Crown Me Yours — Chapter 18

Chapter

Eighteen

Elara

he cold is a shock.

I stumble back, coughing snow from my mouth, the freezingT crystals melting against the heat of my tongue. And yet giggles bubble out of me, bouncing off the stable’s ancient beams.

Vale lets out a soft, huffing laugh. His grip on my waist loosens, but he doesn’t pull away. Instead, he turns me toward him, the edge of his heavy velvet sleeve brushing the remaining slush from my cheeks and brow.

I look up at him, the golden light in my chest pulsing in rhythm with my heart. My laughter fades, tapering off into the heavy breathing between us as his thumb grazes the line of my jaw.

It lingers at the corner of my mouth, pressing just enough to reveal the pink of my inner lip. The playfulness has vanished, replaced by a

devastating, raw yearning as he looks down at my mouth. His gaze tracks every shallow, jagged breath I take, before flicking back to meet mine with a desperation that borders on agony.

“Saints, Elara…” He swallows hard, the movement of his throat stark, his restraint a hum in the air like the prickling tension before lightning strikes. “Tell me you truly want this kiss. Say you long for it as much as I do.”

Glove pulled from my hand, I glide my fingers up to his jaw until I feel the frantic strike of his pulse against my own, the curse all but forgotten. In its place is an urge as raw as it is old, a longing for the solemn quiet of the grave, the calming fragrance of carnations, the familiar comfort of Death.

“I want to kiss my husband,” I whisper, my voice thick with quiet honesty, my gaze dropping to his mouth before rising back to his, steady and unflinching. “And my husband…is Death.”

A sound breaks from him, part sob, part growl—a visceral release of an eternity of loneliness.

It vibrates against my lips as they meet his, connecting in a kiss that makes my eyes flutter shut. Within that darkness, I sense the shift. Smooth teeth against my mouth. Skeletal fingers cupping my cheek. Stuttered breaths catching on tendons.

As my palm glides higher, the smoothness of his jaw vanishes, replaced by polished bone that shifts with our kiss. A kiss heavy with the gravity of every soul he ever took, yet focused entirely on the one in his arms.

His skeletal hand slides from my cheek into my hair, cradling my skull with a gentleness that contradicts the desperate sounds tearing from his throat. “Touch me more. Please.”

I gaze up at him, at how he stands hunched over to make himself smaller. My fingers slip between his cloak to explore the transition at his sternum—smooth skin yielding to curved ribs—sending a shudder through him so violent that the air trembles around us.

What follows is a slow unraveling of layers. His cloak, black and heavy, falls to the straw. My dress, unlaced with agonizing care by fingers of bone and flesh alike. My shift, dragged down with a patience that makes me ache, the linen catching on my nipples before whispering free.

Each reveal earns a sound from him, low and starving, and each touch of his bony fingertips on my bare skin sends a bolt straight through my

center. Warm thumb tracing one breast while ivory fingers cradle its weight.

The contrast alone could undo me.

“So beautiful,” he whispers, gathering my skirts, stripping the last scrap of cotton from my legs before he lifts me as though I weigh nothing. “So fucking made for me.”

My back meets the chilled timber wall. His arms hook beneath my thighs, and my legs wrap around the impossible breadth of him, heels barely catching behind his hips.

I look down between us, and my breath fails. His cock is thick, the grayish-pale skin flush, weeping a glistening thread that stretches between our skin like a filament of light.

“We’ll be careful,” he rasps, reading every flicker of concern on my face. His forehead drops to my temple. “Like the first time, in the tower.”

“Yes,” I all but breathe, reaching down between us to guide his broad crown through my slickness to my entrance. “Slow.”

He pushes forward and up, making me clench against the blunt, staggering pressure as my hand flies to his chest. A sharp hiss leaves my teeth. He freezes instantly, every muscle locked, breathing thin and

controlled.

“Give me a moment.”

He gives me an eternity.

Standing there trembling, barely inside me, his forehead drifting to mine, the restraint is costing him. I feel the violent tremors that run through his thighs. Feel the desperate clench of his jaw, bone grinding on bone.

I exhale. Will myself open. Rock my hips a fraction, and I slip down on him by an inch.

The sound he makes has no name. Broken. Reverent. Older than

language.

“Now,” I whisper. “Slowly.”

He feeds himself into me in careful, devastating increments. A thick inch. A pause to read my breathing. Another inch. Each one stretches me further past what should be possible, the burn blurring the line between pleasure and pain. I bury my little whimpers against his neck, tasting salt on the tendon there.

“Shh,” he hushes, nuzzling my temple with what’s left of his nose.

“Almost.”

When his hips finally press flush, seating him so deep, so completely that the fullness pushes the air from my lungs in one shuddering rush, Death

goes still.

Utterly, absolutely still.

His forehead drifts against mine again. Bone to skin. Breath to breath.

The frantic beat of his heart reverberates through my entire body, syncing with my own until I can’t tell which rhythm belongs to whom.

“Elara,” he whispers, and it sounds like the first word spoken after an eternity of silence.

I tighten my arms around his neck, pulling us closer until my breasts

meet pectoral and ribs. “I’m here.”

He exhales, long and unraveling.

Then, his hips begin to move.

The first thrust is shallow, a careful retreat and return that tests the limits of my body’s welcome. Even that small motion drags a moan from somewhere so deep inside me, trapped between warm bliss and chilled timber.

“More,” I gasp, digging my heels into the small of his back, finding purchase on the smooth skin there.

He obeys with a groan that grinds through exposed teeth, pulling back further before sliding home in one long, devastating stroke. The fullness hits differently in motion—a deep, rolling pressure that lights every nerve from the inside, making my thighs clench and my spine bow away from the timber.

“Look at me,” he commands, his voice wrecked.

I force my eyes open. Those black, bottomless hollows hold me with an attention so absolute, so devastatingly focused, it feels like being seen for the first time by the only eyes that ever mattered. It’s terrible and breathtaking, making my walls clench hard around him.

“I can feel you tightening,” he rasps against my mouth, his pace growing ragged, less controlled. “I can feel every part of you pulling me deeper.”

His rhythm builds like a tide, unhurried but relentless. Each thrust reaches deeper than the last, his massive frame pinning me to the wall while his arms bear every ounce of my weight. The muscles on his human side flex and cord with each roll of his hips, while on his other side, sinew pulls taut between ivory ribs in raw, hypnotic shifts.

I’m trembling, my thighs shaking around him, my hands grappling at the back of his neck. “We have to…have to move…”

He doesn’t question it.

Doesn’t even break stride.

His arms tighten beneath my thighs, pulling me off the wall and flush against his chest in one fluid motion. I feel every step reverberate through me—each one shifting him inside me, a deep, nudging pressure that makes my breath hitch and my fingers claw at his shoulders.

Three strides. Four. The stable blurs past in streaks of gold and shadow.

He lowers me onto the hayrick with a care that borders on worship, the dry stalks crackling beneath my back as his cock slides free. The sudden emptiness is a shock. A hollow, aching absence that makes me whimper and reach for him.

“Patience,” he murmurs, and the grind of that word through bone and throat sends a shiver straight to my core. “For once, I want to take my time.”

He sinks to his knees between my sprawled thighs, the knock of bone against stone clicking through the stable. His hands skim up the outside of my legs, bony fingertips dragging lines of fire along my skin before curling beneath my knees and spreading me open.

The cool air hits my slick, swollen heat, and I flinch. Not from cold, but from the first careful contact. Lips on one side, the smooth edge of teeth on the other, pressing a slow, open kiss against my center that makes my hips buck off the hay. His tongue follows—broad, hot, impossibly thorough— dragging a flat stroke from my entrance to the swollen bud at my apex.

I cry out, my hand flying to his skull, fingers digging into whatever black curls I can find there. He groans against me, the vibration buzzing straight into the nerve, and my vision whites at the edges.

He quickly finds his rhythm: a merciless, lapping devotion, his tongue circling and flicking with precision. Every time my thighs tense, every time my breath hitches higher, he adjusts. Slower when I’m close to shattering.

Faster when I sag back from the edge.

“Stop teasing,” I pant, tugging at his curls, my heels digging into the hard planes of his back. “Please…”

He answers by sealing his mouth over my clit and sucking, hard, while two long fingers—one warm flesh, one smooth bone—slide inside me with

a slick, curling thrust. The stretch is nothing compared to what I just took, but the angle, the beckoning press against that devastating spot… My spine arches clean off the hay as I come undone. The sound that tears from my throat is raw, riding on a peak that goes on and on, each stroke of his fingers extending it by excruciating seconds.

He rises slowly, dragging the back of his hand across his mouth—bone catching on his lower lip—and stares down at me with an expression I’ve never seen on him.

Not hunger. Not smugness. Something quieter and infinitely more

dangerous.

Pride.

“Death is a lover,” he murmurs, his voice like gravel. “And one not even half bad.”

Before I can respond, he’s climbing over me, the hay compressing beneath his weight, his massive frame eclipsing the stable rafters until he’s all I see. He settles between my trembling thighs with a slick, blunt press at my entrance.

He slides into me easily. One long stroke, my mouth falling open on a soundless cry. He swallows it with a kiss, hunching low to reach me, his spine curving into a great bow that changes the angle of his hips. The thrusts turn shallow this way—short, rocking motions that keep him buried deep while his tongue tangles with mine. I taste myself on him, salt and musk, and the intimacy of it makes something crack open behind my ribs.

He breaks the kiss to breathe, his forehead dropping beside mine, and I feel the nudge of his jaw against my cheek. Then he finds my hand where it grips the hay and lifts it, pressing my palm flat against the exposed ribs on his side.

“Touch me,” he says. “Explore your husband.”

Not a request. A need.

I trace the ridges of bone, the sinew strung between them. My fingers dip into the gaps, feeling the impossible heat radiating from within his open chest. He shudders above me with a groan that sounds pulled from the earth itself—and with it, two perfectly healed heartstrings that thrum along.

My gaze searches for the blackness of his, my voice thin. “Your heart is healing.”

He takes my hand from his ribs, brings it to his mouth, and presses his lips to my knuckles in a loving kiss. “I know.”

He turns my palm over and kisses the center of it, tongue darting out to taste the salt there, and something in his black hollow eyes goes so tender I nearly shatter again. Then the tenderness shifts.

He releases my hand, grips the back of my thigh, and hitches my leg higher against his side. The new angle opens me completely, tilting my hips until the next thrust drives so deep I feel it behind my navel.

“Vale…” I choke out his name—half plea, half prayer—and his restraint finally, mercifully snaps.

He drives into me hard. The hay scatters beneath us with each impact, stalks catching in my hair, on his bones, floating through the dim air like chaff at threshing. The wet slap of skin-on-skin echoes off the beams, punctuated by his low, rhythmic grunts and the keening sounds I can’t seem to stop making.

His thrusts grow erratic, each sound he makes more desperate than the last, and I feel the coil inside me winding again, impossibly, already.

“Together,” I mewl. “With me.”

His jaw clenches, bone grinding, as if it takes his entire life force to slow his thrusts as he does. “No. I want you to finish what you started that

night.”

The world tilts.

His arm bands around my waist. In one fluid motion, he rolls, keeping himself buried so deep the shift wrings a gasp from both of us. My knees find the hay on either side of his hips, and suddenly, I’m astride him, his enormous frame sprawled beneath me, ribs and muscle and bone rising and

falling with each ragged breath.

His hands settle on my hips.

A nudge is all it takes, and I roll my hips the way I did that night, grinding my clit against his body. It makes a guttural, shattered sound rattle through every exposed bone. So I do it again. Slower. Finding the angle that drags him against that spot inside me, the one that turns my vision to sparks.

His head tips back into the hay, the column of his throat bared—half skin, half stripped tendon—and his fingers spasm against my hips. “Keep fucking me like that. Don’t stop.”

I build my rhythm. Rising until only the thick head of him remains inside me, then sinking down in one deliberate slide that seats him to the

hilt. Each descent pulls another groan from him, his stomach muscles clenching into rigid planes.

His jaw falls open, bone unhinging slightly on the bare side, and the moan that escapes is so raw, so helpless, it nearly tips me over the edge right there. “Slow down.”

I can’t. The coil is winding too tight, my body chasing its own desperate rhythm, each downstroke sending me closer to the edge. His cock twitches inside me, and I feel the telltale throb, the swelling heat that means he’s close, too.

“You need to—” His grip tightens on my hips, bone pressing hard into my flesh. Not pushing me down. Pushing me…up? “Stop. Elara—”

But I’m already gone. The coil snaps, an explosion of tingles, and I clench around him so hard my vision dissolves into ringing, shuddering light. The orgasm tears through me in waves, each one gripping him tighter, pulling him deeper, and I feel the exact moment his resolve breaks.

His hands stop lifting.

They slam me down.

He buries himself to the root with a cry that splits the air—half roar, half something frighteningly close to a sob—and I feel him pulse inside me.

Hot. Flooding. Each spasm pushing deeper than the last while his hips jerk up off the hay in helpless, stuttering thrusts, his entire body convulsing beneath me like something holy coming apart.

We hang there, trembling, the silence broken only by two desperate creatures remembering how to breathe as I collapse onto his chest.

He shifts beneath me. A small movement, just enough to look down between us. Then he goes rigid.

His breath catches, stops entirely, stillness spreading through him like frost across a window. His hands find my waist, and he lifts me off him with a care that contradicts the sudden, sharp panic radiating from every bone.

Wet warmth spills from me onto his thigh. He catches some in his palm, staring down at the evidence dripping from his bare knuckles.

His bones are trembling.

His whole arm is trembling.

“What’s wrong?”

He doesn’t answer. His jaw works, and something fractures behind those black, hollow eyes. Something vast and terrified.

His forehead finds mine. Presses, hard, the ridge of his brow digging into my skin while his breath comes in short, shattered bursts. I bring my hands to his face, holding him there, and for a long moment, he lets me.

Then I feel him shake his head. A slow, grinding drag of bone against my skin. Not a refusal of me. Something worse.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers.

Shadow curls around him like a closing fist—his cloak materializing from nothing, swallowing the bone and skin and sinew whole.

My hands close on empty air.