Page 65

His tendrils twist, flick, pinch and pull. Sending me writhing and squirming and gasping for air. My cock is valiantly trying to fill but it can’t, it’s too soon, but the sharp pleasure-pain sensation is adding to the symphony flowing through me.

More shadows flow over me, each one a tender caress over my flesh. Some find their way between my widespread legs and begin teasing around my hole.

Dark swallows my cry with a kiss. Keeping me soundless. Ensuring that the only noise in the bedroom is the pounding of my heartbeat in my ears.

Shadows slip inside me. Gently teasing in and out. Driving me wild. They swell and expand, giving me a hint of a stretch, a ghost of fullness. It’s not enough. It’s not what I need. I want more, much more.

I break breathlessly away from the kiss. “Give me your cock, please!” I gasp.

Amber eyes burn into mine. Assessing. Calculating. Weighing and thinking. Then he nods and is on top of me.

I stare up at him as he eases gently inside me. Heated silk and satin. Filling me the way nothing else can. The pressure is exquisite, and I breathe through it. This time I’m expecting the pop and I welcome it, even though it still makes me gasp.

Dark doesn’t slide in as deep nor as fast this time. It seems he was expecting it too.

My eyes flutter closed as I ride the waves of ecstasy crashing through me. My guts settle and there is no discomfort, only bliss.

His lips seal over mine once more, then his hips move. A slow, delicious drag out, followed by a mind-shattering glide in. Over and over again. Until I’m wailing and sobbing into our kiss, toes curling and muscles convulsing.

He tenses above me. Vibrating to a sound too low for me to hear as he paints my insides with thick, viscous, shadowy release.

It’s more than enough to tip me into my own orgasm. My body rocks and clenches around him. Euphoria replaces the blood in my veins. My heart beats in pure rapture. I have transcended towards something holy. The universe wheels. Stars are born. And I float in awe amongst it all.

Dimly I’m aware of Dark’s body coiled around mine. A perfect tangle of limbs. A divine snuggle and everything I have ever wanted.

Some small part of me whispers something from somewhere far away. Something about not being able to keep this. It doesn’t make any sense.

“Farewell, Bunny,” Dark’s voice says softly, with so much sorrow that my heart squeezes painfully.

I want to protest. Want to cling on to him. But I’m so sleepy, so far away from my body, that all I can do is murmur something that sounds vaguely like a complaint.

Then Dark is gone, and I’m all alone.

I shiver. My skin must be used to the chill of him, because I feel far colder without him.

Chapter 25

Torn

My contract law lecturer is halfway through explaining the doctrine of frustration. Under any other circumstances, I’d find it genuinely thrilling, the sort of thing I’d happily follow down every tangent for the full two hours. Then my phone buzzes against my leg with the specific urgency of a text that already knows it’s ruining my afternoon.

Felix. You better come to the coffee shop. Right now.

Felix’s texts are never long. On a good day, they barely qualify as sentences. But even his shortest texts usually come with at least a drop of something. This one has nothing. No jab. No eye roll implied by punctuation. Just the words, entirely undecorated. That’s somehow more alarming than anything he could have added to them.

I’m out of my seat and halfway up the steps before I’ve properly finished reading it. I mutter something about a family emergency to the row of strangers I’m climbing over. My bag catches on someone’s shoulder. Someone else’s coffee nearly goes over. I don’t look back to see whether my lecturer’s noticed. Whatever’s happening at Coffeelicious has already made the lecture feel like something that happened to a different, considerably calmer version of me. One who still believed today was going to be an ordinary day spent learning about consideration and breach.

I run the whole way. I don’t remember deciding to run. I just find myself doing it, lungs burning almost immediately, because I have never once in my life been what anyone would call athletic. My bag bangs hard against my hip with every stride.

I know something’s properly wrong before I’ve even turned onto the street. I can feel it, the same bone-deep certainty I had in the park with Dark, except bigger this time, and wronger. It’s coming from the one place I’ve always thought of as safe, the one building in Bristol that’s supposed to be entirely, boringly, my happy place.

The shop’s front window is cracked. Not broken, just cracked, one long fracture running corner to corner like something enormous leaned against it from the inside. Through it I can see light where there shouldn’t be light. A churning, wrongly coloured brightness spills out from somewhere near the back wall, staining the whole street outside a shade of purple that has no business existing on a cloudy afternoon.

I shove the door open into chaos.

Morgana is standing in the middle of the shop with both hands raised, silver hair loose from its pins and hanging in her face. She’s chanting something in a voice that’s lost all its usual wind-chime calm. It’s gone tight and frightened instead, each word clipped and urgent. In front of her, where the stockroom door used to be, is a hole in the world.

That’s the only way I can describe it. Not a doorway, not a shimmer, not anything with edges that make sense. An actual hole, ragged and violent-looking, swirling dark and violet at the centre. It’s growing even as I watch. The edges of it eat another few inches of stockroom shelving with a sound like paper tearing, slow and awful and impossible to look away from.