What Lies Beyond the Veil (Of Flesh & Bone, #1)(60)

“The primordials birthed the Fae race?” I asked, yawning as I tried to force my eyes to stay open. “Is that what the Fae believe?”

“It is. They believe in The Father and The Mother in their own way, but they do not worship them the same as the human race. The Fae believe The Father and The Mother are waiting to take you to the afterlife after your thirteenth life cycle comes to a close, but they’re not ruled by the weight of their choices during their time in this world.”

“What happened to the original Primordials? Why would they allow their children to be worshiped as Gods if they were the ones who actually created the world?” I asked, shifting my head on his lap. I lay on my back, staring up at him as he curled himself over me and trailed gentle fingertips down my cheek.

“Curious thing,” he said. “You’re supposed to be falling asleep.”

“When you said you’d tell me a story, I didn’t think you meant something from the forbidden texts! I thought you meant a bedtime story. How am I supposed to sleep when you’re talking about the creation of the world?”

“I’ll keep that in mind for the future. I could tell you a sex story instead? Perhaps one of the ones I’ve read about the union of Peri and Marat and the celebrations of their son? We already have the visual aid from earlier, and I’m certain we could—”

He grunted when I lifted and dropped my head into his stomach, turning away from him to face the fire. I couldn’t bring myself to take my head off him, not with the warmth of his body heating my near-frozen ear.

“I take it back. You’re more cruel than curious. A curious thing would want to reenact those moments and discover just why they were so pleasurable.”

“Would you shut up or just tell me where the Primordials went already?” I asked, groaning past my annoyance with his antics.

“They disappeared, Little One. Nobody knows where they went or what happened to them. Only that they abandoned this world and those in it. The children of the Primordials, what we know of as the Old Gods, took over. They put themselves at the top of the hierarchy and lived a life of decadence and sin,” he said, continuing on as I snuggled into him against my better judgment.

He spoke of gilded cities, of the lands they’d had fashioned in their own honor, and the temples where they were worshiped. I fell asleep to the image of temples of stone in my head, my eyes drifting closed as slumber finally claimed me.





20





I snuggled deeper into the warmth wrapped around me, rubbing my face against bare skin where the laces of his shirt had parted in sleep. A deep groan startled me just enough that my eyes flew open in shock, holding myself perfectly still as I tried to unravel what had happened.

I’d fallen asleep with my head on Caelum’s lap, so why was it his chest I snuggled into? I glanced down at our bodies, wincing when I found my dress hiked up to reveal my bare calf where my leg draped over his waist. My body was half on top of him, sprawled across his as if I could suck the heat from his bones and into mine. With the embers of the fire at my back, his body warmth at my front, and his cloak draped over myself, the cold of the early winter outside was a thing of the past.

Something hard pressed against my belly, the length of him seeming impossible to even speculate on as I bit down on my bottom lip to stifle the shocked gasp that tried to escape. His fingers tightened, bunching the fabric of my dress up further as he squeezed an entire cheek of my ass in his grip. His hand was enormous, covering it entirely and using the grip to pull me tighter into his body as he shifted his hips to grind his erection into my belly.

I looked up into his face, where the lines that were usually taut with intensity and a hint of brutality, or playfully arrogant, were relaxed in sleep. Nothing remained in his expression of the man he projected in his waking hours, only a peaceful expression, giving him the illusion of being somehow…normal.

Of being less intimidating, less exceptional.

I swallowed down my nerves, slowly lifting my head away from his chest to put some distance between us. I must have rolled onto him in my sleep at some point, and I could just imagine his arrogance if he woke to discover me clinging to him like a leech. I lifted my leg off his waist, slowly pulling it back to twist my body off of his without disturbing him.

He moved, rolling me beneath him in a move so smooth and sudden that I squeaked as my back rested against the stone. His weight covered me, his dark eyes seeming to dance with shadows as he opened them suddenly. “Where are you running off to, my star?” he asked, squeezing my ass in his hand more intentionally as his lips tipped into a smirk that made me want to punch him in the mouth. “Did you think I wouldn’t notice your body wrapped around mine? That I wouldn’t feel you even in the depths of sleep?”

“I loathe you,” I mumbled, shifting my hips to try to rub his hand against the dirt beneath our bodies until he had no choice but to remove it. The motion rubbed me against him, my legs spread around where he’d slid his hips in between them when he’d rolled me.

“If this is what your hate feels like, then I can’t wait to feel your love,” he said, leaning forward until his nose touched the end of mine. He trailed it up, tracing a path over the arch until he touched his lips to my forehead. When he drew back, his eyes dropped to my mouth.

“Love?” I asked, the hushed sound hovering between us as he stared at my lips intently.