He withdrew slowly, then pushed back into me, deeper, until my hips were lifted off the bed with the force of it. Sparks shot up my spine, pleasure spreading through my core. My one free hand reached for something, anything, to hold onto, finding his shoulder and clutching so hard that surely I was leaving marks on him.

He held that pressure for a few agonizing, incredible seconds, watching me as each minuscule shift made my breath quicken.

“Yes?” he said, softly.

“Yes,” I answered.

Gods, yes. Yes, yes, yes.

He withdrew again, painfully slowly.

His next stroke was harder still. My moan came out ragged, ripped from me without my permission.

Another stroke. Faster. Forceful.

He was still watching me, his face serious and focused, and I wanted to look away, wanted to hide myself, but I couldn’t—his eyes, the amber gold of a wolf in the woods, transfixed me.

Again.

He was slowly increasing his speed, his pressure. His free hand, the one that was not holding my forearm to the bed, traced the curve of my hip, my waist, circling the peaked hardness of my nipple just as he pushed into me again.

This time, my moan became a cry.

“Yes?” he asked.

“Yes,” I gasped.

Still, we didn’t look away from each other.

He was decoding me, solving me, the way I had solved him. I was being projected onto the wall like I had projected his blood, and I knew with a strange, terrible kind of certainty in this moment that he found me just as remarkable.

He wasn’t the only one. Because even though he had let go of my chin, I didn’t look away from him, either.

No, I barely blinked as he continued fucking me, every carefully measured stroke loosening in control. He was a quick study. He learned fast what I liked, what angles made my moans loudest. Learned what to give me when desperate, nonsensical pleas tumbled from my lips, even when I myself didn’t know.

Every muscle of my body, every shred of awareness, rearranged around him. The pleasure was unbearable, agonizing. I wanted to throw my head back and scream his name—I wanted to bury my face against the smooth expanse of his skin and breathe him.

I didn’t. Because I couldn’t look away from him, watching him watching me, memorizing each other.

And gods, he was beautiful. More beautiful than his blood. More beautiful than his admiration. All of it was dwarfed by the way he looked slowly unraveling, losing himself in his pleasure the way I lost myself in mine, tethered only to each other.

I clutched his shoulder now, and his fingers were tight enough around my arm to leave marks on me. My legs folded around his hips, urging him into me faster, harder. The headboard banged against the wall, an increasing rhythm that echoed my heartbeat.

His lips found my cheek, my throat, my mouth, stifling my cries. And yet he pulled away again, right as he rushed to that pinnacle, his cock driving into me so hard that he had to clutch my waist to keep from sending me against the headboard.

He met my eyes. And I knew he wanted to see the conclusion of this experiment—as much as I did.

“Yes?”

His voice was strained, like it took a lot of concentration to form even that small word.

I took his next stroke with equal force, pushing against him, contracting around him.

“Yes,” I choked. “Yes.”

And he pinned my shoulders down as I lifted my hips to receive those final thrusts, and we watched each other’s faces as we came together. I had to fight to keep my eyes open through the explosion of pleasure that left sparks of white over my vision, that tore a cry from my throat that must have echoed down the ancient empty hallways of this house.

But gods, it was worth it to make sure I saw him, eyes both distant and sharp with ecstasy, looking as if he had seen his goddess herself.

He pushed deep as he came, and I wrung myself around him as if to make sure I gave and took every last shred of pleasure.

The world went quiet. Reality came back in blurry pieces.

Vale’s head dropped, his forehead pressing against mine. His muscles trembled a bit, which I noticed with a pang of guilt. He’d strained himself more than he should have so soon after his injuries, magical potions or no.

He rolled off me and, as if it was nothing other than instinct, his arms folded around me, pulling me onto his chest.

I had never liked being held much. I found it too hot and restrictive. But Vale’s body was just the right amount of warm and cool, just the right balance of soft and firm. It felt like it was built to accommodate the shape of my own.

I let him hold me, and as my eyelashes fluttered with a sudden wave of exhaustion, a terrible dread settled over me.

Vale had been my experiment, my question to be answered. I thought it would be easier to let go of him if I could understand his every unknown. But he was a question that had no answer. And every answer.

Vale wasn’t a cure for anything. He was a whole new disease, one I’d carry with me to my inevitable end.

I didn’t want to let him go. I didn’t like goodbyes. Easier to be the first one to go.

But they come for us all, anyway.

CHAPTER TWENTY

I really didn’t mean to sleep.

I didn’t have time for it. I never did—maybe that was why my body forced it upon me. One moment, I was allowing Vale to hold me. The next, I was blinking blearily into the shadows of his bedchamber. I hadn’t spent much time in this room. It was just as cluttered as all the others—full of books and weapons and mismatched artifacts, like he’d just run out of space to put the vast quantity of things he’d collected over his long life and just shoved them wherever he could.

The smile came without my permission.

Vale. Someone who collected knowledge just like I did. I felt like a failure of a scientist for not realizing what I was seeing the first time I came to this house. I thought it was just full of clutter. But no, all these things had touched him in some way. He was careful about what he kept.

He slept now.

I knew that before I even looked at him. I could feel the steady rise and fall of his chest beneath my head. It was a deep sleep. Good. He needed it.

I didn’t want this moment to pass.

I blinked away sleep and stared into the room. The blue light of white flames now flickered alongside a warmer accent. My eyes fell to the windows. Dim light seeped beneath the curtains. Daylight from an overcast sky.

Daylight.

“Shit,” I hissed.

How? How could I have slept so long?

When I pushed myself up, a wave of dizziness greeted me. My whole body protested. The hard realities of our situation crushed me one after the other.

The dead priests I had burned.

The medicine.

Vitarus.

Time. We didn’t have time.

And I had let myself fall asleep.

Shame flooded through me. Embarrassment, that I’d let myself be distracted for so long—that I’d let Vale see—

I stood abruptly, ignoring my shaking knees and the sway to my step as I crossed the room.

I heard rustling fabric as Vale stirred behind me.

“Where are you going, mouse?”

His voice was weak and sleep-slurred, and I heard those things before I heard the joking lilt to his tone. He was still injured.

“I slept too long.”

He laughed. “I already know you well enough to know that is never true.”

It was true right now, when the world was falling apart. I went to the curtains and peered through them, careful not to let sunlight fall over Vale’s bed.

The window overlooked the back of Vale’s estate grounds. The charred remains of the bodies I had burned were a smear of ashy black bones.

I raised my gaze, and my throat closed.

No.

My knuckles trembled around the handful of velvet curtain.