“Come on,” a deep voice murmured, cool hands running over her face, brushing back the hair on her forehead. “Wake up for me.”
Ophelia didn’t want whoever was touching her to ever stop.
“Mmm?” she muttered, trying to open her eyes, but they were much too heavy.
“I’m going to start healing you,” the voice told her.
She hummed an incoherent response as they began running their fingertips over the damaged skin of her hands and arms. A staticky, vibrating sensation rippled through the places they touched, and she found herself giggling.
“That tickles,” she gasped.
It didn’t take long for the strength to return to her limbs, the pain fading so quickly she nearly forgot how it felt only seconds before, and when she finally opened her eyes, a beaming smile stretched across her face as she gazed up into Blackwell’s emerald eyes.
“I think you must have been heaven-sent,” she told him as her head finally cleared.
He lifted a brow in amusement. “That’s a new sentiment for me. Here.”
He offered his hand and pulled her to her feet. She stretched her arms out above her, inspecting the now-smooth skin of her palm where the wounds had been festering just a moment before. Brand-new. Meanwhile, Blackwell’s hands were now covered in her blood.
“Sorry about that,” she told him sheepishly.
He lifted a shoulder with a smirk. “It’s only blood.”
She reached out to give his hand a squeeze. “Thank you. You got me through that.”
He took a step toward her, lifting her chin with his finger so he could look her square in the eyes. “You got yourself through that. I’m proud of you.”
Her breath hitched. No one had ever said those words to her before. Not Genevieve. Not her mother. Her mother might have told her she’d done something well, but never that she was proud. Tessie Grimm had never been the kind for flowery sentiments.
As quickly as his words had warmed her, his next sentence made her blood run cold. “I want to talk about the Shadow Voice.”
She ripped her chin from his grasp and shook her head. “No. In fact, why don’t you just wipe everything that happened in that level from your memory forever?”
There was something about being in excruciating pain that had postponed her embarrassment. But now that her senses had returned, sharpened from the power of his magic, she couldn’t help but be mortified by everything he just witnessed. She had cried.
Next time, just take the plummet into the ocean of lava, she chided herself.
His expression turned frustrated. “If this voice is making you hurt yourself—”
“I can fix myself without your help.” She huffed. “I was just under a lot of stress. It gets louder when I’m stressed.”
“Ophelia.” His tone was firm now. “You don’t need to fix yourself. You’re not broken. But it’s okay to get outside help if it gets too loud.”
“I can control it,” she insisted. “Just drop it.”
“It was making you beat your hand into a bloody pulp,” he stated bluntly. “Excuse me for being concerned.”
“You don’t get it,” she whispered. “No one gets it. They only judge. The girl who has to tap on walls before she leaves a room—or everyone she’s ever talked to will die. The girl who can’t run a simple errand because a dark thought popped into her head that something catastrophic would happen if she left the house that day. Meanwhile, I’m just trying to satisfy the voice long enough to get a break from having to listen to every single sin I’ve ever committed on repeat.”
“Listen, if you need to punch a wall to relieve yourself from whatever insidious voice is in your head, I’m not going to judge you. That is one of the least strange things I’ve ever come across in Phantasma, I assure you.” He narrowed his eyes. “But letting yourself believe you’ve done something so sinful that you deserve to be in pain is another sentiment altogether. And if you’re upset about what may have happened to the others in that trial… taking care of yourself first is not a sin. You understand that, right?”
She looked down at her hands. “It’s just… all my life people have had thoughts about what my mother was—what it is that I now am. Necromancer. Blasphemous. Demon. It’s all the same to some people. Sometimes, it’s easy to listen to the voice in my head when it tells me I don’t deserve something. Who wants to be around someone tied so closely to death and darkness? It’s morbid.”
“Because I, of all people, wouldn’t understand what it’s like to be surrounded by death and morbidity?” he responded dryly.
Point taken.
“Can we please talk about something else?” she implored. “After everything that just happened, Hell, I just want to feel good again.”
The intensity in his eyes heated at her words. “And what would make you feel good right now, angel?”
She swallowed thickly. The answer was on the tip of her tongue, but she couldn’t bring herself to say it. It was unequivocally a bad idea to even be thinking it. And he was taunting her, challenging her. She knew that. Yet, still—Hell if she didn’t deserve a little fun after all the blood and sweat she had just shed, if all she was guaranteed in this place was pain, why not seek out pleasure when and where she could?
He took another step closer, and she backed up into the wall behind her. They were still in the corridor just outside of the dining hall.
He placed a hand above her head for balance as he leaned in and taunted, “C’mon, angel. Tell me what I can do to make you feel good. I’m at your service after all.”
She tilted her head up, her lips brushing over his as light as a feather, but still she said nothing. A low, sensual sound hummed in the back of his throat, and he lifted his free hand to the front laces of her corset, skimming the backs of his fingers over the material across her stomach. He slowly tugged at the laces holding her corset closed, nimbly undoing them, one pull at a time, the blood still covering his hands smearing across the delicate white gossamer of the gown beneath.
“Tell me what you want,” he murmured.
Her breath hitched as the corset finally fell away and he began flicking open the buttons running down the front of the dress beneath one by one. All the way to her navel. The cool air of the open hallway hit her feverish skin, and his fingers moved to lightly trail down between her breasts, leaving a faint crimson line in their wake.
“You first,” she whispered. “What do you want?”
He moved in, turning his head so he could lightly touch his lips to the underside of her jaw. “I want you to let me see you.” His mouth began tracing up her jawline, languidly, torturously. His words tickling her skin. “All of you. There is nothing I have seen yet that has made me look away. No atrocity you could commit to make me not want you like this. No matter how forbidden.” He seared a kiss into the sensitive spot at the end of his trail. “I want to know everything. I want to see all the darkest corners of your mind.” He tilted his face up to whisper his next words right into her ear. “I want to taste your sins.”
The moment those words rolled off his tongue, something possessed her. She leaned back briefly, her hands finding their grip on the front of his shirt to steady herself before she rocked up on the balls of her feet and slammed her mouth into his. This kiss was not gentle or shy. It was all-consuming. Fire—the good kind—erupted in her core as he greedily gathered her body up into his, twisting one hand up into her hair as he wrapped his other arm around her waist like a vise. She moaned at the sensation of him deepening the kiss even further, plunging his tongue into her mouth and scraping his teeth against her bottom lip. When he pulled back to give her a chance to catch her breath, her mouth was swollen and throbbing.
He kissed his way down her throat, nipping at her pulse before lowering himself down to his knees before her. Her heart thundered in her chest, her locket nearly fusing with her skin it burned so hot, and she frantically looked around the corridor to make sure they didn’t have any witnesses. He huffed a laugh at her nervousness as he gathered her skirts and pushed them up over her hips.
“I dare someone to bother us right now,” he threatened.
Her voice was shaky as she asked, “What… what are you doing?”
He gave her a wickedly roguish look. “Tasting.”
She nearly choked on her shock, but there was no time to respond before he leaned in and began kissing the sensitive skin of her exposed inner thighs. A shiver ran down her spine the higher his mouth traveled, and her chest heaved with ragged breaths of anticipation. He slid a hand slowly up the side of her leg, toward the delicate material at her hip, and the next thing she knew, he was ripping through the lace of her panties and discarding them.
That’s when she felt the dark gaze return. The same one she swore she had felt that time she first met Blackwell within Phantasma—and the other instance after she had crashed through the dining room ceiling. When Blackwell had become paranoid as to who might be listening and dragged her into a broom closet…
She went utterly still, scanning the hallway, but there was no one she could see.
Blackwell instantly froze his movements when her body language changed, looking up to assess what had made her tense.
“Is something wrong?” he asked. “Do you want me to stop?”
She took a deep breath and shook off the paranoia. There was no one there. She looked back down at Blackwell. “No. Don’t stop.”
That was all the permission he needed. He placed kisses around her navel as his hand wandered closer to the spot that had been aching for him since their first kiss.
When she felt the pad of his thumb brush over her core, lighter than a feather, she made a sound that was somewhere between a moan and a purr as she leaned her shoulders back into the wall and arched herself closer to him, desperate for more pressure. The slickness between her legs grew as he drew lazy circles around the bundle of nerves at her center, his mouth moving in closer and closer and closer.
Dropping his hand, he flicked his tongue out, to taste her arousal, and they both groaned in unison. She began to pant, needing more, more, more. But he was taking his sweet time. Plunging his tongue in and out of her core, but never against that spot, and after a minute she’d had enough of his teasing.
“I can only imagine death is more kind than you.” She peered down at his smug face as she practically writhed against the wall.
He laughed and continued his teasing until she was whimpering for relief.
“You taste like heaven,” he murmured.
“Blackwell,” she pleaded, tugging on his hair with her impatience. She needed relief. This teasing was too much.
Finally, he gave it to her. His tongue flicked over her clit, sending a piercing wave of pleasure through her body, making her toes curl, her stomach clench. She tightened her hold in his hair as if to keep him right there forever. He swirled his tongue in lazy circles and sucked gently until her legs almost gave out beneath her. Her body was building to that beautiful apex of bliss with each stroke, each hum of satisfaction from his throat in response to her sounds of ecstasy, but just before she reached the place she was climbing toward—he pulled away.
She was going to murder him.
