The Demon Lord's Vessel(4)

His claws gripped my hips and pinned me face-down against the cold stone. My cheek pressed flat. Bright lines of light moved under my skin, spilling across the floor in slow gold ribbons. The stone was rough beneath me, and I held on to the feel of it, the one steady thing in a world that had stopped making sense.

He didn’t hold back. I felt the force of him through the stone, through my hips, through every nerve I owned. My breath hitched against the floor. The glow under my skin flared with every movement, and the light pooled around me, bright enough to make the shadows run.

“Don’t stop,” I said. “Harder.”

He gave it to me. His claws sank into my skin just enough to sting, and his horns pressed down against the back of my head, holding me where I was. My face stayed flat on the floor. My wings twitched against the stone, and the stubs burned in the dark like coals.

I pressed up against the horns for one second, then let myself sink back into the hold. “Keep me down.”

He did.

I stopped trying to understand what was happening to me. There was only the weight of him and the heat of the stone and the strange, burning music of the light, rising and falling with every breath. Somewhere in the distance, I heard my own voice saying his name. It sounded like it belonged to someone else.

My knees scraped the stone. My arms trembled from holding myself in place. I met every movement with my own, pushing back into him on purpose. I wanted this. Even now, even here, that was the one thing I was sure of, and I kept coming back to it while the world narrowed to nothing but heat.

“More,” I said.

He shifted. His tail coiled against my thigh, warm and heavy, and his claws dragged slowly across my skin. The glow answered. Every time he moved, it brightened, running down my arms and legs in thin gold threads until I looked like a map of rivers lit from within.

The light began to hum. It was a low, steady note, felt more than heard, like a bell rung somewhere beneath the earth. The stone trembled with it. Dust lifted from the floor in tiny glittering spirals and hung in the air, caught in the glow.

“Damien,” I breathed.

He didn’t answer. His breath came rough and uneven above me, and his horns pressed harder against my head. I felt the heat of his body along my whole back, the scales smoothing and rasping against my skin, and I closed my eyes and let it carry me.

“Don’t let go,” I said. My voice cracked.

His claws tightened. He didn’t let go.

Time lost its edges. I couldn’t tell how long we stayed like that, only that the glow kept climbing, and the hum kept growing, and the stone beneath me had begun to burn with my own light. My wings scraped the floor. My fingers curled against the stone until my knuckles ached.

Somewhere deep in my chest, the pull I had felt before began again, stronger now, slow and insistent, like a tide drawing back from the shore. It tugged at the light under my skin. It tugged at me. I felt myself leaning into it, helpless, unwilling to resist.

“Faster,” I said.

He moved faster. The room shook. The hum rose into a high, bright ringing, and the light poured out of me in great spilling waves, gold and white, flooding the stone. My vision blurred. I felt the heat gather, a pressure beneath my ribs that grew and grew until I thought it would split me open.

I gripped the stone. I held on.

And then the light broke, flooding outward from the center of me in one blinding wave, and every shadow in the room vanished at once.