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Addie smiled sheepishly, satisfied with my answer. Her eyes told the full story; they held relief. She turned to Tasha without letting go of my face.

"Leave," she said, and her voice carried the weight of three centuries. "Forget what you saw and forget him, because he was never yours to have."

Tasha grabbed her purse, running from her own home, and she didn't look back. The door closed behind her on its own. Addie turned back to me with eyes of fire. Her eyes brought back memories of my grandmother's cloth, the sunset over the marsh, the color of everything I'd ever wanted but had been afraid to name.

"You made me jealous," she said softly. Dangerously. Her voice had gone low, filled with peril and abrasion before settling into an erotic beat. "You made me come find you. You made me leave my marsh, my house, my peace, to claim what's mine."

She pushed me against the wall. Her body pressed the length of mine—soft and overwhelming. Her breasts flattened against my chest, her belly against my hardness, her thighs bracketing mine. "Do you know what I do to men who make me jealous, Malik? Do you know how I punish them? How I reward them?"

"Show me," I whispered, my voice shaking with anticipation.

I'd never been this hard, this afraid, this alive when her mouth neared mine. She kissed me, and it was nothing like Tasha's kiss, nothing like any human kiss I'd ever had. It was commanding and consuming. It was the firefly swarm pouring into my mouth, my throat, my lungs, filling me with light and voracity. The smell of mangroves enshrined me at the end of the rainy season. Her tongue was long and dexterous. Nothing about the way she was exploring me with her tongue was human. She moved with a thoroughness that felt medical as it melded into an eroticism so encapsulating that it felt reverent.

She tore my clothes. Literally tore them from my body with nails like sharpened blades. I relished in her ripping my shirt down the front like paper and popping the button of my trousers as she dragged the fabric off my body, leaving long bleeding scratches down my chest that burned before they began to heal even as she made new ones. She was marking me with no hesitation and writing herself on my skin.

"Mine," she growled against my throat. Her teeth rested at my pulse—not biting yet, but pressing and promising. “You are my day husband, my night husband, my love, my food, my weaving."

"Yes." I arched against her, offering my throat, my heart, and my eternal soul for her taking. “Take me, My Love. Consume me.”

She bit me and not the gentle sip I'd half-imagined. Her teeth sank deep into the side of my throat, and her mouth sealed over the wound, and she pulled. The pain was white and total for one second, before it inverted into pleasure so intense my knees buckled. She held me up against the wall with one arm like I weighed nothing as she drank. With every swallow I felt myself pouring into her—not just my blood but my loneliness, the cold London flat, the hollow place in my heart, all of it draining out of me and into her like she'd opened a wound I'd carried my whole life and was finally letting it bleed.

While she drank, her free hand slid down my body and wrapped around my hard length. I was desperate for a release only she could give me. I was leaking precum all over her hand as she stroked me in rhythm with her swallowing—slow and firm—each pull of her mouth matched by a pull of her hand, until my heartbeat, her hunger, and my pleasure were all one rhythm, one tide.

“Mmmm, fuck,” I growled as she took what she needed from me.

She sucked harder as I pumped feverishly into her fist until I came with her teeth in my neck and my blood in her mouth. Her hand was milking me through my release. This was more grandiose than an orgasm; I was being pleasured into my rebirth. My vision went black, and I wasn’t sure if my heart stuttered or stopped altogether. I just knew for one long moment I was nowhere, and I was nothing but hers. Then I was back, gasping, slumped against the wall, and she was licking the wound on my throat closed with a tongue that felt like sandpaper and silk.

"Enough," she breathed. Her lips were red and her eyes molten. "For now, at least. This is enough to mark you and bind you to me.”

She lifted me with ease, six-foot-four and two hundred and twenty-four pounds in arms that had no business being that strong, before she carried me out of Tasha's apartment and down three flights of stairs. We eased into the humid darkness of the streets, where a car I'd never seen waited at the curb with its engine running and no one at the wheel, taking me home.

CHAPTER TEN

THE FIRST WEAVING

Iawoke in bed with four posts made of dark wood. I knew it had to be Addie’s because the scent of her lingered there. Mosquito netting that smelled of lavender. Moonlight danced through tall windows, though I had no idea what hour it was. My throat throbbed where she'd bitten me. When I touched the wound, I found it already closing, the skin puckering into a scar that felt like it had been there for years.

She was beside me, propped on one elbow, watching me with her hypnotic golden eyes. The gold cloth was gone as she lay sprawled across the sheets completely nude—all of her glorious body on display, unashamed and unapologetic. Her full breasts resting against her arm made my mouth water. The soft, generous curve of her belly would be perfect for gripping when I filled her with my hardness. Wide hips I planned to hold while she bounced the weight of herself on my dick and thighs that I hoped would crush me while I feasted between them. She was hairless below the neck, her skin smooth and dark like wet marsh mud, and between her legs she glistened with something that caught the moonlight like liquid silver.

"You came for me," I said, my voice wrecked.

"I will always come for you." She traced one nail down my sternum. "You were mine before you knew it. You'll be mine until the marsh dries."

She moved over me. Her weight settled on my hips, pressing me into the mattress. I welcomed it, craved it, needed it like air. My body was already responding. Though I was weak from the mixture of the blood loss and being drunk on her, I was hard again, aching again, as if she'd rewired me to want nothing else but her.

"But now," she said, "now that I've claimed you, now that I've shown you what happens when you try to run, I want you to choose with your eyes open. Give me your surrender, and I’ll bring you pleasure."

I looked up at her. The fireflies drifted lazily in the corners of the room, patient.

"Please," I said. The word was more than a prayer; it was a confession, a door opening. "Please take me. Feed on me and make me yours, completely. Forever."

She smiled, and it was not only the smile of a predator, but a goddess and a wife.

"Finally," she whispered. "Finally, you submit."

She lifted on her knees and positioned herself over me as her drenched pussy hovered just above my hard shaft, coating me. The heat radiating down made chills course through my body.

"Nye lɔlɔ̃," she said. "You are so beautifully made. Even filled with anger and loneliness, you are perfectly mine,” She spoke as she sank onto me.