As I step into the room, I inhale sharply. This room, too, is trashed, every piece of furniture demolished. Savage claw marks scar the paneled walls, the chandeliers are torn from the ceiling, wires dangling, exposed, crystal splinters glistening on the floor. The bed is a collapsed jumble of wood, with slashed velvet pillows, shredded linens, pulverized mattress.
I narrow my eyes, letting them adjust to the gloom. He’s here, I can smell him; that spicy, darkly exotic scent that always clings to his skin, animalistic, druggingly masculine, blatantly sexual. I can feel him, every nerve ending in my body electrified by his presence.
There’s more in this room. Rage. Fury. Grief. It’s embedded in every demolished item, gouged into each panel, carved in deep gashes across the floor.
He grieved me. Believed I was never coming back. But why?
All my senses are cranked up to full volume. This is my night. My choice, my long-denied, deepest desire, and I feel achingly, incredibly alive. I hear him inhale, as if questing the air, catching my scent. Then a rough laugh floats from the shadows near the fire where he sits in a tall armchair.
“Not again,” he says, with a rasp of agony in his voice.
I wince. I know the power and persuasion of hallucination. I lived it in my cage. I’d wake from a tortured slumber smelling food, certain Mom had come home and I was going to open my eyes to a heaping bowl of my favorite creamed corn, topped with a crispy helping of fried chicken and green beans only to find there was nothing there for me to gnaw on but my own knuckles.
Again.
I knew the despair of the moment the brain processed the deceit, that hope crumbled to ash. That the thing you wanted so desperately wasn’t there, and maybe never would be again.
He smells me and thinks I’m a dream.
I intend to fulfill every one of his wildest ones tonight.
I step carefully into the room, skirting bits of debris and broken glass, trying to decide what to say, how to convince him I’m real. Some of my hallucinations had been so extreme they’d nearly unhinged me. I’d actually eaten imaginary meals. Starvation messes with your head. Sustained deprivation of anything you desperately need does.
He desperately needed me. I like that. I feel the same about him. I decide the best approach is to simply touch him. Let our bodies do the talking.
As I skirt the shattered coffee table and approach his high-backed armchair, I inhale sharply, butterflies fluttering from my stomach to my throat. I’m…nervous? No. I’m exhilarated. Okay…a little nervous and have no bloody idea why. Just that this man has always rattled me.
God, this is it! He’s here, I’m here, my skin is flawless ivory, we’re free to be together, to be everything I’ve ever hungered to be with him. I know I’m real; yet even I almost can’t believe this moment has come. I’d thought it would never happen. That I’d lost us forever.
Still, I was quickly disabused of my grief. He’s been grieving me for months.
I clear his chair and circle to stand in front of him.
He tips his head back and stares at me with narrowed silver eyes, stained with crimson streaks. “I’m getting better at this,” he mocks. “Christ, you look so fucking real. So fucking sexy in that dress.” His gaze rakes me from head to toe, heat floods my body, fire ignites in my blood. “I never told you. You define beauty for me, Dani O’Malley. Copper flames and emerald ice. The snow and rose of your skin. Those insanely powerful legs. The steel in your spine. The unquenchable fire in your spirit.”
Well, fuck, he’d silenced me. I’d stand unspeaking for an hour if it meant he’d keep talking like that.
“You’re unbreakable, woman. None of it ever broke you. You’re my fucking holy place. Do you know that? Why the fuck didn’t I ever tell you?”
I swallow hard, tears stinging the backs of my eyes. His holy place. That’s exactly how he feels to me. He’s my temple. I slip into his presence and the world melts away and I’m safe and together we can face anything, do anything, survive anything, always find the next way to be together. I think that’s what love is; holding someone sacred, honoring them, protecting them, living up to the very best of them. The grief, the pain, the fury in his gaze slays me. Humbles me. I will never doubt the depth of this man’s emotion. It’s evident in every too-tightly drawn line of his body, the stony set of his face, the half-wild look in his eyes.
I drop to my knees before him. Holy hell, he’s beautiful. I’ve never seen him like this, dressed only in a pair of low slung, faded black sweats, skin poured over rippling muscle, glistening gold in the firelight. This is Ryodan slumming. His face shadowed with beard growth I’ve never seen that makes him look diabolic, dark, fascinating. He smells like beast and feral fury and no shower in a long time and I don’t give a damn. He smells exactly right to me. Danger. Edges sharp enough to cut myself on. And I know he’ll heal my every wound if I do. His perfectly cropped hair is long, messy as if he’s been running his hands through it. He’s too lean, skin tight against bone, and I know he hasn’t fed in a long time.
I reach out and place a palm flat to his hard, chiseled chest.
No heartbeat. He definitely hasn’t eaten recently. “You might want to,” I tease. “I plan to wear your ass out tonight. Babe.”
He cocks his head, eyes glittering, nostrils flaring. “Even if I were starved you couldn’t wear my ass out. You’re an illusion. I let you get away. Hell, I fucking threw you away and I shouldn’t have. I should have fought for you. I should have told you everything. I should have persuaded you to reject what was happening.”
I slide my palm from his chest, down over his six-pack abdomen, trailing my fingers lightly over his velvety skin. “You didn’t throw me away. You did the hardest thing possible, sacrificed your own desires for my best interests. Trying to keep me here, almost completely black, unable to ever use my power again would have destroyed us both. Neither of us is wired that way. We push the limits. We adapt. It’s what we do.”
“And my illusion offers absolution,” he says with a snort. “I am getting better at this.”
I drop onto his lap, slinging my legs, one over each side of the chair, and take his face in my hands, stare into his beautiful eyes, fire and ice, blood and steel. “Do I feel like an illusion to you?” My dress is hitched up nearly to the top of my thighs. I lower myself, slowly, firmly, against him. He’s hard. He’s so fucking hard. And I’m so fucking, painfully alive and starved to have him inside me. I don’t need foreplay. Not this time. I just need it done. Him. In. Me. Over and over. Maybe the next time I get to be human we’ll bother with foreplay. Maybe I’m not much of a foreplay kind of woman.
His hands close on my waist tightly, fingers digging in with anger, with grief. “You never do. I’ve spent hours touching you, holding you, days fucking you in my mind.”
I say lightly, “Do it again. But it’s me. I get to be a woman half the time. Dragon the other half. Still, I only have a week. Y’rill helped me change so I could come back and tell you I was okay, spend time with you until I learn to transform myself.”