanity and stepped between her legs, smoothing his palms up her bare thighs. The hem of her chemise rose and bundled around her waist. His hands splayed across her hips, opening her wide to him.

“Do you know what I thought when I first saw you at my club last New Year’s?” he said, voice low and rough. “I wondered what it would feel like to have these long legs”—he gripped behind her knees and pulled her flush against him— “wrapped around me.”

She hooked her ankles behind him, pressing closer, feeling the hard length straining his trousers. Impatient to touch him, eager to lose herself, she unbuttoned his shirt and shoved it from his shoulders. Her hands charted the edges of his muscles, learning the slopes of his back, the contours of his chest, the ridges of his stomach.

“I want to kiss you everywhere.” Cupping her breasts, he sucked a nipple into his warm, wet mouth, lavishing her with laps of his tongue and nips of his teeth until she was writhing and panting his name.

“Beautiful,” he murmured, kissing her other nipple.

Her fingers sank into his hair as he drove the need growing inside of her to a fever pitch. His lips meandered in a tortuous path down her fluttering stomach to the scar over her navel, a whorl of white thorns, down to her thatch of dark hair.

Kneeling between her thighs, he hooked her legs over his shoulder. “I want to taste you . ” Malachy pressed his lips to where she needed him most. Then his tongue.

Breath hitching, her eyes flew open and met his, blue and brazen, gazing up at her between her splayed thighs. A swipe of his tongue and her head was thrown back against the vanity mirror on a loud moan.

“Beautiful.” He dragged his tongue along her seam.

The world narrowed to the sweet torment of his mouth. Pleasure unfurled, an excruciating pleasure Cora had never felt before. He licked slow and tasted deep, teasing her clit with flicks of his tongue before closing his mouth over it and suckling.

She gasped and cried out. Tension mounted until she was sure she would combust.

When a long finger eased into her slick heat, panic shot through her. Breathing shallow, she pushed him away and tried to close her thighs. He pulled back, watching her through fallen locks of dark hair, his parted lips glistening with their shared moisture.

“This is your choice to make, Cora. I won’t do anything you don’t want to do.” Gaze unwavering, he kissed a scorching path from her calf to her inner thigh. “Tell me to stop, and I’ll stop,” he murmured against her skin. “Tell me to leave, and I’ll leave. You’re in control.”

She sank into the blue pools of his eyes. Soft, warm, safe . Her fingers tunneled through his hair when he found her again. Back arching, she rode the delicious friction of his tongue.

His fingers traced her seam, and she stiffened. Slowly, he licked her clit and slid one long, clever finger inside her. Coaxing her. Filling her. Curling against a spot deep inside her that made her gasp and clench. He slid in another and she moaned, gripping him harder.

Kneeling between the altar of her thighs, he worshiped her. His fingers and mouth conducted the symphony of her surrender into a crescendo of pleasure.

Anticipation wound tight in her belly. Every muscle drew taut enough to shatter. A wave crested within her, threatening to consume her.

“Oh god,” she breathed. “This must be a dream . ”

Suddenly, the sensation was gone. Malachy was gone. She sat on the vanity, naked and panting, her legs splayed open to no one.

When Cora startled awake, a pair of saucer eyes glowed yellow from the foot of her bed. She screamed. Kevin blinked. She hurled a pillow, and the feline tore out of the dark bedroom with shocking speed.