“Lazarus.”
Looking like a man possessed, he prowls onto the bed. His lips and a few locks of his hair skim along my skin as he moves up my body. Death doesn’t stop until the two of us are face to face.
His eyes search mine. “You rob me of breath.”
“It’s you who robs me of breath,” I say. I can’t not admit that at the very least. Death is the most beautiful, unearthly thing I’ve ever seen.
Death’s gaze lowers to my lips. “I have wanted to kiss you from the moment you first ambushed me and demanded I end my ways,” he says. “It drove me mad, this need I felt but didn’t understand—a need I still don’t understand. I thought my brothers were weak for succumbing to it.”
I exhale slowly, trying to process all of that. “You’ve wanted to kiss me this entire time?” I ask.
His eyes fill with mirth. “Among many other things.”
“What other things?” I say curiously.
He trails a finger down the slope of my nose, over my lips and chin. “I wanted to steal you away the first moment I laid eyes on you. I wanted you completely. It was an agonizing, awful experience. I thought it only further proved how wicked humans were, to have desires like that, desires I was now forced to feel.”
My heart thunders to think he’d wanted me even then. I can hardly imagine it, given how everything between us played out.
“And when you didn’t die—” Thanatos continues, his fingers skimming down my side, stroking my bare flesh, “when all my power proved useless against you—I knew you were mine, kismet. Knew it as surely as you know your own name.”
This should be terrifying—especially in light of the fact that even after he had these realizations, he hurt me, again and again.
But I’m not terrified. Not at all.
There is no one like us.
“Why did you finally give in to your … human desires?” I ask.
Now his expression softens, and I’m finding it hard to breathe.
“All those lonely months on the road, the monotony of my task only interrupted by your meager attempts on my life—”
“They weren’t meager,” I say, forgetting for a moment that a very naked horseman is pressed against me and that we’re about to do filthy things to each other.
He flashes me an indulgent grin like I’m being cute.
“Fighting you became hard, and then it became agonizing,” he admits his smile slipping. “But as bad as the fighting was, the parting was worse. I spent months wondering about who you were, and what it was about this miserable human existence that you found so worthwhile.
“And then, eventually, I wanted to know other things, human things, about you. Things that even now, I struggle to name because everything about living is so very different than dying. I wanted—I still want—to know about you—what brings you joy, what makes you sad. Wilder still, I want to be one of the things that brings you joy.”
My throat tightens at his confession, and I cannot look away from the dark depths of his eyes. He’s told me some of these things before, but in the fading light of dusk, with my body held against his, it hits me differently.
“Somewhere between all of our confrontations, Lazarus, I came to care about you, and leaving you behind became unthinkable.
“So I stopped fighting that wicked desire to take you, and I gave in. And here we are,” he says.
“Here we are,” I echo.
The moment stretches on, until finally, I can’t stand it any longer.
Moving beneath him, I let one of my legs fall open.
The horseman lifts his body a little to look down between us. I see his nostrils flare, and after a moment, he runs a hand down my flesh—down, down, down—until he gets to my pussy.
Now he moves back to his haunches, his black wings hanging over the edge of the bed as he studies my sex, his eyes burning.
His gaze returns to mine as he deliberately runs his finger down the seam of my slit.
I suck in a breath, my hips moving against him.
“Do you like that?” he asks.
I part my lips to answer, but he’s already running his finger back up my folds again. The moment his finger strokes my clit, my hips helplessly move once more.
His eyes alight and his touch backtracks to my clit.
“What is this?” he asks, brushing it once more.
“My God, Thanatos,” I gasp out. His light touch is driving me mad.
I reach for his cock, which already looks painfully hard, his strange glyphs glittering along its shaft. The horseman catches my hand and pins it back against the bed.
“No, Lazarus. Let me learn you.”
My body is taut like a bowstring and I’m pretty sure I’m the one who looks agonized. I shudder out a breath and reluctantly nod. He’s never explored another body before. I can be patient with this. I just have to calm down my own raging libido.
Death’s fingers continue to explore my body. They travel down my clit, right to my core. Almost by accident, one of them dips inside me, and I let out a gasp.
Really have to calm down that libido.
In an instant, the horseman’s eyes have honed in on me and my reaction. His finger, meanwhile, retreats—only to slide back in, this time a bit farther.
I writhe underneath his touch, and Thanatos’s expression darkens with desire.
“I think I’m beginning to figure out how this works.”
After several more tantalizing strokes of his finger, it slips out of my core and his hand continues traveling back until his finger finds something else altogether.
“Please don’t make me tell you what that does,” I say breathlessly as he traces my other opening.
Death’s eyes gleam, his expression somehow both intense and amused. “I don’t really care what it does—only whether you like me touching you there.” As he speaks, he presses a finger against it.
I bite my lip because that is my asshole. Despite myself, I’m still aroused.
Thanatos watches my expression, his gaze searching mine. “You do like that.” But then his hand retreats and he turns his attention back to my pussy.
His hands slide over my legs, his attention fixed between my thighs. All at once, he grabs one of my legs and hoists it over his shoulder, his feathers tickling the pad of my foot.
I swear I see a shiver rack through him at the contact, but he pays it no mind. Instead, he places my other leg over his other shoulder.
I stare up at him, somewhat confused by this particular turn of events.
“What are you … ?”
Before I can finish, Death leans forward and places a kiss against my clit.
My body jerks at the sensation, my hips rising to meet those lips of his.
“Thanatos.”
He smiles against my flesh.
I nearly die at the sensation of that grin against my skin.
“You like that,” he says, a note of wicked triumph in his voice.
“It’s—”
But he doesn’t let me finish.
His mouth returns to kissing my clit, only now he begins doing something with his tongue that—holy shit. My hips buck against him, the sensation so sharp it’s almost painful.
I reach for his head, my fingers threading through his black hair. I mean to push him away, but there is no budging this man. And that tongue of his …
I go from moans to panting real quick.
How is he even doing that? He’s had no practice.
Death pauses, “I was wrong earlier when I said there was nothing sweeter than your smiles,” he says. “This is sweeter.”
I’m not going to muse on the fact that the man won’t eat bread but he’ll gladly eat me.
I make a senseless, pleading noise because he got me all worked up and then he stopped.
The horseman’s eyes blaze with masculine pride. And then his mouth is back on my clit, his tongue laving over it again and again.
“You have to move around,” I beg him. “Please—”
“I’ll do what I want, kismet,” he murmurs against my flesh. “And you’ll endure it.” And then he’s back to devouring me.
Filthy, bossy man. I’d hold it against him if it wasn’t my pleasure he was demanding.
The pads of my feet slide against his wings as I writhe, and the horseman makes a satisfied sound as though he enjoys the sensation.
He moves down a little, his tongue slipping into my core.