Page 45 of Kazimir

He held me down with that cool hand and worked me like he was coaxing truth from me, and oh, I gave it. I couldn’t keep still; my hips bucked, chasing the friction, trying to take his fingers deeper. He let me, meeting me thrust for thrust with his hand and his mouth, letting me ride his face. Every now and then, he pulled back just enough to breathe and look up at me, lips slick, eyes wild. I felt powerful and ruined at once.

“Please,” I panted. “Please don’t stop. Don’t—”

“I will not stop,” he promised, and fastened his mouth to me again like he meant to live there.

Pleasure gathered the way thunderstorms gathered in July—slow, rumbling, inevitable. It built in layers: the steady pressure of his thumb; the firm, rhythmic stroke of his fingers against that inner place that felt like a switch; the warm, wet glide of his tongue playing me higher. My scalp prickled; my hands clawed the sheets; my thighs trembled on either side of his head. I didn’t know where to put the wanting, so it spilled out of me in nonsense and endearments and filthy little requests that would have made six-months-ago me blush to death.

He answered every one with devotion.

When I started to fall apart, he felt it before I did. He adjusted the angle of his fingers just a fraction and sealed his mouth around my clit with purposeful suction. My body jerked as if he’d pulled a string hidden under my skin.

“Let go, malen’kaya,” he crooned against me. “Come for me.”

I broke. It wasn’t a pretty thing. It was a shattering, a burning line whipping up my spine and down my thighs. I seized around his fingers; my vision went to bright static; I heard my own voice like it came from very far away. Something in the house answered—the lights beyond the door stuttered and dimmed, then flared before settling, as if the mansion itself took a gasping breath with me.

Oh, God.

He kept me there, at that too-much edge, for three, four, five heartbeats, mouth unrelenting, fingers a steady pulse against that place that no one had ever touched before. The rush crashed over me, then again, smaller. Tears leaked from the corners of my eyes. My thighs shook around his head; my stomach fluttered with aftershocks I couldn’t ride or refuse.

Only when I went from breaking to broken-open did he ease me down, softening his mouth to feather-light licks that eased the ache from unbearable to sweet. His fingers gentled inside me and then slipped free, leaving an echoing emptiness that promised a better kind of fullness.

I lay there, panting, throat sore from sounds I barely remembered making, the inside of my thighs damp and hot. He kissed the soft place at the top of my inner thigh like a thank-you, then followed the route he’d mapped earlier, this time in reverse—hip, belly, ribs—slow enough that I could keep up.

By the time he reached my mouth, my hands were already in his hair, dragging him down. I tasted myself on his tongue—salt and heat and something I couldn’t name—and it didn’t embarrass me. It thrilled me. I kissed him like a promise and a consequence.

He hovered over me, his weight held in check by muscles I could feel bunching in his shoulders. I dragged him closer by his hips until his cool, hard length pressed against my belly and both of us made that same helpless sound.

I was still floating on the wreckage of my own pleasure when he pulled back to speak, breath hitching against my cheek. But that was another storm coming. For now, I was just light, scattered everywhere, and he was gathering me with his mouth.

He didn’t climb off me right away. He caged me there in the quiet way a hand cupped a flame in the wind, and the praise he poured into my ear wasn’t the kind I’d learned to distrust—it wasn’t a transaction. It was observation, devotion edged with awe, like he couldn’t quite believe what he’d been allowed to keep.

“You were… exquisite,” he said, voice gone rough. “The way you came—such light in you. Brave little angel. You stood in front of a monster and said yes. No one will make you stand alone again. Not while I breathe. Not while I do not.”

Something small and feral in me laid down at those words, not because it was conquered, but because it had finally been offered somewhere safe to sleep.

I turned his face with my hands and kissed him once, softly, gratefully. Then I slid my palms down over the hard cut of his chest—the texture of ancient scars under my fingertips—and lower, to where he was heavy against my belly. He made a sound that hadn’t belonged to a king in centuries. It belonged to something caged that had decided to be tame for me and me alone.

He was cooler than human, but heat lived under the skin like banked coals. I wrapped my fingers around him and felt him give—silk over steel, thick and solid in my palm. The weight of him made my wrist ache in the best way. He twitched when I stroked him, a little involuntary jerk that answered some impish, powerful part of me. My slick made the glide salt-smooth; I slid my hand from base to crown and back again, twisting just a little at the top the way instinct told me would undo him.

His eyes went heavy-lidded and predatory. His hips rocked into my fist without his permission, slow, then harder when I tightened my grip. The breath he dragged in sounded like it scraped his ribs. I loved it. I loved that I could wring noises from him that he didn’t make for anyone else. He covered my wrist with his big hand as if to slow me, then didn’t slow me at all.

“Devon,” he said, and my name in that mouth felt like a ritual.

“Inside,” I whispered, guiding him lower. “I want to feel you.”

He shifted, bracing a forearm by my head, and followed my hand with terrible concentration. The blunt head nudged at my entrance, slick and hot, and every muscle low in my belly tried to drag him in. He pressed forward a fraction, and the stretch lit up nerves I didn’t know had names. I hissed; not pain exactly, but a full ache that demanded breath and attention.

He stilled immediately. “Tell me.”

I breathed through my open mouth and met his eyes so he could see the truth. “It’s good. It’s… a lot.”

His forehead rested against mine for a heartbeat like a prayer. He pushed another inch, and I felt myself open around him, my body solving for him, deciding yes. The urge to clench and to relax fought inside me and then resolved as my hips tilted, offering him the angle I wanted.

“Don’t go slow,” I heard myself say. I wasn’t sure if I was brave or foolish, but the hunger riding me didn’t care.

His control snapped like silk. He drew his hips back a breath and then drove into me in one long, sure stroke, seating himself all the way. It stole my sound and gave it back louder. The sensation of being filled like that—stretched, claimed, completed—made my vision pulse. The look on his face went from human-beautiful to inhuman, to something that had found a home after starving for centuries.

We froze, locked together, and I felt something click in the space behind my breastbone. Not a sound. Not even a sensation I could describe to a mortal. Just a current completing a circuit, a hummingbird wingbeat that belonged to a bond I’d tried not to believe in until it was too late to doubt.