What Lies Beyond the Veil (Of Flesh & Bone, #1)(64)

Nothing about the world we’d known mattered anymore.





21





“Would you stop it?” I snapped, swatting Caelum’s hand away as he tried to snake his arm around my waist.

Again.

“You’re still limping,” he argued, as if that was justification for his continued attempts to carry me.

“You said it wasn’t much farther,” I said, nodding my head forward and motioning him on as I passed him.

He growled in response; the sound rumbling in his chest as he stalked after me. His massive hand came down on the top of my head, using it to steer my body more northward than I’d begun to walk. “You have the sense of direction of a hydra.”

“Aren’t they blind?” I asked, thinking back to the paintings I’d seen in the books that warned of the horrors of Alfheimr when the High Priestess wanted to scare me into staying away from the Veil. They were filled all the creatures we wouldn’t ever have to see with the Veil to protect us, so long as I learned to leave it alone. The Fae were terrifying enough, their ethereal bodies so similar to ours but different in all the ways that mattered. The monsters and beasts of Faerie were crafted from nightmares, molded from darkness and all the evil magic brought into the world. The enormous three-headed serpents didn’t even have eye sockets.

“Yes. Yes, they are,” he agreed, quirking an eyebrow at me as he walked at my side, his pace relaxed so that I could keep up.

As much as I feared the cave beasts, the thought of sleeping exposed to the elements and to the Wild Hunt and others who might kill us in our sleep was somehow even more terrifying. At least when I had Caelum to protect me, the two of us might have been able to escape a cave beast’s wrath.

But I doubted the Wild Hunt would let us slip away twice.

“I wish I was a hydra,” I teased. “Then I could just swallow you whole and not have to endure your endless hovering anymore.”

“My star, you can swallow me whole anytime you—” I smacked him in the stomach, drawing pleasure in the grunt that rolled into a laugh as the strike cut him off.

“There’s that tingle.” He laughed when I glowered at him.

“You do realize you aren’t supposed to enjoy being punched, don’t you?”

“I can think of worse ways to pass the time,” he said, shrugging his shoulders as if my little violent outbursts weren’t of actual concern to him. It both infuriated me and intrigued me that he was so unconcerned with my displays of violence, when so many men would’ve had me beaten for less.

“Do you not worry that I might bite it off if you put it near my mouth?” I asked, braving the dangerous tension between us to continue the conversation I should have left unanswered. His gaze felt heavy on the side of my face, his attention fixated on me when I didn’t turn to meet his stare. I focused on my feet, on the way my too-large boots trudged through the leaves and underbrush on the ground.

“Maybe,” he said finally, his eyes leaving my face as he turned his attention toward the path in front of us. A building appeared in the distance, the first of the village where we needed to gather supplies. “But I’d know a few moments of perfection until you did.”

I scoffed, laughter bubbling in my throat and doubling me over as I tried to catch my breath. “Do you believe the lines you feed to the women you try to bed? How do you say them with such a straight face?”

“Oh, my star, you seem to have misread the situation. I do not tell women lines or whisper sweet nothings in their ears or give them false promises I have no intention of keeping. They come to my bed entirely willingly with a great understanding of what I have to offer them: one night of fun. There is no need for romantic lines or exaggerations.”

“Then what would you call the perfection of my mouth? A dramatic half-truth?” I said, letting him guide me off the path itself and into the woods surrounding the village so we could observe.

“I would call it the truth,” he said, turning toward me suddenly and trailing the pad of his thumb over my bottom lip. “I think we both know that there wouldn’t be many better ways to die than with your lips wrapped around my cock, Little One. The only thing that might be better is if I was between your pretty thighs, sinking inside you while you struggled to take me.”

I couldn’t breathe. We spoke of his death, of all the ways he could die that would be mixed with pleasure, and yet it was me who felt like I was on the verge of the end. As if my lungs would never draw in air again, not with the filthy words that came out of his mouth and the way his dark eyes seemed to glimmer with understanding as he stared down at me.

“Tell me again how much you don’t want me, my star. I do so love the way you lie.”

“I loathe you,” I wheezed, repeating the words from earlier as a blinding smile claimed his face.

“Hmm,” he hummed, leaning forward to touch his lips to the part of my mouth he’d explored with his thumb. My breath caught, a shuddering rasp in my lungs as he took my mouth and made it his. “Why fight the inevitable? We both know where this is leading.”

“With me brokenhearted and abandoned when you find something prettier?” I asked, the words escaping before I could rethink them. I hated the vulnerability they showed, the weakness it was to admit that he had the power to hurt me.