Pure Requiem - Aja James Page 0,51
the dragonfly, right?” Benjamin chirps. “Where did it go?”
“Dagonfy!” Isolde echoes, clapping her chubby hands. “Fy! Fy!”
“We must have imagined it,” Cloud says in that hypnotically deep, soothing voice.
He stares at each of us in turn, looking directly into our eyes.
Right.
I guess I imagined it.
I don’t even remember what “it” was.
But there’s a bug shaped splotch in my watercolor painting that definitely wasn’t there before.
Chapter Eleven: I Could Live Inside You Time After Time
*TAL*
I’ve been training with Cloud and Valerius nonstop, everyday, since the first time I challenged them to one-on-one combat.
Since the day I volunteered to take up the laser-sword that could help us defeat Medusa in her evolved, monster form.
Ishtar, true to her word, insisted that I practice sparring with her Great White Beast. I have claw and bite marks daily from the exertions, but I never back down.
Sometimes, I take on Inanna and Gabriel at the same time. My daughter is also a distance fighter with her chained whip, but when she is with her Mate, they fight together as one, lethal in close quartered combat.
With every battle, I grow stronger; I can anticipate my opponents better. They have all commented on how much faster I seem to move, how much stronger. But it’s not that. It’s that I am always in position to deflect or execute a strike because I always know where my opponents will be before they know it themselves.
This morning, I stepped up the routine a notch further by inviting Tristan, Aella, Adam and Liv to join in the fray as well, all at the same time with the rest of the Elite warriors and my Mate surrounding me and attacking from all sides.
I held my own. Much better than I would have before I lost my sight.
With so much action, so many movements from all directions, it would have been too much to track with eyes. I would have had to depend on my other senses and instincts anyway. Now, without my sight, it’s as if I can “see” even better. I feel and anticipate the battle rather than react to it. I’ve never felt so alive, so powerful.
At the end of the mock battle, when there’s a temporary stalemate, I tighten my fists, throw my head back and roar with victory.
Nine against one.
Even if it was only a minute, I held my own. Sixty seconds is all it takes sometimes to determine the outcome of a battle, to win a war. Five of my opponents are down for the count, groaning with their wounds. But I remain standing, scathed and bleeding but strong enough to keep fighting.
“Damn, General,” Tristan grunts from ten feet behind me, still sprawled on the ground where I left him, “what did you have for breakfast? Those were some freakin’ cool moves! Sign me up for lessons.”
I turn toward him to answer, but suddenly brace myself a moment before a thirty-pound snow leopard kitten launches itself at my chest.
My arms automatically close around Ishtar in kitten form as she enthusiastically licks me all over my face and neck with her raspy tongue, making me chuckle.
After a few moments, she changes back into her Dark One form, and the second she does, it is I who dives in for a thorough, tongue-filled kiss that lasts much longer than a few moments.
Whistles, cheers and clapping erupt around us from the other warriors, but I pay them no mind. I’m a warrior pumped up from the adrenaline of battle. I am strong enough to protect my loved ones, and I proved it.
Most of all, I am a male who is hard and aching for his Mate, and I don’t care who’s watching while I Claim her.
Right fucking now.
I don’t release her or stop kissing her, but somehow, the two of us make our way to our private apartment from the training hall. We might have slammed into a few walls and doors along the way, but what’s a couple more bruises after a productive, “whoop-ass” day.
The moment we’re inside our chambers, we’re tearing at each other’s clothes. Both of us are bloody and sweaty, battered and bruised, but it only makes us feel more alive.
We’re fighters. Survivors. We live.
And now we’ll “fuck each other’s brains out” to prove just how alive we are.
Both of us naked, I lift her up with one arm around the waist, snap my hips back and bury myself balls-deep inside her in one lunging thrust.
She growls wildly and attacks my mouth with her tongue and