I had the sudden premonition he was about to ignite them, just to show me. “Don’t,” I said, reaching out to stop him.
Our hands brushed, just a whisper of skin against skin, and the air between us changed, charged with electric anticipation.
I glanced uneasily at Viktor as Kosamaras’s words echoed through me.
You and that boy will create things, terrible things. Things terrible enough to bring down even the gods.
There was a moment, one short breath, where I could have pulled away, hastily retreating as though nothing had happened.
The moment came.
The moment passed.
My fingers closed around his.
“What are you doing, Ver?”
His voice was warm with amusement, pleased, as if he knew exactly what I was doing, even though I did not myself.
Wordlessly, I reached up, cupping the back of his neck, running my fingers into the thick waves of his hair. He made a soft, surprised noise but I pressed my lips to his, silencing him.
Viktor responded in kind and I arched forward as his hands snaked up my spine, drawing me against his chest. I opened my mouth, running my tongue over his with a brazen audacity that could not be checked.
With a soft, appreciative growl, he stepped forward, causing me to step back, and my ankle caught on a rock. I fell backward, landing on a bed, high with silken pillows and velvet throws. It had not been there before, I was certain of it, but I stretched out anyway, savoring the wanton comfort.
Viktor followed after.
With deft movements, he laid me across the mattress like the main dish of a banquet, an offering spread over an altar. His hands ran down me with ardent reverence, a supplicant bowed low with resolute devotion.
The sky above us was a void of night blue and shimmering stars, swirling closer than I’d ever seen before. Trails of cosmic dust swirled and sparkled, landing on Viktor’s naked back, illuminating my bare lengths. I could feel it soak into me, a foreign energy, shaping and shifting my essence, making me something new, something other. It was like witnessing the birth of our world, our galaxy, our very existence.
But then the sky was gone, blocked out by Viktor as he bent over me, pressing kisses down the length of my throat, down my sternum, on each of my breasts. His skin was feverishly warm. Our breaths grew ragged, filling the air with dark wants, deeper needs.
I ran my fingers along the muscles of his chest, exploring the planes and shapes of him, so different from me. His hands guided mine lower, dragging down the ridges of his abdomen, stroking over his length. Our bodies were damp with desire as I pulled him over me, closer to my wanting, covering myself with his heat.
I ached for him, driven almost mad by an incessant need for more, more of him, more of his touch and all the wickedly wonderful things it brought. It burned in my veins, licking up my toes as they curled, setting me ablaze with hunger.
Viktor’s fingers dug into my skin as he left a trail of fiery kisses over the swell of my hip bone and I gasped, eyes flashing open.
We were aflame.
The fires were real, crackling and dancing with a hypnotic pull.
My blood sizzled as his scalding hands worked their way even lower, clutching my thighs, marking me with his mouth as decisively as a brand, but there was no pain, only that unfillable ache, that impossible insatiability.
You and that boy will create things, terrible things. Things terrible enough to bring down even the gods.
I pushed aside the Harbinger’s warning as my nails raked down Viktor’s back, eliciting a feral growl from him that made me want to bare my own teeth, howling to the stars.
The stars.
They were even closer now, their place in the universe in peril as we spun new energies, pulling them in to watch the start of something—
Terrible.
—Rapturous.
Terrible enough to bring down even the gods.
A tremulous quiver began to grow within me, shimmering and brighter than the stars now surrounding us, spinning ever closer. It pulsed white hot and consuming, setting my body aglow in its radiance. Viktor’s eyes roamed over mine and they too were filled with that light.
That beautiful, terrible light.
Terrible.
“Viktor,” I murmured, trying to find a way to stop this, even as every bit of me screamed for it to continue.
“Ver,” he groaned, pulling me closer, and the light shifted, tingeing as pink as the blush of first love, as a peach ripened in the heat of the summer sun. Then red, bright as poppies dancing in a field, a spool of scarlet thread.
I imagined that thread tying around us now, slipping over our entwined limbs, binding us as one as he thrusted forward, removing all space between us.
“Yes,” I gasped, slipping into its hazy, heady depths.
I could not tell where he began and I ended and I did not care. We two were one and it felt so good, so right. Even the stars shimmered with agreement.
But their light changed again, going darker as we fell deeper. As dark as a splatter of blood, a jagged wound, a silent scream.
And I could hear the screaming then.
So many screams.
As if every person in Bloem, in Arcannia, in the whole of the world had opened their mouths and released their deepest terrors. They cried out for relief, for release, for it all to end.
A great tremor rumbled beneath us, shaking the bed, shaking the ground, shaking the world apart.
And Kosamaras’s words again rippled through me.
Whatever perdition you bring upon this world, I hope it eats you first!
It was coming. It had started.
“We have to stop,” I sobbed, breathless.
We couldn’t stop.
Not now.
Not when we were so close.
When it was so close.
So…
Close.
So…
A soft knock snapped me from my slumber and I opened my eyes, gasping as if I’d just run from the maws of death. My heart pounded, thudding in an unfamiliar cadence.
I’d been so surrendered to the dream, so blissfully, horrifically saturated within it, I couldn’t at first remember where I was.
I sat up and the world came rushing back to me.
I was in my sitting room.
Lying on the velvet settee.
After spending the day in the Garden of Giants, I’d feigned a headache before dinner. I knew I’d be unable to stomach sitting in Gerard’s presence, pretending everything was fine.
The room was dark now, washed in shades of midnight blue and starlight.
Save for Viktor, poised on the threshold of the open secret passage, illuminated by the glow of a single yellow taper.
Viktor.
My body sizzled as I recalled the way his touch had raked over me.
Not him.
It had only been a dream.
But my middle ached with the echoes of that ecstasy all the same.
He frowned, looking guilty. “Were you sleeping?”
“I…” I pushed back a strand of hair, feeling fluttery and flustered. “I was but…I’m glad you woke me. I was having the most—”
Sensual.
Shameful.
“—shocking nightmare,” I concluded, my chest rising and falling as if I was out of breath. I swallowed hard, trying to stop the quiver in my voice.
“No dreams of me, then?” he asked playfully.
Deep inside, I felt the way his feral groan had reverberated in the deepest, most secret part of me. I stifled back the urge to press him up against the wall and demand he take me then and there. “Afraid not.”