Page 47 of Voidwalker (Beasts of the Void #1)

One time

The kiss was a plunge, one deep breath before diving under ice.

Fi surrendered her mouth to his with a spike of panic. As if this would finally be the moment, the beast’s chance to bury claws in her throat while she lowered her guard.

The claws did come—wretchedly soft, tightening around her waist and cupping her neck to pull her deeper into him.

He was a spark on her tongue. Electric air in the back of her throat.

But as she tasted his mouth, savored the hungry press in his reply, a deeper note bloomed, some crisp cold homecoming she couldn’t quite place.

Fi broke away first.

They paused, but neither softened. She weighed the closeness of Antal’s teeth as if her life depended on it, only to find his mouth softly parted, lips messy with her lipstick.

Claws locked around her waist, holding her flush against his front.

Fi pulled herself closer, fingers dragging creases against his shirt.

They were breathing hard again. Both of them.

“Well, shit,” she said. “That’s… not as bad as I thought it might be.”

So much worse. He was delicious, a taste of ozone and forbidden fangs on her tongue.

Antal’s chuckle rumbled through her. “What did you think I’d taste like? Old bones and moldering flesh?” His mouth brushed hers, but didn’t press. “Is there more of me you’d like to taste?”

Wicked creature. Fi fought a shaky exhale as he nipped her jaw. What kind of dumb, thrill-seeking rabbit threw herself at the mouth of a panther?

But it was a thrill. Entirely too tempting not to savor.

“One time,” she relented, rougher than intended. Just to sate Fi’s curiosity. Just to cleanse this distracting want from her blood.

The smolder in Antal’s eyes combusted her. “Is that all?”

“You’d better make the most of it.” Then, with all her mustered resolve. “One. Time.”

“One time,” he agreed, the solemnity of an oath as his nose nestled against her cheek. “How shall I leave a lasting impression, Fionamara?”

She kissed him again.

Antal pushed her backward. They crossed the room on warier steps than before.

Testing. Claws and fingers locked around each other, watching for one of them to flinch, for a strike at anywhere too soft.

The thud of the wall against Fi’s back knocked the breath from her lungs.

An instinctive jolt of panic when teeth flashed toward her.

A purr, as his mouth met hers, fangs snagging the curve of her lip.

Sweat already kissed Fi’s skin from their dance. Antal wound his fingers into the mussed curls of her hair, brushing damp strands off her cheek, claws ghosting her scalp. His tail curled around her calf. Too slow. Too gentle.

“You really aren’t afraid of me?” he asked in barely a whisper. Barely a breath.

“Does this feel like I’m afraid of you, daeyari?” Fi hooked her fingers in his trousers and pulled their hips together, relishing his growl against her neck. For all the foreignness of claws and antlers, she found familiarity in the delicious hardness between his legs.

Yet still he held back.

More than that. He pulled away.

“ Tell me ,” he said. If Fi had been thinking clearly, she might have called it distress.

They both fell too still. It was like standing on glass, the way he looked at her, waiting for a reply. Fi’s barbs were useless against that moment of quiet, the earnest hitch in his breath.

“I’m not afraid of you,” she said.

Crimson eyes scoured every inch of her face. “You want this?”

“Fucker. If I have to tell you any more explicitly how to take this dress off me, I’ll—”

His kiss shoved her against the wall. Deep enough to summon a moan. A bruising clash of lips and teeth, his knee pressed firm between the waiting gap of her thighs. There went the crumbling remnants of her guard. Fi was falling so fast, she never bothered looking for ground below.

Let him consume her.

Their hands fought together to lift her dress.

Cool fabric slipped up the flushed heat of her thighs, pooling in a silken bundle at her waist. Antal’s fingers ran the curves of her hips, the hidden garden of floral tattoos along her stomach.

A taunting brush beneath her breast. Fi arced into his touch, not withholding an inch of bared skin, even if he was a…

She didn’t care what he was. She only wanted to feel him against her.

He turned his attentions lower. Fi tensed, only a moment to register the sight of claws slipping toward a place where claws shouldn’t go, a peep of protest before—

Antal’s palm pressed between her legs. One firm stroke curled Fi into another moan.

No clawed fingers, but just as dexterous, dragging the heel of his hand across the most sensitive part of her.

A bloom of energy fiercened his touch, not strong enough to burn or carve—heat that shuddered into her, sending every muscle taut.

She had a few toys in her nightstand that employed similar Shaping.

Nothing as wild, as ruthless as daeyari energy. She wanted to melt into him, to rock her hips against his hand until it destroyed her. And his tail—that cruel, slender tail lashed around her waist, holding her dress up as he worked.

Merciless Void, why had she fought this for so long?

Fi’s hands were everywhere. She scraped nails down his strong shoulders, across the collarbone she’d admired from a distance. Splaying his shirt open, she relished every hard line of his chest, hot and humming beneath her palms, energy coursing beneath his skin.

She tugged the buttons of his pants. Her fingers turned to putty as Antal ran a knuckle through her center, hot and slick with her eagerness.

“What do you want, Fionamara?” he whispered, cruel, against her hair.

“You know what I want.” She could barely speak through clenched teeth. Tight breaths.

“ Tell me .” He stroked his palm slowly over her clit, making Fi writhe.

Her fingers were talons on his trousers.

She pried open enough buttons to lay him bare, to take him in her hand.

Her curiosity, finally appeased: daeyari did, in fact, have cocks.

And Void, his felt good in her hand. Fi stroked experimental fingers down his length.

Claws and fangs might be foreign weapons, but here was something familiar, maddeningly hot and hard in her palm.

Claws struck the wall beside her head. Antal leaned hard on one arm to steady himself, digging black sickles into the woodgrain.

She ought to chastise him for the property damage.

Fi was too busy devouring his reaction to her, all of him taut as he pushed against her grip, a low and hungry sound in his throat.

Fi was hungry, too. She angled his cock against her entrance, the pressure leaving her breathless.

“You,” she hissed. “I want you .”

“How?” A rasp.

“Inside me. Prick .”

She cried out when he thrust into her, pressing her to the wall.

Fi’s breath hitched through every delicious inch.

When she was early in her twenties, a very rude man in a bar told her good girls always screamed.

Since then, she’d formed the resolute opinion that if anyone wanted to hear her scream, they’d better fucking earn it.

It was with great difficulty, then, that she clamped her mouth shut against the unbecoming sound threatening to escape her throat.

She gasped as Antal moved inside her.

Slowly, at first, her thighs shuddering at how well he filled her.

His exhale, long with relish, fell hot against the sweat-slicked hollow of her throat.

He worked in her with unhurried strokes, with ruthless purpose, until he found the angle that made Fi thrash between the pin of his hips and the wall at her back.

She carved her fingers down his shoulders, fighting the moan in her chest.

“ Harder .” She snarled like snapping teeth, an unbearable ache building inside her.

Antal’s growl snapped fiercer. “Can you ask for nothing nicely?”

“I—”

He thrust hard into her, and Fi lost her words.

His command broke her gasp into a pant, his claws tightening in her hair until she surrendered a whimper. And when she tilted against him, lifting one leg to wrap his waist at a better angle—

“ Antal .” His name tumbled off her tongue, a wretched plea.

“There?” A wicked whisper, claws clamping behind the soft of her thigh as he buried himself into her.

“Yes.” Fi shuddered, her ferocity crumbling into purrs. “Yes, there .”

Her fingers clawed through his hair, latching upon the anchor of antlers.

She melted beneath him, bristles turning to liquid as pressure swelled in her core, teetering on one unsteady foot.

And there he was to catch her: trapped between the wall and every hard line of him, his grip tight on her ass, tilting her hips to take him even deeper.

Fi scraped her hands against the wall.

His chest.

The unrelenting hold of his arms.

He hadn’t fully removed his shirt, but she found the hot skin underneath, digging nails into the hard muscles of his back until he snarled something that might have been her name. Fi didn’t catch it as she cried out, dizzy with the crest he pushed her over.

All of her went taut. One feral beast arcing against another, devouring every spasm as the climax swept through her.

He followed, fingers buried in thighs as he drove into her with one final, shuddering thrust, an exhale rumbling his chest.

Then, the slow fall. Still snared in his arms.

For the final time, their dance came to an end. Stillness again.

Fi slumped against the wall, gasping, muscles hot and spent. Antal’s weight fell heavy against her, one arm supporting her waist, the other braced beside her head. They lingered there, breaths ragged in warring tandem, his warmth a lulling presence. His ozone, delicious on her tongue.

“You’re good to your promise, daeyari,” Fi said when she could form the words. They slurred a little, her pulse too heavy in her throat.

Against her neck, Antal’s mouth curled a grin. “You’re good for quite a number of things.”

His thumb brushed circles at her hip, a bloom of warmth beneath the pad—a shiver, at the tease of his claws. It was too easy to let him hold her, to let him nuzzle his nose along her jaw.

Pulling apart was harder.

Antal uncoiled his tail from her waist. Her dress fell across her legs as he released her, the smallest space between them like a breath of icy air.

Fi leaned against the wall, hazy pleasure thick in her veins.

He was good . Exactly what she’d needed after several days of tireless work. But as cold clarity crept back…

Antal studied Fi with head tilted, waiting for her to make the first move on this upended playing field. She looked him in the eye, unabashed beneath those burned-coal irises.

“That was… refreshing,” she said.

He hummed, a sound between agreement and amusement. Fi wanted to grab him by the antlers and make him hum against her throat, that intoxicating reverberation down into her ribs.

That swiftly, Fi realized she had a problem.

Her pulse quickened again. She’d enjoyed plenty of one-night stands, a fling of passionate fucking then a swift farewell. Quick. Clean. A clear head to focus afterward.

So why did Antal’s eyes still leave a prickle everywhere they brushed? Why was she pressing herself against the wall, fighting the urge to fall into his arms all over again?

“We shouldn’t stay up too late,” Fi said. “We have a metal heist to plan.”

“We do,” he agreed. Too easy.

What was Fi thinking , letting him shove her against the wall?

They still had to work together. They still had to sleep in the same room together. How easy would it be to invite him into her bed? Test how warm he felt curled beside her. See what else the night led to…

Shit.

She had a problem .

“One time,” Fi reminded him. Or her. Or who the fuck knew.

Antal watched the scowl twist her face, his grin curled as if beholding the most amusing creature in all the Planes.

“Of course.” He laid a hand over where his heart ought to be. “On my word.”

The taunt made Fi press her thighs together, hot and slick from what he’d done to her.

Antal backed away. Yet they couldn’t flee too far from each other, could they? He went to her tub to wash. The moment he pulled off his shirt, that view of lithe back muscles and rolling shoulders, the scandalous taper of his waist… Fi made herself look away.

She had only one productive way to go from here: when Antal finished with the tub, she went about her nightly routine as if not a damn thing had happened.

She bathed the remnants of him off her. It shouldn’t have felt so skin-prickling, being naked in the same room, after she’d just moaned for him.

She dressed for bed behind the cover of her wooden screen.

Antal drifted in her periphery, giving her the space requested.

Only the twitch on his lips betrayed anything awry.

As the time came for sleep, the firmest line was drawn: Fi on her mattress, Antal perched in her rafters, a contented grin as his tail swayed beneath him. She risked one final glance up at him. One final flush to her cheeks.

It would be so easy. A few simple words to ask him to join her.

“Good night, Antal.”

He slitted one eye open, a glow of red in the dark.

“Sleep well, Fionamara.”