had been returned to me.
I wept, rocking my hips to seek that perfect embrace over and over.
Exactly how I desired to spend the rest of eternity.
Yet ultimate bliss could not be held at bay forever. My darling, overwrought, screamed into her pillow, clenched down around my member in a series of rippling tugs, physically demanding seed as her orgasm blossomed.
As her eternal slave, I could do nothing but comply.
She drained me dry, my roar shaking the walls.
When it was over, when I carefully pulled out in smiling satisfaction to see the sticky cream flooding her contracting channel, I knew a child would be made before the year was out… and that she would love me for it.
Chapter Eleven
Pearl
It was over…
Every part of me oversensitive to the point I would combust if he attempted to pleasure me further. Hand pressed between my legs, I turned my back to the beast and stared at the wall—the plaster now cracked from the monstrous howl that had set the building to quake.
“There is no need to hold my seed in, my soul.” Settling at my back, draping my body in that wing, it snuggled me. “I can give you more any time you wish. Rest with me for a short while, then I have a surprise! The first of many.”
I couldn’t imagine what could possibly be more surprising than what had just taken place.
“I feel as if a feast is in order to celebrate! Oh, sweet wife, you have given me such a gift that I cannot even fathom how to adore you best.”
Given him?
Wife?
Was I now more the wife he believed me to be because I had let him rut me? Because I had shamelessly shut my eyes to the monster on my back and abandoned all reason.
“I won’t always be ugly to you. A pure heart like yours will learn to love me for who I am and not the shell I wear.” He kissed my neck, lightly scraping his fangs on my flesh. “I know this, because I once was beautiful, and you didn’t love me for my beauty as all other women did. It was my spirit that drew you. Even if I were to wear that form again, beauty would never earn you.”
When his bite punched through delicate tissue, a great jaw holding my throat, it wasn’t pain I felt.
Only a sip was taken.
“To drink from the throat of another immortal is only done between those who are excessively intimate. It’s practically our only taboo.” Licking at the twin wounds that were already closing, he hummed out a great contented breath. “My throat is yours.”
“I don’t want your throat.” I don’t know why I said it, or why my voice held such vindictiveness. But I felt a great need to hurt the beast. Or hurt myself.
Rolling me to my back so he might make me look at him—or perhaps he wanted to look at me, my body was planted between two massive arms. “Once upon a time, you wanted my throat. Held a knife to it on our wedding night, would have slit me ear to ear had you the talent for it. I’ve often wondered if it was your magic that made us what we became, our oath, or my will alone. But blood? It always comes back to blood.”
And if I had that knife now?
Would I take the throat he bared?
Try to kill the monster who had pulled me from my grave, cared for me, clothed me, fed me, fucked me? Twice damned was I, meeting his gaze and hazarding a question. “Why did I try to slit your throat?”
“You didn’t want to be queen, though you were born the jewel of the kingdom.” The beast looked lost in memory. “Raised in seclusion, you’d never interacted with any man beyond our father. Who spoiled you to a fault and loved you more than our sisters. And it was not just for your great beauty. It was for your tenacity and will to have your way. The greatest queens never hunger for the duty. They must be tamed. When you tried to kill me, I’d never been more in love.”
“That sounds sick.” Truly sickening.
Careful of his talons, Vladislov cupped my cheek. “There is nothing sick in love. You found joy in freedom, in my body, in my obsession, and even in your duty.”
Joy might not be the emotion I would equate with what had just happened. Unable to decide if I had tricked myself, or he had fooled