Page 21 of Velvet Folds (Velvet)

Chapter 21

In which our heroine becomes a queen

I step onto the cobbles in bare feet and walk to the grassy patch at the center of the square. In this light, my nightgown glows like a wedding dress.

I see shadows in my periphery.

Others come to their windows, creeping to peer out of their shutters and I need them to see me. I need them to know.

Adrik is mine and tonight I intend to claim him.

Walking steadily to the center of that grass, I go to my knees to wait.

A thunderous crash echoes overhead and I look up at the dark clouds crowding the blood red moon.

The air feels electric, and I do too.

When the first patter of rain shakes, his shadow passes over me and the ground shakes as he drops from the sky in front of me.

“It’s raining,” I tell him with a soft smile as a drop lands on my face, forcing me to blink.

“I know.” His wings raise up to cover over me and the patter of those drops on them is such a strange sound, it makes me laugh.

“Have you come here to give yourself to me, sweet sacrifice?”

“Yes.”

“Body and blood, mind and soul?”

“Everything that I am is yours, if you’ll take it,” I say, repeating the words he said to me a month ago. “Will you take it?”

There is another thunderous crash overhead and Adrik’s claws tear my nightgown to shreds.

This ritual, a melding of the ancient traditions of this land and those of his kind is raw and dirty and I land on my back in the sopping grass.

He pounces, entering me with a thrust that makes me cry out.

More shadows. More cracked windows.

Let them watch. Let them see.

And when his teeth find my throat, there’s no mistaking the ecstasy in that scream.

He drives me into the mud with each thrust, fucking me just as ravenously as he drinks my blood.

I know it looks like he’s devouring me. And maybe he is.

I’d let him. I’d let him drain me and fill me and do it all over again.

But he grunts and groans and together, we find release as the sky opens into a torrential downpour.

Adrik holds me tight to his chest, still fitted inside of me and now there are full faces at the windows, watching with wide eyes as my king takes me for his queen.

He lifts me into the air without removing his cock from my velvet folds.

“This is dangerous,” he says, flying faster than I have ever felt or seen him fly before.

A bolt of lightning crashes, but I am not worried.

Fate would not betray us like that.

He alights in the tower he’s only told me of before. But I knew I would see one day for myself… a tower for bathing and breeding on the bleeding moon.

Soaked to the bone, we don’t need to bathe, but Adrik closes the window behind us and finds a towel.

We are still joined, his cock locked inside my velvet folds and when he kisses me, drying the rain from my skin, I never want to let go.

When he lowers me onto the bed where the windows focus all of that red moonlight, he says three soft words against my throat.

“I love you.”