Death Wish (Alexa O'Brien, Huntress #5)(23)

I wasn’t seeing him anymore. He had faded along with the rest of the bedroom as I spun headlong into a memory that wasn’t mine. I saw the candlelit room with the cream-colored chaise lounge and the shrieking woman upon it. She was young, eighteen perhaps. She fought hard once she broke free of Arys’s powerful mesmerism. Some victims would smile happily as they died under his thrall. But others, they fought until that very last breath.

There was a rush of white noise, almost deafening in my ears. I was lost in my kill, Arys’s kill, and my sense of reality shifted. My four fangs filled my mouth, and I reached with clawed fingers for a victim that wasn’t really there.

I’m not sure how long Arys shook me, trying desperately to get me to come back to him. “Come on, Alexa! You’re not part of that world. I was. I need you in the here and now.”

I mumbled something incoherent. Harley’s devious laughter echoed all around me. I heard his victim wailing. I wanted him to make her stop, to just shut her up. I couldn’t take much more. The screams, the blood and the erotic flavor of terror, it was all driving me into a frenzy.

I was caught between myself and Arys. Feeling his hunger for her and his deep-rooted satisfaction as he drained her life away conflicted with the need I felt to be the one he claimed in such a powerfully intimate manner. My vision swam, alternating from Arys’s past to the present. I had always been a part of him. Even then, when I had yet to be born.

Arys’s voice was firm when he demanded, “Do you want her? Or, do you want to be her?”

It took a few moments before awareness hit me. I was lying flat on my back with Arys straddling me, holding my arms pinned above my head. It became clear what he was asking. He was offering me release from the grips of his horrid memories.

I was flushed with desire for both body and blood. I couldn’t form a response. My mind was a mess of blood stained images. I don’t know what Arys saw in my eyes, but he didn’t wait any longer for a reply. True to his nature, he made me the victim.

He slipped a hand between my legs, finding me ready. An evil light shone in the depths of his eyes, and a smirk tugged at his lips. “Hell, if I’d known that journal would make you so hot, I’d have given it to you months ago.”

“You did this to me. You made me a monster.” I was rambling without thought, saying whatever danced onto the tip of my tongue.

Arys leaned in close, his lips brushing mine as he spoke. “You were always meant to be a monster. I just make you enjoy it.”

His kiss was gentle and soft, so contradictory to the tension I felt emanating from him. Nudging my legs apart with a knee, he positioned himself between them so that I was comfortably pinned beneath his weight. Every time I closed my eyes I saw her, the redhead sprawled out before him, bleeding and begging even as she enjoyed his touch.

“Look at me.” Arys’s demanding tone startled me. “I want to see terror in your eyes before I bleed you.”

I almost choked on the stifling sensation that flooded me. Fear. Arys had frightened me during such an encounter only once before. That same time he’d also threatened me. Once again, the promise of pain in his words made me ache for him.

Burying his face in my hair, he pressed his lips to my neck and breathed deeply of my scent. He was encouraging my fear with the taunt of his fangs against my vein. I tensed, uncertain. The thick swell of his erection against me was both exciting and intimidating. I felt him draw on my energy, feeding on my bloodlust, fear and desire.

Arys slipped inside me with a rough thrust, forcing a cry from me. He groaned as the power rose up to engulf us. His mouth was warm on my skin. I could feel him shaking with the strength it took to keep from biting me, to hold out for the right moment when it would throw us both headlong into the abyss that sought to claim us.

There was a change in him, a shift in our dynamic that made Arys the aggressor. He often was aggressive, but never did I truly feel like a victim with him. Not until now. He peered down into my eyes, and all I saw was the predatory gaze of the wolf looking back at me. My wolf. It was an unsettling reminder that Arys had as much of my monster inside him as I had of his.

“Please, don’t,” I heard myself say. I wasn’t sure what I was asking him.

With every slick stroke of his body into mine, my panic began to subside. The energy binding us grew and writhed, wrapping us in its magnificent hold.

He showered me with kisses on my lips and along my jaw. “You know me. You always have.”

Conflict filled me as anguish over his words warred with comfort. Until I really knew what that meant, I could find neither solace nor regret in his words.

I gripped him with claws that cut deep red ribbons into his flesh. Every time he filled me, he brought me closer to the edge. He was aggressive, as if he couldn’t possibly get deep enough. We were as close as we could physically get, and still it wasn’t the union I ached for. Despite the fervor in which he made love to me, his kisses were soft caresses. But, only until his patience ran thin.

With a hand tightly entwined in my hair, he forced my head to the side and bit deep. My heart thundered in my ears at a deafening level as my blood poured into Arys’s mouth. I had a moment of clarity, and I wondered if my life would end in his hands. Maybe not today but one day. If our destiny was to destroy each other, that might only be fitting.

I gasped for breath, unable to fill my lungs. Time felt non-existent. I had no conscious awareness of what time it was or how long it had been since I’d dropped the journal. All I knew was the pleasure and the promise of Arys’s mouth on my bitten neck and his body declaring me as his.