Page 83 of The Familiar

A kind of growl escaped his throat. “It can.”

“Please demonstrate,” she managed. Then her skirts were in his hands and she forgot about talking.

CHAPTER 38

It was dangerous for him to stay, but it had been dangerous for him to come to her room at all, and there was no hiding from this anymore.

Their coupling had been brief and urgent, their bodies wedged against the door, her head buried in his neck, the pinch of her teeth as she bit the skin of his shoulder, stifling her cries. He’d been grateful for the centuries that had given him control.

He should have left then, but he didn’t want to. Better to say he couldn’t. He had spent so long dreaming of freedom, he had forgotten other wants. The pleasure of warm skin, conversation, the glimmering of connection—tentative at first, then bright and steady, another ship glimpsed on a dark and endless sea.

“What does it mean to be a familiar?” she asked as they lay atop the covers of her bed, her knee hooked over his thigh, her head against his chest.

“To serve.”

“To give Víctor your luck and me your strength?”

“Those things are the same. If you win, it will benefit Víctor.”

“Then why does only one make you strong in return?”

“Because Víctor has no magic himself. No De Paredes ever has. He has nothing to give back to me.”

“But I do.”

Gently he pulled one of her thick curls straight, feeling it slide and twist between his fingers as it rediscovered its shape, a living thing. “In abundance.”

“Have you ever been drunk?”

He laughed. “Of course. You haven’t?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “A bit light-headed. It felt like this.”

“When I was young—”

“Many, many years ago.”

This time he was the one to bite her.

“When I was young,” he began again, “I did everything to excess. There were nights when I would drink and laugh and sing, but there would be a moment when a kind of misery came over me. When I looked around at my friends making merry and I felt only lonely, and even angry that they could be so happy and light when I was drowning beside them.”

“And other nights?”

“Other nights it felt so good to be untethered from my mind that I only wanted to stay drunk, and I would drink more and more, to try to keep that feeling, to stay aloft.”

She shifted against him and his cock stirred against her leg. “Águeda once told me that the cure for drunkenness was to drink until you made yourself sick, until you hated the taste.”

“And what if you never weary of it?” he asked as she slid atop him. “What if you empty the bottle only to wish for another just like it?”

“Is there such a wine?”

“Yes, but it’s very rare,” he said. “Put your knee here.”

“Sit astride?” she asked skeptically.

“Like that,” he managed, feeling the press of her damp flesh, the coils of her curls, wondering where his centuries-old control had gone.

“A rare wine,” she said on a sigh, as she guided him inside her.