Free Claiming Ecstasy by Madeline Pryce Page B

eventual birth, seers beholden to my mother
saw my betrayal.
    Tonight I was to prove my allegiance.
    I pushed back on a desperate moan and forced Nicolas’ cock
deeper—needing the connection between us to breathe. I was trapped, pinned
within the cage of his hard, muscled chest and the iron bands of his arms. The balcony
was no longer close enough to touch. The concrete was gone and in its absence,
only chaos remained.
    “Yes. Gods, yes,” I screamed as the ecstasy numbed my toes.
My voice was raspy, seductive. I barely recognized it as my own.
    I was lost in sensation. My death—the true end of my
life—beckoned as the tight walls of my pussy pulsed around his cock, the first
tremors of my orgasm threatening to sneak up on me. Sometimes, when he fucked
me, it felt fatal—this time it would be. The more pleasure, the more pain I
gave into with Nicolas, the tighter the black fist of death squeezed around my
soul. He controlled the fist, choked my essence until the pressure was all
consuming. One closing finger at a time, my life force was being extinguished.
I felt it and welcomed it. I was sick. Twisted. I was in love with my rival.
    Each beat of my heart came harder. Each breath I took was
shallower than the last. I drifted in thoughts of death, of the freedom it
would bring.
    I should die. The thought was punctuated with the hard,
steady thrust of his cock.
    Nicolas forced my head to the side and dominated my mouth
with his. I gripped the back of his head, slid my tongue against his and
deepened our kiss. I couldn’t kill him but knew I had to, not just for my
people but for self-preservation. My love for him was more than an obsession. My
want for him went beyond my control. He was the dark to my light. I needed him
like air—like water. No one except him understood how perverse I really was. No
one except him understood me at all. No one except him cared.
    Kill me. The plea burned the tip of my tongue.
    “I can show you death, lover, if that’s what you want.”
Nicolas growled and turned me to face him.
    The dark night brightened with electric light, exposing the barren
balcony layered in smooth gray brick. The ground rumbled from the sky’s fury.
The sudden burst of light let me see that Nicolas’ heavy-lidded eyes were amber
with flecks of golden, swirling power. His too-handsome face was a mask of
perfection. The high cheekbones combined with the sweep of black, curling hair
should have been feminine but his square, muscled jaw was too chiseled to be
anything but pure, devastating male.
    Nicolas gripped my thigh and drew it up, over his hip. He
didn’t enter me right away. Our gazes clashed—his full of furious desire, mine
of guilty acceptance. He slid back inside one slow inch at a time and the anxiety
flowing through me eased. Carefully, with more tenderness then anyone had ever
shown me, he guided me onto my back atop the cool, hard floor. The chaos inside
my head disappeared. He filled me, stretched me again and again. The tips of my
nipples scraped against the hard wall of his chest. I knew from the smug tilt
of his sensual mouth and the satisfied gleam lighting his eyes that he read my
relief. This only added to my shame.
    Nicolas drew a line along the corner of my eye with his
thumb and stared at me. “I could drown in your eyes. They are so pure, so
innocent. No matter how hard I fuck you, how badly I hurt you, they still shine
with a desire that burns brighter then the Irish moss your irises resemble.”
    I shook my head, hated his attempt to make this anything
other than a primal meeting of bodies. “They are just green.”
    He tried to smile at me, I think, but his lips curved up
into something that was more a snarl of sharp, gleaming fangs. Doubt crept in.
Mother’s words haunted me. He’s using you, you stupid bitch. His fancy
words were a game, a battle of wills we’d been playing since he’d snuck into my
bedroom on my eighteenth birthday three years ago. It had been the best