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Lord, she never did this. Certainly, she’d stolen a few kisses, or gifted them as favors. She’d shamelessly flirted, openly admired, and even allowed the pursuit of men on occasion. But never like this. Publicly, with a man she barely knew whom she didn’t need to charm for money or gain. Just pleasure.
squeeze? Why wasn’t she dead yet? Because earlier her dark eyes had shimmered with life. Her smile had held the kind of joy that life tended to smother out of most adults. Because … though he was a godless man, something whispered to him from the ether that he didn’t have the right to take such light from the world.
Kissing her … well, that defied description. It was more excruciating than any torture. More exquisite than any memory.
It was all he knew. All he was good at. And never in his life had he questioned his place, never looked back into the abyss of the past. Never thought of that pathetic, powerless boy he’d once been. Or of that night he’d lost his soul. Until her.
Farah was his. Of that he had no doubt. From her white-blond ringlets to her ridiculously tiny feet. Her body, her heart, and her soul belonged to him. And his heart, black as it was, always had been and always would be at her mercy. His body was hers to command and only hers to touch. And his life was dedicated to filling her every need, serving her every whim, and being the source of her every smile.
“It’s madness, at first, or maybe always. It’s … possession and fear, passion and joy. It’s indescribably sweet, and utterly terrifying. It’s different for everyone, I imagine.”
“This is so, rassam walad, but when far from home, it does one good to maintain the traditions of one’s people, so that the heart can remain close to those he loves but must live without.”
prostitutes. Because of the lustful nature of a man’s needs, or maybe because of the intrinsic beauty of the fairer sex, a woman’s body is a commodity, one that men barter for with land and titles and sometimes even kingdoms. So why then, when a woman sells her own body for food, or survival, or even pleasure, is it called a sin? Or a crime? What has marriage become but sanctioned prostitution, the buying and selling of female flesh for the begetting of heirs and so forth?”
In the middle of this room, draped in soothing colors and lovely, filmy things, a dangerous desire flared inside of him with such ferocity he shuddered with it. Not the kind of sexual desire he’d experienced with her last night, though he’d be fooling himself if he didn’t admit a strong component of that, but a stark pang of yearning that pulsed inside his chest. For her, for this, for all of it.
When she’d first met him, she’d thought his eyes dead and cold and utterly indecipherable. But now, when he looked at her as he was doing, she read volumes in their depths. Beautiful things. Terrible things. Words and desires she dare not indentify, because they would set her entire world aflame.
This must be what religious men felt as they fell to their knees at an altar. This unworthy rapture. This unholy desire. This need for redemption. Christopher became a pilgrim of her pleasure. Watching her expressions as carefully as one would a map of the stars.
In general, she found men easy to understand, charm, and read, thereby making them uncomplicated company. They were creatures of ego and artifice. They smiled with their wolfish teeth whilst scheming with their eyes. Their weaknesses included flattery, their virility, and challenge or conquest, power, wealth, and sexuality, respective and interchangeable throughout. Anything that made them feel like a predator was enjoyable, as long as they could master it without too much effort.
The urge to hold him overtook her with such ferocity, her arms ached. Lord, what he’d been through, what he’d survived. Most men would have broken, would have fallen to the earth and lost their minds, or taken their own lives. He’d hidden the shame, the horror, the desperation in a placid lake of darkness. Of blood. And then froze it solid to lock it away. Unfortunately, it seemed, she was just the storm to dredge the wreckage up from the bottom.
“I have killed so many,” he murmured. “Don’t you know that it’s too late for me? Don’t you realize that if there is anything but oblivion after this life, I am well and truly damned?” “But wasn’t it Dickens who said ‘I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in this world.’ Look at this, Christopher.” She turned her gaze to encompass the shattered, splintered casualties of his rage strewn about the marble floor like fallen soldiers. “This is proof that, despite what you think, you have the ability to feel, and to do so is not always pleasant, I know,
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“What do I have to offer you but corpses and shells?” His voice … his cold, cold voice, it had returned. It leached the warmth from the room, froze the heat of last night’s memories with the hard actuality of his violent life. Of the existence he’d carved for himself out of stone and ice.
Sometimes he’d wish he’d never met her, that he didn’t have the memory of her creamy skin singed into his fingertips. That she’d never reached into his soul and confirmed its existence. There’d been a reason he’d buried it in the first place. And now that she’d found it, it belonged to her. And she’d offered to keep it. God, why would she do such a thing?
Christopher. “Men like you and me, we don’t love like other men do. With patience and poetry and gentle deference. Our sort of love is possessive—obsessive even—and passionate and consuming and … well, fucking terrifying sometimes.”
“What if?” Dorian snarled, slamming his palm against the wall, startling Christopher to his feet. “Fuck what ifs. What if they’re our last chance at humanity, Argent? What if they’re a gift from the beyond for all of the injustice visited upon us? What if we spend eternity burning for what we’ve done, for who we’ve become, but we have the memory of these precious years spent with a goddess?” Black fire flashed in his eye. “I almost let Farah slip through my fingers and you were witness to the misery it caused me. Why repeat that mistake? What if you lose her for good because you’re too busy
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“I would be your blade in the darkness,” he bartered. “So you and Jakub could stand in the light. I would never leave you again. I would protect you, support you, and give you the freedom you crave. I would follow you anywhere you wish to go, anywhere the stage takes you. For where you are, that is where my home is.
“I’ll let you fill my house with things, countless, useless expensive things. Until it’s a home, and not a shell. And I’ll try. I’ll try so fucking hard not to be a shell, either. And … I’ll give Jakub my name. Tainted as it is. No matter what happens, it’s his, it’s yours. Whatever you want is yours. I’m yours. And you are mine so just don’t…”
