Chapter 10 Elena Heart -POV
I was making sounds I couldn't control, whimpers, pleas, the broken repetition of his name. My thighs trembled, my back arched off the bed, and I fucked myself harder, chasing the release that hovered just out of reach.
"Dark!" I cried out, the word echoing in the empty chamber. "Please, please, I'm—I'm going to—"
The orgasm crashed through me with devastating force, my body seizing as wave after wave of pleasure radiated from my core.
I kept my fingers moving, drawing out the spasms, my voice rising in uninhibited cries that I couldn't have stifled if I'd wanted to. It went on and on, the intensity almost painful, born of days, no, years, of denial finally finding release through the fantasy of him.
When it finally subsided, I collapsed back against the mattress, shaking and spent. My fingers were still inside me, and I withdrew them slowly, feeling the aftershocks twitch through my sensitive flesh. The air smelled of sex, of my own arousal, of the sweat that filmed my skin.
I lay there in the darkness, breathing hard, and felt the hollowness return, not the comfortable emptiness I'd known before, but something sharper, more demanding. The release had been intense, but it hadn't been enough. It hadn't been him.
My fingers traced idle patterns on my stomach, and I stared at the ceiling, watching the moonlight shift as clouds passed across the sky. Somewhere in this city, he existed, Dark, with his mask and his knowing hands and his voice that stripped me bare with every word.
He served the king I was sworn to kill. He had touched me like I belonged to him. And I couldn't stop wanting him, even knowing what he was, even knowing what it made me.
The blade strapped to my thigh was cold against my skin, a reminder of who I was supposed to be. An assassin. A weapon. Not this trembling, aching creature who touched herself to the memory of a monster's hands.
But the blade couldn't cut through the wanting. Nothing could. Not yet.
I closed my eyes and let his name form on my lips one more time, silent this time, a prayer or a curse or a promise I didn't yet understand.
Dark.
A few hours later… The moonlight had shifted while I lay there, sliding across the floorboards like something alive, something hunting.
My skin still hummed with the aftermath of my own touch, the too-quick peak that had left me emptier than before. I could smell myself in the small room, sex and sweat and the particular sharpness of my own frustration.
I closed my eyes against the moon's pale intrusion. The blade against my thigh was a cold comfort, a reminder of who I was supposed to be. An assassin. A weapon. Not this woman with her gown bunched around her waist and her fingers still sticky and her heart pounding out a rhythm that sounded too much like a name.
Dark.
I whispered it into the darkness, testing the weight of it on my tongue. The sound barely left my lips before it seemed to dissolve into the shadows, consumed by the night itself.
Then the shadows answered. "You're a mess, assassin."
The voice came from the corner of the room where the moonlight couldn't reach, where the darkness pooled thick enough to drown in. I jerked upright, my hand flying to the blade at my thigh, my heart suddenly hammering against my ribs so hard I could feel it in my throat.
But I didn't draw the weapon. I knew that voice. I had dreamed it, moaned it, hated myself for wanting it.
Dark stepped forward, and the moonlight found him. His mask glinted, black enamel and twisted silver catching the pale light like a blade catching torch flame.
The mask left his mouth exposed, his jaw, and those eyes. Those striking blue eyes that seemed to hold their own light, their own particular darkness.
He was dressed as he had been at the masquerade, all black and shadow, but there was something different about him here. In the palace, he had been performance and threat. Here, in my modest chamber with its narrow bed and its smell of sex and longing, he was something else entirely. Something more dangerous.
"But I like it," he continued, his voice carrying that same amusement I remembered from the pillar, from the garden, from every moment he had dismantled me piece by piece. "I like seeing you like this. Undone. Wanting."
I should have killed him. The blade was right there against my thigh. I was an assassin, trained since childhood to be death itself, and he was the enemy's creature, the tyrant's hound, the man who had warned me that his king would break me.
Instead, I sat there frozen, my gown still bunched around my waist, my breasts still exposed to the cool air and his gaze, my body still slick and swollen from my own touch and his name on my lips.
He moved closer, and I could smell him, that scent of smoke and cedar and something darker, something that made me think of forbidden rituals and blood oaths and the space between waking and dreaming. He sat on the edge of the bed, and the mattress dipped beneath his weight, tilting me slightly toward him.
"Let me clean you up," he said, and his voice had changed. Still dangerous, still knowing, but with something beneath it that might have been gentleness. Might have been another kind of trap. "You've made such a mess of yourself, assassin. Such a beautiful, desperate mess."
His hand reached out, and I flinched, not away, but toward, my body betraying every oath I had ever sworn. His fingers brushed my knee, my thigh, leaving trails of fire on my overheated skin. He leaned down, and I could feel his breath against my inner thigh, hot and deliberate.
"You taste even better than I imagined," he growled against my skin, and then his mouth was on me, his tongue tracing the path of my own juices, cleaning what I had spilled in my desperate solitude.
The sensation was shocking, intimate, obscene in its thoroughness. He licked and sucked and marked me with his mouth, his breath hot against my most sensitive skin, his stubble rasping against my inner thighs.
I moaned, my hands finding his hair, his shoulders, anything to anchor myself as the world tilted. "Dark," I gasped, my voice breaking, "please, I—"
"You're so wet for me," he murmured against my flesh, the vibration of his words sending shocks through my core. "So ready. So fucking desperate." His mouth moved higher, his lips brushing my clit with devastating gentleness, then withdrawing, teasing.
His tongue delved into my core, fucking me with slow, deliberate strokes that made my hips buck against his face.