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They rode side by side, leaving the Little Palace and Os Alta behind them on a crisp, chilly day in late fall. Since the day at the well, he’d invited her out a handful of times—whenever he was at the Little Palace, he seemed to find an excuse to go riding with her.
Alina turned her eyes to the sky and wished he’d find an excuse to go riding with her. She probably hadn’t made it clear she was interested in him like that. After all, she’d dropped hints to Mal for years, but he never looked twice at her.
“Your lessons are progressing well?” Aleksander asked her, breaking the silence between them.
He rode like he was born for the saddle, all straight lines and confidence. He held the reins in one gloved hand, his other resting loosely in his lap.
With a sigh, Alina slouched in her saddle. She didn’t ride well at all—even without the comparison to him, she felt as uncomfortable on a horse as she did in her classes. She belonged in both places, but she fit wrong.
“Well enough.” She looked away from him, studying the passing trees with more interest than they deserved. “I can summon the light, at least.”
“Mmm.”
The sound of his agreement caressed the length of her spine. Her back arched, her shoulders rolling back, and when she glanced at him, she found him studying her.
“What?”
His brows lifted and he gave her a faint look of amusement. “You’ll need to do more than simply summon light at the Fete.”
Since she couldn’t scowl at the great General Kirigan, she dragged her eyes away from him and back to the trees just in time for them to give way to a broad meadow.
“Sometimes,” he said, “it helps to have a goal to work toward.”
He dismounted at the edge of the meadow, leading his horse toward a nearby post.
Head canted to the side, Alina followed and dismounted as well. “Why’s there a post here?”
“Old training field,” he replied, tying his horse and then hers.
“What’s here that will give me a goal?” She surveyed the field, barely managing to disguise her disbelief.
Aleksander gave her a dry look as he stepped around her, putting the horses at their backs. “Space.” He sounded incredibly amused by this, like he knew something she didn’t.
To be fair, he certainly did.
Frowning, she followed after him. “Why do we need this much space?”
The meadow was easy as big as the massive drive leading up to the Grand Palace. A critical examination of the meadow using all the skills she’d gained as a mapmaker told her they easily had the same area as a city block.
Aleksander stopped walking forward, and she stumbled to a halt half an inch away from his back.
He glanced over his shoulder at her. “You won’t see anything from there, Miss Starkov. Come—” She hoped the heat that washed through her at that word didn’t show on her face. “—and stand at my side.”
She joined him, watching him with curiosity.
He clasped his hands together behind his back.
Their shadows overflowed their boundaries, darkness welling up around their feet, their ankles. The sight of it no longer frightened her. Instead, he awed her as he brought his hands around his body, drawing more shadows from the distant edge of the meadow.
“Do you remember what I told you on our first ride to the Little Palace?”
Frankly, it was a blessing she’d forgotten the bulk of their terrifying flight across Ravka. At first, she’d dreamed of the Drüskelle’s death regularly. Had jolted awake from nightmares of his blood splashing her face all over again or, worse, the hand axe cracking into her skull. Now, the whole thing seemed like a lifetime ago.
Unsure if she should be embarrassed that she didn’t remember, she ducked her head. “No,” she answered honestly.
“The Cut,” he said, and her eyes jumped back to him.
She remembered that.
The Cut was a technique unique to Summoners, a shaping of power that required tremendous skill and concentration.
“I’ve seen the Cut,” she said, her voice low and soft. She didn’t know what might happen to all that power if she disrupted his concentration.
“So you have.” He held his hands before him, creating a crescent of writhing darkness in the air, holding the scythe-like edge.
Her eyes widened. To casually hold the power like that… how much power did Aleksander actually possess? What was the true extent of his abilities? She knew he was old, knew that meant he had considerably more power than the average Grisha, but—
“But we can do more with our power than just kill—than just destroy,” Aleksander said, a strange quality in his voice.
Darkness fell from his fingers in inky pools as he spread his hands wide, creating a plane of shadow. One of his hands slid beneath the darkness, as though supporting a tray, the fingers of his other hand danced over the plane, sculpting it slowly into a panorama.
Alina exhaled heavily with wonder, eyes wide as Aleksander made two forms out of shadow that walked together through a glade ringed by trees.
“We can create.” She felt his eyes on hers, but she couldn’t look away from what he’d crafted. “People think the small science has to be big.” His lips quirked, as if he found a joke in the small contradiction of his description.
Darkness collapsed on itself, folding into a small sphere no larger than a marble, but she felt the tremendous weight of it. Its gravity pulled her, and she stepped closer, enchanted by a kernel of midnight.
Aleksander turned his body toward hers. “The small science is small,” he said, his voice lowering. “It needn’t be a grand thing that overwhelms.” He lifted his hand between them, and she stared at the blackness, the emptiness, the void resting on the tips of his fingers. “Where is there shadow, Miss Starkov?”
Her eyes lifted to his. There was a lesson here, and she tried to divine the answer in the darkness of his eyes.
The corner of her lip quirked up.
Your eyes didn’t seem like an answer she could give him. “The night,” she said aloud.
“Think smaller. Where else is the darkness?” His eyes were fierce.
“Beneath the forest canopy.”
“Smaller still, Miss Starkov.”
She licked her lips. “In the space between you and me.”
Something shifted, an infinitesimally small change in his expression. There was darkness there, she thought. Darkness in his eyes.
“Smaller.”
“The hearts of men.”
“How philosophical.”
Heat flushed her cheeks. “I—”
“You,” he interrupted, “are not wrong.” He spread his fingers wide, and the darkness stretched between them. “You find your piece of the science wherever you can. We are all things, Miss Starkov, that is the truth. And there is power in that.”
Lifting his other hand, he caught the strand of darkness and stretched it into a long, thin rope.
“And underpinning it all is control,” he said, his voice low and rough, his gaze fixed on hers. “The ability to exert your will on the world around you. If your power is everywhere, then you cannot be robbed of it.”
There was something important in that statement, but he gave her no time to pick through the labyrinth of his words.
“And if you can control it, you can never be overwhelmed.”
His hands turned in lazy circles, and she felt a coil of shadow against the inside of her wrist, cool as silk.
With a gasp, she lifted her hands as he drew them together, bound in a cord of darkness. She felt the pressure of another tendril of darkness against her throat, her waist, just below her knee.
Instead of feeling trapped, she felt a strange sort of liberation. If there was darkness in the hearts of men, there was also light, and his shadows were only so dark because her light shone so bright. He bound her in darkness, but she could destabilize his science with her own.
And that was power.
“Could I do this with light?” she asked him, studying her bound hands.
He caught his fingers beneath the knot of darkness, drawing her closer to him. He hadn’t hobbled her feet with his shadowy bindings, but she let herself fall against his chest.
His hand settled on her hip, holding her in place as he chuckled.
“Ah, Miss Starkov, how is it you so often surprise me?”
Since she’d arrived at the Little Palace, she’d thought of him often. At first, she’d been afraid of him. His reputation was as great and terrible as the Fold. He was solitary and given to isolation, they said, whoever they were, with exacting standards and little patience for mistakes. He was power crafted into flesh.
But so was she.
Now, when she thought of him, it wasn’t with fear. It was with respect—more respect than she’d had a moment before. And deeper, buried beneath the respect, was something else. Something hot and hungry, something full of craving.
Full of desire.
Lifting to her toes, her wrists still bound and her eyes on his, she pressed a tentative kiss against his mouth.
His eyes went wide and then drifted half closed, the hand on her hip curling into the heavy fabric of her kefta.
“Twice in as many minutes,” he murmured against her lips.
She shivered, finding the brush of his mouth against hers delicious. “I don’t think that was two minutes.”
“Are you suggesting I possess a poor sense of time?”
“Maybe.” Her lips curved in a faint smile. “Maybe you should release my hands and let me try this on you.”
His other hand found its way around the back of her neck, the tips of his fingers pushing into her hair to hold her close. The hand on her hip gripped her tighter, pulling her against the solid wall of his body.
She inhaled sharply, delighted and somewhat mystified by the sharp ache growing between her legs. She’d felt desire before, but it had always been a muted thing, easily set aside for the more pressing concerns of her own survival. Maybe she should be more concerned with her survival in this moment—he was dangerous, and to suggest he wasn’t was to believe a pretty lie—but all she wanted was to sink deeper into the feeling.
“You are Grisha.” Every word he spoke was like a kiss. Tingles spread from her lips to her jaw, along her scalp and down her spine. “Maybe you should practice your power.”
She hesitated. “Isn’t that dangerous?”
The hand on her hip curved to the small of her back. The heel of it pressed against her, urging her closer, and she was surprised to find there was still space between them, a space she quicky eliminated. Then his hand shifted lower, the tips of his fingers brushing over the swell of her ass.
Dark eyes watched her as his hand eased lower.
“Would you hold any part of yourself back from a lover?” he asked her, his voice low and rich and, Saints, she felt that sound. “Would you not use your hands to touch them?”
“Yes,” she breathed as his hand cupped her ass and tugged her flush against him. His arm kept her close, helped her maintain her balance.
“Would you not use your mouth to kiss them? To taste them?”
She swallowed hard, remembering all those times she’d imagined Aleksander’s mouth on hers. And on other parts of her.
“You’re imagining it now, aren’t you?”
She gasped as liquid darkness slipped over her arms. The bindings around her wrists stayed in place, but cool shadow drifted inside her sleeves and stroked over her skin. Tendrils of it, like so many cool fingers, dipped beneath her tunic and into her breeches.
Skin prickling with heat, she tried to tug her wrists apart.
“Where would you have me kiss you, Miss Starkov?”
“Alina,” she insisted.
“Alina,” he agreed, his voice a rough purr. “Will you dodge my question?”
She wasn’t sure she could answer his question. “I…”
He smiled and brushed his lips against her in the faintest caress.
Somehow, that devastated her more than any other sensation. She felt like she was falling even though he held her secure against his body.
“That wasn’t your original question,” she managed. “That doesn’t answer my question.”
“You worry about control.” Shadow licked along her thighs, following the curve of her ass, and she gasped, arching into him. His eyes darkened, becoming pools of midnight and desire. “That, Alina, is why we practice.”
He drew his mouth along her jaw, urging her head back and into the palm of his hand. A shuddering breath rushed out of her, tinged with a quieted moan. The heat of his breath washed over her skin, along the column of her throat, and his teeth followed.
Gasping, she yanked again at her hands. “You’re distracting me.”
“You’re not trying.”
She sucked in a sharp breath as he nudged aside the collar of her kefta and sucked on her skin. A reedy sound caught in her throat. “I could hurt you.”
“You could.” He licked the hollow of her throat. “I don’t believe you will, Alina.” He drew away from her neck, his nose following the curve of her jaw again. His lips brushed the shell of her ear, and his teeth caught the lobe. He tugged, and pleasure shot through her like lightning, ricocheting through her body.
And lightning was light and light was her power and she summoned it without thinking. Sunlight shattered the bonds on her wrists as she sank her hands into his hair and yanked him back to her mouth.
Hungry little moans spilled from her lips to his as she kissed him. His hand on her ass flexed, and she arched her back to press into his touch, which only served to have him yank her closer to him again—where she felt the beginnings of his desire against her stomach, even though the heavy layer of her kefta.
“Summon again,” he whispered against her mouth, his hand sweeping over her hip and to the front of her kefta. Fingers of flesh and darkness pulled open her belt and buttons.
She shrugged out of the heavy jacket, letting it fall to the ground as her fingers yanked at his silvery buttons. “I don’t want to.”
As he had, she kissed along the length of his jaw and then down the line of his throat, trying to imitate how he’d licked and sucked on her skin.
The sound he made when her teeth raked over his pulse made her shudder—and drew light to the tips of her fingers.
His fingers stroked down her sides, caught the white chemise tucked into her breeches, and pulled it free. Warm, human fingers caressed her over her stays alongside more cool, silky darkness, and she cried out against the skin of his throat.
“Summon for me, Alina. Show me your control.”
Control? She was supposed to be in control? Now?
Aleksander’s hands spread over her ribs, his thumbs brushing over her breasts through the fabric of her stays.
Burning tension drew through her.
Shadow sank beneath fabric. Two cool coils curled against her nipples, and she gasped.
“Banish the darkness, Alina.”
How was she supposed to find control when he purred her name like that? When he touched her like this, like no one else ever had? When she—Saints, the revelation crashed through her like a spring storm come down from Fjerda. “I don’t want to,” she gasped.
He went still against her, drawing back to peer into her face.
Heart pounding in her chest, she met his gaze, keenly aware that she was already half undressed, and if she tilted her head to the side, she’d see the tunic beneath his doublet and his skin behind that.
“What do you want?” he asked softly, quietly, as if the words might break the world.
She freed the final buckle of his doublet, danced her fingers up his chest, and loosened the laces at his throat. She licked her lips.
Beneath the confines of her skin, she burned, and fire, too, was light. She drew on that burn, on her own desire, and spooled a thread of it to the tips of her fingers. They glittered gold as she let them wander over his skin, her eyes lifting slowly to his.
Light spun off her fingers, reflecting in the darkness of his eyes. She felt it like an extension of her body, drifting over his skin.
Against her sides, his hands tightened. His pupils dilated as she watched, as her light twisted against his flesh like his shadows had against hers. One arch of light ran over his nipples beneath his clothes.
He surged against her, capturing her mouth in a devastating kiss.
Burying her fingers in his hair, she held his mouth to hers. Their tongues met, tangled, and delirious heat wound through her. More light spilled from her fingers, spinning around them both like ribbons.
Just as much as his hands, his shadows pulled at her clothes, loosening her stays, the cords of her breeches.
Cognizant that she’d be naked faster than him, her hands dropped to his shoulders and then lower. She pulled at his clothes, too, until he broke away from their kiss.
One hand cupped her jaw. His forehead rested against hers. “Where is your line?” he asked her.
Saints, she didn’t know. She’d never done this before, but she’d also never wanted someone’s mouth on her skin as much as she wanted his.
As if sensing her hesitation, he began to draw back—and she knew she didn’t want that.
So she ran her hands down his sides, his hips, his thighs as she went slowly to her knees.
His breathing turned ragged. The look in his eyes scorched her.
She knew enough about sex to know all the ways people could play with each other. She knew that all the ways she wanted his mouth on her, he could have her mouth on him.
Emboldened by the way he looked at her, she brushed her lips against the hard line of his cock through his breeches before she spread her kefta on the ground and leaned back on it. She pulled the laces on her breeches open, letting the front panel sag low on her belly, and met his gaze with trembling anticipation.
As if mesmerized, he knelt between her legs. When he leaned over her, she felt sheltered by the shadow of his form instead of caged. His hands pressed into her kefta above her shoulders, and he hovered above her.
“I want—I want to feel—what you said earlier,” she managed, feeling her cheeks heat with embarrassment. Not because she didn’t want him to touch her, to taste her, but because this was new, and she didn’t quite know what she was doing, and she worried about disappointing him.
The hot look in his gaze, the ragged cadence of his breath, all told her she probably didn’t need to worry about disappointing him.
“My mouth on you?” he asked.
She nodded.
Slowly, he lowered himself onto his forearms. His fingers threaded into her hair at her temples, and he kissed her slow and long, his mouth lingering on hers as though she were a treat to savor.
With a groan, she arched against the air, seeking the weight and comfort of his body and frustrated when she didn’t find it.
His tongue licked into her lips as he obliged her, settling against her.
She gasped into their kiss to feel him between her legs—she’d never thought too much about how she might feel the line of a man’s cock through his clothes and against her body, but, Saints, she adored it. The weight of him, the feel of him, filled her with a gnawing need.
“Is that all you want?” he asked her, each word its own kiss.
She licked her lips. Licked his lips. Gasped when that made him groan and roll his hips hard against hers.
Oh, but she liked that. Loved that. Sliding her palms down his back, she curved her hands over his ass and urged him to move like that against her again.
With a moan, her head fell back and her body arched in a sinuous line against his. More friction, more pleasure, and she lost his question in the labyrinth of fire his body created against hers.
“Alina.”
Her name on his lips only made her want more, only served to make her burn brighter.
“Alina.” He tipped her face back towards her, and she felt shadows on her legs again. The silky darkness curled around her calves, and she felt them release the buckles of her boots.
That. She needed to learn that.
“Tell me, Alina. Do you want more than my mouth on you?” The mouth in question drifted against her cheek, the whiskers of his beard a delicious rasp against her skin. “Do you want my shadows on your naked skin?”
“Yes,” she gasped, driving her fingers beneath his tunic. Grateful, she was so grateful men didn’t wear stays, because the thought of having to get through more fabric to feel his skin beneath her palms was abhorrent.
“Do you want to feel those shadows inside you?” he asked, his voice a low rumble against her ear. He timed that question with a slow, languid roll of his hips against hers so she couldn’t mistake his meaning.
And she didn’t. Her nails curled into his skin, pulling a hiss that dissolved into a wicked chuckle from him. “Yes. And—and then—”
“And then?” he prompted, when she didn’t finish.
Her teeth caught her lower lip. Talking about this seemed strange, but she liked it. It was difficult to put all these secret desires into words, but when she did, those words made her burn. Made her ache. Speaking her desires aloud only made her want them more.
“And then you.” She turned her head, her mouth stroking lightly against his cheek as he groaned and rocked against her again. “I want to feel you inside me, Aleksander.” He trembled against her, and she ached with pleasure. As much as he could unmake her like this, she had the power to do the same to him. “With your shadows around my wrists.”
She didn’t know what to make of the sound that escaped him, but then he kissed her with such a savage hunger, she realized she didn’t care. He liked the idea, and she burned for it.
Shadows and hands stripped her of her clothes. He held her back in an arch as inky darkness took her shirt; his mouth smoothed over her chest as pale hands pushed her stays off her shoulders.
He didn’t pause to draw back and stare at her. Instead, his tongue traced an ever-tightening circle around her breasts before he reached her nipple. He sucked the little nub between his lips as she cried out his name. His thumb dragged back and forth over the other as shadows pulled off and discarded her boots.
Thinking around the wet heat of his mouth proved nearly impossible, but she did manage to create thin, wavering tendrils of light. The heat from her light kept her from shivering—though she thought the heat from their bodies and desire would work just as well—and made him arch and twist against her body in the most delicious ways. Still, she couldn’t strip him naked as he’d stripped her, and she wanted to. Saints, she wanted to. Wanted to use her power the way he did.
“You’ll learn,” he murmured against her underside of her breast.
“Now you’re content with letting me take my time?”
He grinned at her, and that grin made him seem so much younger than he was. “Never.”
Shifting away from her, he settled on his knees between her legs, both of them shirtless. His gaze drifted over her body, and the heat in his eyes made her squirm.
A muscle in his jaw flexed as he muttered a coarse oath. “Watching you move—” He broke off, running his hands up her thighs. One of those hands curved inward, and now his eyes fixed on hers.
Curled knuckles brushed against her breeches.
She let out a shuddering little sigh and rocked toward his hand. “Please,” she murmured, feeling her cheeks flame.
Aleksander’s knuckles brushed against her cunt through the fabric of her pants.
Alina frowned.
He burst out laughing, leaning over her again. “That’s not the look you want to see on your lover’s face.” He kissed her, and she felt his hand shift, felt his palm cup her. The heel of his hand pressed against her pubic bone, and the frown melted into a wide-eyed look of delight. Of awe.
“That,” she gasped.
“Good?”
Her hips twisted, her body moving to push his hand to the right place. She’d touched herself, she knew what she wanted to feel, knew—
A keening moan fell from her lips, and he devoured the sound with a greedy kiss
His hand rocked against her, finding a rhythm with her, until she burned beneath him and mewls of pleasure became broken pleas for more.
“I promised you my mouth,” he reminded her as she carded her fingers in his hair to hold his lips against hers for more of those kisses.
Torn between two wants, she groaned. “Didn’t think this would be so hard,” she groused.
His brow arched.
“I want everything all at once.”
A thoughtful look crossed his face. “Stay still,” he told her, resting his forehead on hers again. His hand shifted away from her cunt, petting up and down her side as he closed his eyes.
She watched him, curious—and then she felt it. The swell of power, a cresting rise of cool shadow sliding over her belly. It shifted and rolled, shaping with his will into—
Alina jerked when a cool mouth brushed between her legs beneath the fabric of her pants.
Above her, Aleksander’s eyes opened. “Not too strange?” he asked as those cool lips kissed her thighs, her clit. As they kissed her entrance—as a cool tongue flicked against her.
She jerked again, her hips arching against his. She writhed, seeking the weight of his body between her legs and getting only the delicious torment of ephemeral shadow.
“Intoxicating.” His thumbs brushed over her lips as she twisted and arched beneath him, her eyes fluttering shut so she could focus on the feeling, the building pressure and pleasure and heat.
She dug her fingers into his shoulders, clutching him against her body as she sucked one of his thumbs between her lips. She needed something, some kind of action to help alleviate the tension inside her. Instead, grasping him close and sucking on him only made her ache more, only made her burn brighter.
“You have no idea how beautiful you look right now.” The dark timbre of his voice shook her. The cool touch of the tongue between her legs made her keen.
That shadow tongue curled around her clit and she sobbed his name.
“Fuck, Alina.”
The coarse language should have offended her. Instead, it inflamed her.
“Not enough,” he muttered, and one tongue of shadow became two.
The first continued flicking back and forth over her clit. The other thrust into her entrance, and her back bowed beneath him.
“Still not enough.”
His hand smoothed over her belly as she turned her face against his neck. Her hips worked hard against his shadows, shadows that continued to torment her when his hand slipped beneath her pants and cupped her.
The heat of his touch snapped the tension coiling inside her.
She came with a broken sob, her nails raking down his back. Pleasure overwhelmed her, but it wasn’t enough, wasn’t quite the feeling she craved. There was no weight to the mouths on her, and nothing of him was inside her.
“Please,” she gasped, trembling beneath him. “You promised.”
“I did.”
Aleksander slid down the length of her body, those shadow mouths continuing their sweet torment as more tendrils of darkness pulled her pants down her legs. She kicked them aside, and he slid his hands beneath her ass, lifting her off her kefta.
She thought she should be embarrassed when his eyes landed on her naked cunt, slick with her orgasm, but those mouths never stopped tasting her, never stopped tormenting her. It almost felt like too much.
Then his mouth, his hot, wet, hungry mouth descended on her, and she realized she’d been very fucking wrong.
Alina’s fingers dove into his hair. She heard herself beg for more as his lips closed around her clit and sucked, as shadow mouths wrapped around her nipples and tormented her entrance. One hand yanked away from his hair to drive through her own. She didn’t know what to do with herself, what part of his body or hers to touch, how to alleviate the wicked, demanding ache he created once more inside her.
And then, as his tongue flicked against her clit, painting strange patterns on her flesh that made her keen his name, ephemeral shadow became somehow solid. It pushed into her, parting slick folds to fill her, and she knew without any doubt that otkazat’sya men would never be able to give her what she’d crave with sex because she’d always want this—this slick, wicked science, this combination of magic and flesh.
He must have remembered what she’d said to him, because as her hands wandered through his hair, over his shoulders, over her own breasts, shadow coiled around them. Darkness tethered her wrists, pinning them together over her head.
With no outlet, all she could do was feel. Wet heat. Cool silk. Insistent tugs of his mouth, the hot flick of his tongue. She sobbed his name, and the darkness swirled inside her cunt, filling her with power. It dragged along tender flesh, stroking her as he withdrew it, and filled her with a raging fire when he pushed it back into her.
She came a ragged cry, her hips arching against his mouth, against the shadows that filled her.
He grasped her hips and drew himself up her body. His mouth crashed against hers in a brutal kiss. She drowned in it, in sensation, in wet and wicked heat as his fingers petted between her legs and her cunt rippled and clenched around the darkness still inside her.
“You’re delicious,” he whispered against her mouth as she writhed beneath him, twisting against the shadows tethering her arms and against his body above hers. “You still want me—”
Her eyes snapped open and met his. “If you don’t give me what I want, I will learn the Cut just to use it on you.”
That didn’t motivate him, but it did make him lick at her lips. “What do you want, Alina?”
She groaned, her heels scrabbling over the rough grass, her hips arching into his stroking fingers.
“Do you want me inside you?” The murmured words were decadent against her lips, better than any sweet she’d ever eaten. “Do you want my cock stretching your sweet cunt open?” Two fingers slid inside her, the heat of him replacing the cool darkness, and she cried out with delicious shock. How good his fingers felt, burning hot by comparison to his shadows. “Do you want me to fill you until you can’t take anymore? To grind myself against you until you’re begging for me to move?”
She had no idea how good the fantasy he painted might actually feel, but her body certainly wanted it. She felt her cunt squeeze around his fingers, an involuntary contraction that made her moan.
He shifted over her, drawing his fingers out of her. She dragged her eyes open to watch him pull back and strip off his pants. Had just enough time to see his cock, hard and flushed, before he leaned back over her. The head of it nudged against her entrance, his fingers playing once more against her cunt—as much to torment her, she was sure, as to guide his cock into her.
But he didn’t push inside. Instead, he lingered at her entrance, and the tease was unbearable.
“Please,” she gasped, arching, twisting, yanking hard against the shadows that pinned her arms above her head.
He gave her the most infuriating smile—lopsided, smug. “We came here for a lesson,” he reminded her, bending his lips to her chest. He nipped her skin at the swell of one breast, making her jump beneath him, only to soothe the sting with a long stroke of his tongue. Still his cock nudged her entrance but didn’t push into her. “Call the light, Alina.”
For the first time, summoning was easy. She burned, she ached, her skin stretched tight over the swell of glittering pleasure, and that was all her power. She drew it through her body from her hands, and it sparkled over her arms and down her chest, casting scintillating patterns on his skin.
“Collect it, shape it,” he murmured. “Show me what you’ve learned.”
Show him? The fact that she could summon while he drove her out of her mind should have been enough, but of course he’d expect more from her.
“Come now, Alina.” Fuck him for that phrasing. “Impress me.”
She shuddered beneath him, trying to separate herself from the pleasure he’d coaxed through her so far. She couldn’t, not entirely—she didn’t want to—but she found a quiet place in her mind where the pleasure was warm and soft instead of an inferno, and in that space she urged it into a shape.
Light formed into a tongue, and she ran it from the base of his cock to the tip.
He arched sharp against her with a curse, burying himself in her cunt in a single stroke, and Alina moaned his name as she arched beneath him. Full, she felt so delicious full, and though there was a slight discomfort in the first second, that faded a moment later when her cunt rippled around him.
A different sort of pleasure spread through her, and she purred.
Her eyes opened. He stared down at her, his expression the most delicious combination of aroused and surprised and delighted. A lopsided, smug smile spread across her lips, a mirror of his from earlier.
“Impress me,” she said.
With a ragged chuckle, he bent his mouth to hers. “With pleasure, solnishko.”
He drew back slowly, and she sighed with pleasure. He thrust back into her, her hips arching to meet him, and she moaned. As he found an easy pace with her, she let herself down in the sweet friction.
The bonds around her wrist stretched. Fingers twined around her own, and she held them tight as he fucked her in long, easy strokes. Each time he pushed into her, her back bowed, and her body softened more.
She lost herself in their back and forth, content to float in the warmth of their shared pleasure. But he didn’t let her for long. His lips brushed against her ear. “Once more for me,” he told her.
She recognized the warning in those words a moment later when shadow tongues licked against her clit.
Electric pleasure strung her tight. Now, she clutched at the shadow hands holding her own as silky darkness licked her, as cool fingers stroked the swollen lips of her cunt. He played with her, layering her pleasures until she gasped his name and begged for him. Only then did he replace one shadow hand with his own and the shadows between her legs with his fingers.
The heat of him ruined her, shattered her. She came with his name on her lips, and he followed her mere seconds later, his body shuddering over hers.
They lay together, panting, for a long moment. Then he drew back, the cool shadows retreating as his cock slipped out of her body. Instead of pulling away entirely, he settled at her side, giving her most of the kefta.
She turned toward him, her fingers brushing over his jaw, his lips, his shoulders. “Are all your lessons in control going to turn out like this?” she asked him.
He made a thoughtful expression.
Scooting closer, Alina pressed a kiss to his mouth. “I’ve an idea for another lesson if you don’t.”
His brow arched. “Do you?”
“I want to try binding your wrists with light.” Interest flashed in his eyes, and she smiled. “I want to push you into your chair in the war room and bind your hands to its arms. Then I want to climb onto you and ride you.”
He stared at her, the look on his face equal parts aroused and bewildered. “You—”
“I grew up near farms,” she reminded him. “And then joined the military. Believe me: I have plenty of ideas for lessons.”
“You think you can keep control long enough to keep me bound to that chair?” he asked, a wicked growl in his voice.
Her body responded to that tone with a wash of pleasure, and she found herself hungry for more of him even though they’d just finished. Part of her wondered if that was normal—and she got her answer when he rolled her beneath him.
“The minute your control breaks, solnishko, I’m going to put you on your back on that table and fuck you until your screams summon the guards at a run.”
Wrapping her arms and legs around him, Alina grinned. “Maybe I’ll make you beg for that.”
With his face buried in her neck, he laughed. “I hope you do.”