“Why X?” The kiss of teeth.
Instead of pulling away, she gripped his arm tight. “Some people say it’s from the Latin word exardesco, which means ‘to blaze up.’ ” The words came out husky. “I think ‘rage’ is also another way it can be defined.”
He raised his head, and it was then that she realized what it was she was saying, what it betrayed. No wonder he didn’t want to touch her. Ice in her veins, she straightened and finished the story, because that was the only thing she could do. “It’s said we were once called the burning ones, so the Latin roots would make sense. But I’ve always thought it was because of what we leave behind when we go supernova: nothing.”
Hawke snarled at the self-condemnation in that last word. “Would you call me a monster, Sienna?”
She tried to jerk up and out of his hold. “Of course not.”
He wouldn’t release her. “Yet I’ve killed.”
“In defense of your pack,” she said, her hand gripping his forearm again, her touch satisfying a bone-deep need. “That’s different.”
He regretted none of the blood he’d spilled in defense of those who were his own, but—“It leaves a mark on the soul nonetheless.”
“When I was younger,” she said in a voice so quiet it was near soundless, “my hold on the cold fire erratic at best, Ming would put those he wanted executed in a room with me, and then he’d use every psychic method he had to push me over. It was his way of teaching me control.” A jagged breath. “He made sure they were conscious. The screams . . . I hear them in my sleep, over and over, and over again.”
Hawke clenched his jaw to keep his claws inside his body, knowing that wasn’t what she needed. “That’s on him, baby. Not you. Never you.”
Sienna dipped her head, her hair sliding forward to obscure her face. “People think that after the first kill, it becomes easier. It never does.”
“No.” It struck him then that this wasn’t a conversation he should have been able to have with a nineteen-year-old woman. Yet that made it no less real, made her scars no less deep.
Dipping his head to push back her hair and kiss the throbbing pulse in her neck, he said, “Turn around,” his voice rough with the raw fury of his emotions.
A shiver as she twisted around to face him on her knees. His jacket slipped off, but he put it back around her shoulders, finding a primal satisfaction both in keeping her warm and in having her covered in his scent. “Enough talk of death,” he murmured, sliding his hand under the cool silk of her hair to cup her nape—driven by the wild need to do everything he could to wipe the sadness from her. “Let’s live.” He dropped his eyes to her mouth.
Her lips flushed under his regard, her pulse thudding in a rapid tattoo that drove his wolf insane. “Scared?” He traced the full curves with one fingertip.
“You do bite.”
Smile creasing his cheeks, he gripped her chin, pressing down with his thumb to part her lips, and then he kissed her. No sweet, playful thing this, but a hot, wet demand that had a moan escaping her throat, her body arching against the hard wall of his chest.
He half expected her to shy as she had that night outside the den, but her fingers clenched on his shoulders, her lips generous and sweet under his voracious mouth. “You shouldn’t give me everything I want,” he chided.
“Why?”
“Because it makes me greedy.” Stroking his hand down over her throat to her chest as he claimed her lips again, he curved his hand over the lush swell of one breast.
She froze.
Nipping at her lips, he flicked his thumb across the taut peak he could feel through her thin black sweater, had the satisfaction of shocking a gasp out of her. “Now imagine,” he murmured in her ear before kissing that beautiful throat once more, drinking in the quivering intoxication of her arousal, “what it’ll feel like when I rub your nipples after I’ve stripped you bare.”
Sienna shuddered. “Don’t stop.”
Petting her down from the edge, he took his hand off her body, his lips off her skin, and nudged her until she lay on her back on the earth, his jacket protecting her from the cold. “Is this hurting you?” He’d caught no indication of it, but he had to be sure.
A quick shake of her head. “We disabled that layer of dissonance.”
That layer.
Which meant there were more, but they wouldn’t talk about the subject tonight, because tonight, he wanted to pleasure her, tease her, indulge her. “Pretty, troublesome Sienna,” he whispered, bracing himself beside her on one elbow and stroking his hand under the bottom of her V-neck sweater to lie over the taut smoothness of her abdomen.
Her muscles tensed under his touch, her eyes dark as the night.