Page 140 of Bonetide

His feet find the bottom. He stands, lifting me clear of the worst of the cold, my legs going around him out of instinct, and we’re chest to chest in the waist-deep shallows with the dark loch all around us, and the last violet light dying out of the sky. Both of us are shaking, his clothes soaked and heavy on him because he came in dressed, he came in just as he was, no thought for anything but reaching me in time.

Because he did just reach me in time.

And the fear turns over into something else, all the heightened nerves, thundering heartbeats, and feverish adrenaline incinerating into want, into need, into desire. That primal demand to prove you’re still alive.

My mouth finds his, and his hand fists in my wet hair. The kiss becomes desperate and deep and graceless, all teeth and breath and relief. He makes a rough, broken sound, and his hands are everywhere on me, my back, my ribs, my face, gripping, checking, like he can’t believe the whole of me came back up with him.

“Never,” he begins against my jaw, my throat. “Never again. You do not go into this water without me, do you hear me? You do not let it call you; you are mine, and the loch does not get to have you⁠—”

“—I couldn’t stop it,” I interject, gasping, holding tight.

“Then I’ll stop it.” His hands close hard on my hips, pulling me against the rigid line of him. “I’ll stop it every time. Nothing takes you. Not them, not the loch, no one. You’re mine, Iris, mine to the bone.”

“I’m yours,” I breathe, and my hands are already pulling the rest of his clothes off him, the soaked sweater, the trousers, dragging them down and off so they sink away into the black beneath us. He lets me, kissing me fierce and deep and possessive, like he’ll devour me if I stop.

Then he thrusts inside me, fast and hard, the full breach of his cock pushing up into me. I cry out and he swallows the sound with his kiss, and he fucks me there in the channel with the cold all through me, his arm locked around my back, holding me up out of the loch like he’ll never set me down in it again.

And that’s when it occurs to me, somewhere underneath the wanting, that there’s no bottom here.

We’ve drifted out past the shallows out to where the channel drops away, and the water’s too deep to stand in, yet he’s fucking me like a man braced on solid ground.

Like there’s something under him.

His hips drive up into me with a power that needs purchase, needs leverage, needs to be standing on something, but there’s nothing there, there’s fathoms of black water there, and he isn’t sinking, isn’t treading, both his hands are on me, accounted for, and we don’t go down.

I make a mistake and look down.

The light’s almost gone, but through the dark water between our bodies, below his waist where his legs should be working, I see the movement is all wrong. His legs disappear into the darkness of the water, but it’s not because of the depth, it’s because…it’s because they’re becoming a different color. A different texture…something sleek and black and⁠—

“Don’t look down, foxglove,” he commands, and there’s that old amusement in it, that knowing, his voice has dropping into the register that is utterly inhuman.

I look at his face and gasp.

His eyes have gone black again. Full black, no blue left, no white, just the depthless dark drinking what’s left of the light, and the hands gripping me have changed, the nails gone long and hard, points pressing into the skin of my back and my hip, just shy of breaking it, the threat of them everywhere he holds me.

Even his cock seems different, harder, firmer, longer, bigger than he has been before. The stretch of him is right at the edge of what I can take, and I feel the difference in him everywhere, the size, and the claws, and the black eyes, and the thing under the water moving to drive him up into me, and I’m wrapped around the whole of it—the man and the monster—and I take it. I take all of it, because I’m too far gone now to do anything but.

“You feel different,” I gasp. “You’re…you feel⁠—”

“Aye.” His mouth drags against my throat, and his teeth aren’t quite right there either, too many edges. “You’re in the deep with me now, lass. This is more of what I am than you’ve had on dry land. Can you take it?”

I nod, because the word yes has become lodged in my throat.

“Good girl.” The claws press. The thing below us surges. “Then take it.”

So I do.

And then the hands come back.

I feel them brush my ankles, my calves, rising again out of the dark, wanting. I jerk against him and cry out in fright. He feels it, and his head comes up, this time, when he speaks to them it’s not a bellow. It’s lower, almost gentle, a long string of that old water-tongue poured down into the deep. The hands go still on my skin, but they don’t pull. They close around my ankles and my wrists and hold me steady, in place, the way you’d hold something for someone else to work on, and I understand with a lurch that he’s bent them to it; that the creatures that tried to drown me ten minutes ago, are holding me open for him now because he is told them to, and they obey him, his dead victims, his drowned women. I’m caught in their cold grip and his clawed one at once, the whole loch’s worth of monstrousness around me, and I’m so far past being able to want anything but this.

“They’ll not take you,” he murmurs in that raw, animal voice, moving in me slow and deep now, the desperation banking into something darker and surer. The black eyes don’t blink—they present me with that cold abyss, that cosmic void. “They’ll hold you for me instead. That’s all they’re good for now. Holding what’s mine.”

And fucking hell, it lights me up, all of it. The dead hands soft on my wrists, and the claws hard at my hip, him stretching me past what I can take, and the thing under the water working to drive him up into me. The man, the horse, and the drowning thing all fused into one creature that has me surrounded and inside and held.

Iris, you’re one sick individual, I think. And I don’t run from it; don’t bat it away. I accept it, because it’s true. There’s something seriously fucking wrong with me if this—this—is turning me on like nothing else.

I think I’m okay with that.