“Yes.” Heat swarmed my belly at the concern in his voice, so I forced my attention to the blossoms carved into the backrest of the daybed. “The way your brother made it sound, the Pale Court was once a lively place with music and… and dancing. I can’t picture it with you.”

“My little wife, your husband is a formidable dancer, unmatched by any mortal man. When gods dance, time itself stands still, so it may watch us in our grace.”

I couldn’t help but grin up at him. “Oh, gods and the stories they tell.”

A spark came to his eyes, followed by his telltale smirk of mischief. “I shall prove it.”

“Wha—”

He promptly rose and pulled me against him. With his arm around the small of my back and his fingers intertwined with mine, my feet scrambled for footing underneath me as he swayed us into the first circle. At the second, the sheer fabric glided over us as he led me into the clearing. Shamrock and clover spun around us, dotting the edges of my vision as my feet found the rhythm.

Tufts of grass wafted around our steps, gently whispering a melody while the air filled with the earthiness of the moist loam beneath our dance. One filled with all the graces one might expect from a god, yet a sparrow danced about on a nearby branch, cocking its head this way and that as it watched us.

“Time is unimpressed,” I said. “Seems to me you dance like any mortal man.”

“Ah, my wife, but can a mortal man do this?”

At the next sway, white feathers drifted away on its current, some catching on the fabric while others flowed into the forest. In their stead, little buds emerged on my dress. When my feet left the ground—Enosh’s hands firm on my waist as he lifted me—the buds bloomed into a thousand pale brown roses, only to wilt and waft into the branches. There, they reshaped into… into what?

I stared up at what appeared to be the flutter of wings, so mesmerized by the beauty of it all as joy illuminated me from within. Enosh let them form into butterflies, with spindly bones for their thorax and the sheerest skin for wings. They slanted into their capricious movement, rising and falling in an unpredictable pattern until, in one surge, they landed on the remaining roses on my dress.

“Do you see its beauty?” Enosh lowered my toes back to the forest floor and stared down at me from the gray storm of his eyes. “The perfection of flesh and bone when in the hands of its master?”

I looked up at him, barely a sliver of air left between our lips. “I see it.”

When I placed my hand on his cheek, he moaned before he said, “You, my little one, were made for me.”

I breathed against a quiver in my chest. “How can you say that moments after you told me I’m not with child?”

The faintest twitch tugged on his upper lip as his eyes slipped to mine, robbing all strength from my knees. “Child or no, you are precious beyond all, and you have my devotion for eternity.”

Time ceased to exist as his words sneaked through the widening cracks of a wall built from hatred, touching me where I’d vowed he would never reach—certainly not before he returned to his duty.

But he did so with striking accuracy, letting the wall tremble until I swayed off balance. My center of gravity shifted until I clasped his neck, and his head lowered just as mine strained toward him.

Our lips connected.

The ground shook.

I kissed him. God forbid, I stroked my tongue into his mouth, tasting his masculine sounds. I lost myself in the trembling of our lips, the heat of our breaths, the support of his arm as he kept me from swaying even as he staggered toward me a step.

I palmed the muscles beneath his shirt, dove my fingers into his black strands. Heavens, I shook uncontrollably, my muscles torn between the instinctual reaction to pull away from this wrong intimacy and the devastating need to succumb to this fever surging between our bodies. To yield to the cruel god who promised me everything I’d ever wanted and surrender myself to his delicious corruption.

Clasping onto the fading memories of a world cast into darkness, I broke the kiss and breathed some sense back into my heated body. Whenever he said things like that, it was just too easy to forget that this was the same god who’d gnarled my legs. Who’d threatened to let his corpses hunt me down, and who was the reason graves carried grain sacks instead of headstones.

“We should leave.” Before he twisted my head the way he’d twisted my bones. “We’re still a good way from Hem—”

Gripping my collar, he cut my retreat short as his exhale stuttered against my lips. “Now, little one. I choose now.”

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter 19

OceanofPDF.com

Ada

Now.

I shivered at that word, an invisible chain pulling me closer to him, strung together by three letters and forged in the fires of my foolishness. Of course, what he’d offered the night at the tavern had been too good to be true, and what he’d asked in exchange… not nearly so simple.

With his grip on my collar, he pulled hard enough that my head tipped back. He lowered his forehead to mine, locking our gazes as his mouth strained for my lips, pausing less than a hair-width from them before making contact. The tenderness of his kiss stole my senses as he ghosted his lips over mine—the touch so light, the air between them quivered.

He lifted me, cradling me against his chest as he carried me over to the daybed. “Did you believe, little one, that I would let you run from the heat in your cheeks or the flutter around your heart?”

Even as he spoke, his mouth remained with mine, rounding each syllable with a suckle of his lips or a swipe of his tongue. I moaned at the familiar taste, even as the trap around me snapped shut.

Its prey?

My heart.

Caught between the welded iron of a promise given and the lure of sweet words sitting at the center, its rapid pounding drew in the devil who wanted it. A devil who sensed its every sinful stumble, every wicked vibration, every squeeze around an organ that had wilted in my chest for too long. Enosh sensed everything.

Every.

Immoral.

Beat.

Letting him corrupt it as he’d done with my body would be weak. Selfish. Undeniably wrong.

I wanted it so badly.

Wanted to turn my back on the world like it had on me, and instead, listen to the wicked whispers of the devil whose words made me feel special, valued… damnit, perhaps even loved in the most rotten of ways.

I closed my eyes and filled my lungs, yet my voice cracked at the first sound. “I… I hate you.”

“We shall rectify that. You, my wife, learned to love my touch, the hardness of my cock, the power of my thrusts, and the pleasure I bring you.” He lowered me onto the mink, letting butterflies and petals burst into the air as he loomed over my naked body, his lips never straying far from mine. “And you will learn to love me.”

I shook my head, yet our mouths refused to part, caught in a glorious kiss of stuttering breaths. “Not until you open your gates and rot the dead.”

“Love comes unbidden and has no care for precautions, turning us into fools for liars and monsters.” His swollen cock pressed against my heated center, telling me his breeches had vanished, but his hips made no further advance. “That much, I learned of love.”

So he likely knew that Njala had never loved him, which ached me somehow. “Neither is it a decision.”

“No, it is not. Love comes into existence between the flutters of a heart and grows awash in the heat at one’s core.” He cupped my face as our foreheads drifted together, submerging me in the scent of ash sprinkled over snow. “I dare you to look at me and deny how your heart beats faster at the undivided attention I give you.”