When I glanced up over her shoulder, my reflection in the mirror caught my gaze. It stared at me, smiling. Though I was sure I had no such expression on my own face. The fangs behind my own lips had never been that long. And somehow, I knew what it told me.
“Little Goddess,” I whispered into Devika’s ear, gripping her hair firmly and baring her neck as I lowered my lips to her throat, and the flow of blood just beneath the skin. “Close your eyes.”
The noises she made ordered my muscles to obey, and my hand tightened in her hair, gripping it until she dug her nails into my back and tried to jerk away from me, but my fangs had found purchase already, and I buried them slowly in her skin.
The soft sound of her moaning became all I could hear, and she keened a violin’s sorrowful song, alongside my ear. It reverberated through my skull until I’d bitten deep, and I hummed with her, shadow spilling into the open wound, blood sliding over my tongue, wetting my lips, sealed in the sinful kiss.
Her small whimper of pain was frail, delicate, like her. It awoke the snarling animal that prowled in my chest. The swirling mass of shadow, whose livelihood depended on her. It lived for her. If it could, it would have breathed for her. But for now, it roiled for her, and it reached out to her pain, as it had in nights past, and numbed it, licking at the wound with soft touches, transforming the pain into sensations that bound us closer with every embrace. The shadow escaped in breaths as I sighed against her, bewildered by my desire for her and aching as she calmed in my arms.
