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  “Where are we going?” I ask, my heart thumping with a strange anticipation.

  “To our garden,” she answers, leading me up the winding spiral staircase that exits to our private rooftop.

  “Where we can be free.”

  Chapter Nine: If This Love Is Pain, Let’s Hurt Tonight

  *TAL*

  It is already autumn in New York City, but this evening, the air is unseasonably warm. I can smell the clean scent of humidity; the clouds are burgeoning with rain.

  As Ishtar and I exit through the private door to our secluded rooftop garden, I inhale deeply the exotic mix of fragrances therein.

  A small patch of paradise in this concrete jungle.

  The garden encompasses the entire rooftop, about five-thousand square feet in size, expanding beyond the perimeter of our apartment. Ingeniously, it is enclosed on three sides by the towers that extend up into the sky as part of the “skyscraper” that houses the Shield. On the one side that is open, the Bay meets the horizon, while other tall buildings rise like man-made mountains around the water.

  There are no windows in the towers that shield our garden from view. And unless one of those modern aircrafts hover directly overhead, no one would be able to spy on our little slice of heaven.

  Fruit and flower trees have been transplanted here with laborious care. Some even large enough to provide shade on a hot summer’s day. Flowers of every variety, even the unusual ones that need extra care, bloom with abandon as if they hadn’t been meticulously groomed and cultivated to do just that.

  Mostly, the rooftop is covered with thick, soft grass, broken only by smooth, concrete paths. Sophia mentioned that she wanted a prettier pebbled path, but Ishtar convinced her that bumps in the road are not best appreciated by a blind man.

  A small pagoda sits in the northeast corner, overlooking a large rectangular pool toward the garden, as well as surveying the Bay view beyond. It is large enough to house gigantic sofas, piled with cushions and pillows. In truth, they look and feel like two king-sized beds pushed together.

  Ishtar loves to take catnaps here.

  Steam rises from retractable vents in the ground. I suppose this is especially useful during cold seasons. Our garden is always open for enjoyment, no matter the temperature outside.

  All of this is how Ishtar describes the rooftop paradise to me. I can well imagine it. And I’ve walked every corner and path to know the layout in my mind down to the last detail.

  “I am hungry, my love,” Ishtar purrs beside me, wrapping both her arms around one of mine. “Will you feed me?”

  “Dinner is downstairs,” I reply, thinking of the meat and potatoes I prepared, that now need to be reheated. “Shall I bring—”

  “I’m not hungry for food,” she growls, putting her hands on my naked chest.

  “I am hungry for you.”

  My body locks reflexively, my muscles tensing to stone.

  This is the first in a very long time that she has demanded anything physical from me. She has been taught by my flinching reactions that such overtures are not welcome. Or rather, that I do not respond as a Pure male who loves his female should.

  She feels my stress under the pads of her fingers, beneath her heated palm. But she doesn’t immediately pull away like she always does when I react this way. Instead, she digs her fingertips further into my skin. Her body temperature, already hotter than mine, a characteristic difference between our Kinds, rises even further.

  She is not backing down from what she wants this time.

  I settle my hands on her shoulders, to push her away or to pull her close, it is not clear.

  My Mated male instincts want to crush her body to mine, to thrust deeply into her tight, welcoming heat, to join our flesh seamlessly together—until we are truly one. But my learned aversion to touch tenses me for fight or flight.

  Not this night, I determine. Tonight, I want to start anew.

  I want to be free.

  No more secrets. No more hiding. Even if she hurts me, even if it kills me, I will give her everything.

  “Then you shall have me, ana Ishtar,” I murmur against her hair, pulling her close and wrapping my arms around her.

  “You shall have all of me.”

  A primal growl reverberates through her chest and throat. The nails of her hands turn slightly to claws, sharp enough to dig shallow gouges into my pecs, drawing blood.

  I hiss at the small pain that feels so pleasurable, more addictive to me than any gentle caress.

  She slowly laps the droplets of blood away, lingering on my nipples, nipping the beaded pebbles with her teeth.

  More blood. More slow licks to soothe the pain and heal the scratches.

  “I don’t want to hold back with you tonight,” she rumbles, her voice husky with predatory desire.

  “Then don’t,” I answer with a certainty that my soul embraces, while my mind still struggles to process.

  “I might break you.” Her voice is both teasing and edged with subtle threat.

  She is a Dark One, after all. At least half of her. The other half contains her animal spirit, the Great White Beast. Combined, she is danger, power and voracious desire incarnate. Never has she unleashed all of her aggression upon me.

  Except the once.

  But it was not love that drove her then. It was poisonous hate and vengeance.

  Now, everything is different. We are different.

  I want to know all of her. I want to be free with her, just as I want her to be free with me.

  “Then break me,” I reply. “Perhaps if you break my broken pieces and put me back together again, I will finally make sense.”

  “And we can be whole,” she says, understanding me implicitly. “Together.”

  “Yes,” I murmur against her lips, brushing across her mouth with mine over and over, fanning the fires of her passion, inviting her to take what she wants.

  She turns her face away from mine, dipping her head, her clawed nails gently raking down my torso, leaving fiery, stinging paths in their wake, but not hard enough to break the skin.

  “Have I told you how much I love your body, Tal? Now even more so than when we first met, when I first knew that I’d love you until the end of time and beyond.”

  One nail traces around my navel, drawing a path toward my groin. She stops at the waistband of my trousers and digs her claws between the material and my skin.

  And then, so fast I barely feel it, she demonstrates the lethal sharpness of those claws by slicing the fabric entirely away, the material falling to my feet in ribbons.

  “Do you know why?” she murmurs, planting a soft kiss on my throat.

  Then, another kiss on my sternum, each of my pecs, and the deep groove between them. She kisses her way down the ridges of my abdomen, going to her knees before me, flicking her tongue into my navel, then lapping at the shallow indentation repeatedly. Over and over, she laps and thrusts her tongue, while her clawed hands dig into my hips on either side.

  I brace my legs wider apart at her onslaught, naked and trembling in her hands. But the shivers are not from cold.

  There’s a strange alchemy of sensations and emotions churning and warring within me. Physically, it’s as if my navel is attached directly to my cock, the way every thrust of her tongue makes it thicken and throb. She ignores it, however, though it stands hard and leaking, jutting past my navel, bouncing against the drum of my stomach beside her jaw.

  Psychologically, I am…both excited and afraid. The dark side of me craves the pain she’s shown through her actions just now that she can, and wishes to, inflict.

  The sane part of me recoils in horror. My body obviously wants this, but shouldn’t I not want pain? Isn’t this more proof that Medusa has made a monster of me? Ruined me?

  Finally, she stops tormenting my belly button and scratches the veins on either side of my lower abdomen with the tips of her fangs, this time drawing thin lines of blood into the skin.

  “I love your body m
ore now than before because you’ve lived in it. You’ve suffered in it. But you’ve also triumphed in it and honed it into a big, mean, fighting machine.”

  I huff a surprised breath.

  “Is that another one of those modern phrases you adopted from Sophia?”

  “Indeed,” she answers. “I quote Sophia directly. Though I might have hissed and growled at her immediately after she made the comment, because I do not countenance other females coveting my male.”

  A tremor of suppressed laughter courses through me, relaxing my body by degrees.

  “Ishtar…”

  “Don’t you Ishtar me,” she counters before I can say anything. “I know that there was nothing between you when she was Ninti and you were the General, but I am still jealous that she was by your side for two decades fighting the war, while I was not. I am jealous of the time she had with you, however platonic. And it’s clear as daylight that she finds you excessively attractive in her current incarnation as well.”

  “Sophia is in love with Da—”

  “Not that I blame her,” Ishtar goes on, talking over me, her claws winding behind me to dig into my gluteus maximus with enough force to make me jolt forward, pressing my erection directly into her face.

  Obligingly, she sucks and licks the thick root while mumbling more words.

  “You are exceedingly magnificent, after all. Beautiful and strong. So strong…”

  Without warning, she sinks the tips of her fangs into my base, startling me with the sharp, stinging pain.

  But gradually, the venom in her saliva soothes the hurt with addictive pleasure, made even more euphoric by the accompanying pain.

  She drinks the blood from the root of my sex slowly, partly sucking through the puncture wounds made by her fangs, partly licking with her tongue.

  Pain and pleasure blend together. I cannot separate them. I do not want to.

  My hands wind into her hair of their own volition, my body impatient for more.

  “Take all of me into your throat,” I command her roughly, my voice like gravel.

  I snap my hips forward, trying to make her focus on the head of my weeping cock where I’m most sensitive, most hungry for her attention.

  She withdraws her fangs and licks the small wounds closed, but doesn’t obey me.

  “Not yet,” she says sternly. “I have plans for you.”

  Then, unexpectedly, she asks, “What did you cook for dinner?”

  Overwhelmed by the sensations she evokes in me, I answer without thinking, “Meat and potatoes, just a simple fare.”

  “Purrfect,” she growls.

  “This is the perfect meat.”

  She licks a hot, wet trail from the base of my pulsing cock to the engorged crown, circling the head of my sex once, twice, before jabbing the tip of her tongue into my swollen slit.

  I grunt at the incredible feeling and sway on my feet. If her claws in my ass hadn’t been keeping me prisoner where she wanted me, I might have lost my balance.

  “And these…” she says as her mouth moves back down my sex to the heavy weights below, “are the perfect potatoes.”

  My gasp of surprised laughter is cut short when she sucks one of my sacs into her mouth, her nose pushing into my groin as she inhales deeply where my scent is strongest.

  “Mmm,” she mumbles as she does the same to the other sac, “such a delectable, delicious meal. And smells as good as it tastes.”

  “Ishtar…”

  “Lie down on the grass, my love.”

  Her request is half demand, half entreaty. The needy possessiveness of her tone makes me even harder.

  She retracts her claws and sits back a little, making room for me.

  “On your stomach,” she instructs when I lower myself to the ground.

  Instinctively, my body rebels against the implication of what she is asking.

  She wants me exposed, naked and vulnerable. She knows what was done to me. She’s seen the scars. She’s lived my nightmares.

  It is my deepest shame. My greatest pain.

  I cannot—

  “Trust me, my heart,” she murmurs softly, her once again human hands with their gentle fingers stroking lightly along my sides.

  “If this love is pain, then let’s hurt tonight. Let’s hurt and heal together. Believe in me, Tal. Believe in us.”

  Swallowing hard, I slowly stretch out on the thick, lush carpet of grass and turn on my stomach, fighting my inner demons with every move.

  “Breathe, Tal,” her low, sultry voice entreats. “Breathe in the night air, as fresh as can be in a place like New York City. Do you smell the salt from the nearby Bay? Feel the sticky humidity in the air. The soft, silky grass beneath your skin. The scent of rich, fertile soil. The clouds above are pregnant with rain…”

  A few beads of water plop onto my back and arms as she speaks. Thunder rolls softly in the distance as a hazy drizzle descends upon the lands.

  “Do you feel that? Warm, wholesome earth. Cool, clean rain. You’re not trapped in any prison, my love. We’re outside in the open, in our own little paradise. You’re free. I’m free. I want to be free with you.”

  I inhale deep breaths and close my blind eyes, letting my other senses take over.

  Everything she describes, I absorb. I hear the rustling of leaves in nearby trees. The distant bustle of the sleepless city. The sounds of small animals that inhabit the garden. The occasional lapping of water in the pool when the breeze blows across it.

  I am free.

  Everything that we do here will be by my choice. Whether pain or pleasure, it will be my desire.

  Wordlessly, I fold my arms under my face and open my thighs, inviting her to touch me. My body is still tense, every muscle turned to steel, but I offer it to her willingly.

  To take. To own. To fuck.

  To love.

  She straddles the small of my back and puts her hands on my shoulders, kneading and massaging deeply. She is still fully dressed, the fabric of her trousers lightly abrading my skin, while I am entirely naked.

  Because of this, I do feel rather like a feast laid out for a hungry predator. Perhaps she is “tenderizing” the meat before she eats it.

  The thought makes my lips curl at one corner.

  “I love your broad back,” she praises, her words lazy and soft. “Wide, yet lean. It’s beautiful like the rest of you. Strong enough to carry the world. That’s what it seems like to me. That you’ve always carried the weight of the world. Who can carry you, I wonder? Who can take care of you?”

  “Any volunteers?” I murmur, trying to lighten her serious words.

  “Me, me, and me,” she replies, digging her fingers into the muscles along my spine. “No one but me.”

  She leans forward to kiss my nape, her long, wavy hair glancing my skin in teasing cascades. Then, she moves down the groove of my spine, shifting her position when the kisses take her to the rise of my buttocks.

  She kneels between my spread thighs and uses her knees to nudge my legs wider, while her hands knead the tense muscles around my waist.

  “Have I ever told you how much I adore, worship, am enslaved by these gorgeous hard globes?” She smacks her lips with emphasis.

  My body trembles with laughter, joy relaxing my locked muscles more effectively than anything else could.

  I flex said globes in invitation, undulating a little to taunt her.

  She growls low in her throat, both playful and aggressive. I can smell her heightened arousal, the sweet, musky scent of her swollen, pulsing, empty sex permeating the air.

  My erection, trapped beneath my body against the grassy ground, throbs in answer, hard enough to pound stone, thick and ready to fill her.

  But when she spreads my buttocks with her hands and licks a long path from the base of my scrotum to my perineum, over the scarred tissues around my anus, my body locks down as crushing shame and terrifying pain engulf me.

  I cannot help the choked groan that escapes. I try to breathe in my fr
eedom, soak it into my skin through the air and rain. I remind myself that the pain isn’t real. It’s in my head.

  I try…but it’s not working. I cannot do this. I cannot…

  “Tal…” Ishtar’s voice comes to me as if distorted through a long, dark tunnel.

  “Tal…”

  I shake my head and fight to keep still.

  Medusa has no place here. I won’t let her win.

  This is between me and my Mate.

  My love.

  Ishtar lays herself on top of my back and kisses my jaw and neck, the side of my face that is accessible to her. She kisses my tightly shut eyes, licking away the moisture gathered on my lashes. It is not from the rain.

  “Did you know that you have freckles beneath your scars?”

  It’s the first time that she explicitly comments on my scars. I am surprised enough to hear her and listen.

  “I think they’re freckles, or maybe small moles. Beauty marks, Sophia calls them. You have a scattering of them on your torso, like shooting stars under the rain and hail of your scars. So beautiful. Bewitching.”

  She begins the massaging and kneading again, along with peppered kisses across my shoulders and back, starting the same process she went through before. Her touch heating up my skin, thawing my muscles, her lingering kisses a gentle, erotic reminder that she is making love to me.

  That this is us. And we are free.

  “You have these tantalizing little spots on your back as well. One here, in the middle of your spine.”

  She scrapes the place with the edge of her nail, making me shiver.

  “One here, right over your tailbone, like a punctuation mark.”

  She presses her finger into the indention and draws it lightly, teasingly through the tight cleft of my buttocks.

  I exhale a held breath and slowly unlock my muscles one by one.

  “And here, there are three dots,” she murmurs, her finger circling the bottom of my ass cheek where it meets my thigh, inward toward my perineum.

  “Like a constellation of stars, but I forget which one. I shall name all of the stars I find on your body, and claim each and every one as mine.”

  Before I knew what she planned, I feel her warm, wet tongue flicking, then lapping at my perineum, down to the base of my scrotum, then back up again, teasing ever closer to my tightly shut hole.