Bound By Fate: A Novel of the Strong (30 page)

“I thought it was well beyond time to prove myself in the bedroom,” he continued, his words tinged with guilty bitterness.

Toran had gone with Merus and a couple of other soldiers to a whorehouse on a witches’ ‘el. He vividly remembered walking down the dark cobblestone alley, an alley that reeked of stale ale, pungent urine, and daemon seed.
 

The female he had chosen had been dark haired and doe-eyed, but more importantly, she had been hearty and hale. She was chosen only after Toran had strategized her pros and cons with his mates in detail. He had wanted to know who had had her… and how she had held up in bed.
 

For him, it hadn’t been about skill or her ability to get him off.
 

No, Toran had needed to know whether she could withstand his venna––and his ungodsly hunger.

After so many years without, he had craved having her rough. Even now, sweat beaded his brow as images of taking his female hard––taking
his Liv
hard––invaded his thoughts.
 

Hiding his eyes in the crook of his arm, Toran shifted his hips and bit back a groan.

Good gods, I’m a bastard.

To think of such things while remembering that female’s shrieks of pain.

The acrid stench of her burning flesh.

The sound of her death rattle…

The bed linens rustled softly as Liv crawled into bed.
 

Though she didn’t touch him, she settled in close.

He tensed to resist rolling in her direction, grimacing as his venna strained to lick her skin.

“You didn’t mean to kill her, Toran,” Liv whispered. “You didn’t mean to kill either of them.”

“It doesn’t change the fact that I did,” he whispered back. “It doesn’t change the fact that I am…”

Weak.

His unspoken word hung thick in the air between them.

“Is this why you hate yourself?”

He almost laughed.

Talk about a loaded fucking question.

He jumped when he felt her thumb press into the bend of his elbow, pulling his arm away from his eyes. She cupped his cheek. Gently turning his face to hers, she asked, “How long ago?”

He blew out a breath.

“A very long time.”

“And you haven’t… made love again… until me?”

This time, he did laugh, but without a hint of humor.

“What we did wasn’t making love, Liv.” Toran sat up and scrubbed his bearded cheeks. When he stopped, he lowered his hands and said, “That’s not possible… not with me.”

“I don’t believe that’s true, Toran,” Liv whispered into the darkness. Drawing her body up, she pressed her breasts against him, her cheek against his shoulder.

His sadness––and his shame––were palpable.

Toran thought himself weak, but to Liv, he was anything but.

An abnormality he had never asked for, a genetic lost roll of the dice, had made him what he was.

Then, the actions of his parents––and an entire people––had damned him.

How would he have known what would happen?

Even that second time.

She shivered at his nightmare.

Not wanting to harm another, Toran had lasted for centuries, lost in his loneliness, and still he battled to shield her from the danger he believed he posed––no matter how strong his need for her.

She kissed his shoulder.

Toran tensed for just a second before he relaxed into her body.

It was almost as if he was helpless not to do so.

Twisting to her knees, Liv kneeled at his side and gently scored her fingers through the venna that shimmered down his back.

He jumped at her touch.
 

“What are you doing?” He turned his head slightly to watch her with breathless suspicion.

“I’m going to make love with you,” she leaned in to whisper in answer.

A wild, animal groan broke free from deep within his belly, his black eyes flashing, a bright pop of blue lighting the room.
 

The very foundation of the castle began to groan under the weight of his need.

He made no move to leave.

Hand steady and possessive on his shoulder, Liv walked back on her knees to give him room before guiding him gently down against the pillows. Toran settled back in bed, his arms bent and helpless beside his head, his long, lean body stretched before her.

Taking a deep breath, she placed her fingers at his waistband and worked his pants slowly down his hips. Toran's chin whipped up, his back arching.

He hissed as his cock sprang free.

At the sight, her lips parted. Her heart and breath leapt in time to lodge in her throat. Lost in her excitement, in her desire for him, she let out a low, wanton moan.

Toran slowly rolled his head forward, his eyes full of eager, yet wary expectation.

Tucking herself at his side, Liv propped up on an elbow so that she could see his eyes. Running the tips of her fingers slowly down the ripples of his abs, she placed a hand at his hip.
 

Tiny frissons of venna hummed against her palm.
 

Liv could feel Toran's indecisiveness and trepidation, his fear warring with his intense physical need.

His undeniable desire for her.

“Please, Toran,” she whispered. “Please let me touch you.”

In answer, he blew out an agonized breath.

Bending forward, she moved her lips back and forth against the bottom of his rib cage, her mouth so close to taking him between her lips.
 

“Let me
taste
you,” she murmured.

Toran groaned, his venna sizzling in earnest. It was as if he battled an army of thousands teeming to escape from within.
 

She breathed in the ecstasy.

He was so strong, so brave… so ready.

Leaning on the strength of his courage, she cupped him gently, carefully gauging the emotions in his eyes. His whole body went rigid, and his breath quickened… but he made no move to stop her.
 

Unpracticed at what to do, but desperate to give him pleasure, Liv wrapped her fingers around him. At her touch, a guttural moan escaped his throat. Giving him a tentative squeeze, she lifted her head, a question in her eyes.
 

Toran nodded a single terse nod before collapsing back against the pillows, his powerful body quivering at her touch. With a tortured groan, he thrust his hips up, pressing hard against her hand.
 

“Do it,” he said, his jaw clenched tight, the white of his teeth glinting in the moonlight.

Not wasting any time, Liv took him into her mouth.

*****

“Fuck!” Toran bit out on a shout.
 

His vision sparkled a dazzling white as, just for a moment, he froze under the force of a pleasure so intense, it teetered on the brink of agony.

Then, as if blasted from a cannon, he jackknifed up, the muscles in his abdomen pulling as tight as dried out leather.
 

Mere seconds in, it took every ounce of his strength not to come, not to lose control.
 

Gods help me, please.

He fell back flat against the mattress.

Just days from the battlefield, the venna of the dead dueled with his own, each unruly strain fighting to make its deadly presence known, daring his control to slip. With this new venna inside him––fifteen Vimora strong––Toran knew he was more deadly than ever. Even more, through his haze of pleasure, he sensed that something was different.
 

Wrong.

Having never taken so much venna at a single point in time, Toran strained against the unfamiliar furor now raging within him. It felt as if a darkness lurked inside, an enemy hidden away in the shadows, waiting to strike.

It wasn’t safe for Liv.
 

It wasn’t safe for anybody.

But his faine was stronger than the venna.

She called to him.

Crying out at the loss of her mouth, he struggled to focus. “It’s alright, my love,” he thought he heard her say. “Let me give this to you. Let me take what you need to give me.”

Clenching his teeth, Toran lashed his venna down tighter. When he finally wrestled together some semblance of control, he lifted his head… and lost himself in the pleasure of watching his faine take him back inside her mouth.

It was beautiful.

Liv’s golden brown hair fell in waves around them, its silky softness caressing his thighs. Her alabaster skin was bright against the dark thatch of hair at his groin.

With the tip of her tongue, she explored the cap of his cock, licking and flicking the achingly sensitive ridges, before pressing the meat of her tongue flat against the vein. He could feel his heartbeat throbbing against the wet flesh of her mouth.

Fisting her hair, he clenched his muscles tight and pressed in deeper.

She moaned against him.

He grunted in answer.

Her mouth scalding him, Toran bucked again. Her teeth grazed his tender skin, pushing him closer to his limit.
 

The scent of ozone filled the air.
 

Close, so close.

Anxiety, pleasure, pain.

Want.

Gripping her head, Toran somehow pulled away from the wicked heat of her mouth.
 

“Stop, stop, stop,” he hissed, his balls aching with the need to come.
 

He couldn’t find his breath.
 

“Shh,” she soothed. Holding him tight in her hand, she rubbed her cheek against him. “You’re not going to hurt me.”

“It’s not that,” he managed to grind out.

“Then what is it?” Liv whispered. When she lifted her head, he could see the desire and trepidation warring in her eyes.

He pulled her up his body to lay pressed against him, their runaway hearts beating in time.

Toran licked her swollen lips, groaning at her taste.
 

“If I’m going to come,” he whispered into her mouth, “Gods help me, I’m going to come inside you.”

If Toran would have just answered his damn phone days ago, Anara wouldn’t be in the position she now found herself in––rushing once again to the castle to beg and plead for entry, her stomach tied up tight in knots.

She was his doctor for gods’ sake. He was injured. And, while she may have been helpless to treat his condition, there was no doubting he desperately needed to hear what she had to tell him
.
Yet, each time she’d come to see him, she’d been turned away.

Lifting her face to the ominous sky above, she feared she was too late. In the past hour or so, the venna storm that raged in the skies over Venn Dom had taken on a distinctly different air.

It was clear that Toran was awake… and he was
alone
with his faine.

Which meant that this night had all the markings of a complete and utter disaster.

She owed it to her future king––
and friend
––to try one last time to get a message to him, to help save him,
to help save Liv from heartache.

Where the hell is Merus? she fretted as she hurried along the castle wall. He had made himself scarce since pulsing Toran home from the battlefield. If anyone could––and would––help her, it would be him.

But he was nowhere to be found.

Instead, when she peeped around the castle corner, she saw that the warrior Ales stood outside the gate barring entry to the keep.

For the time being, she kept her distance.

Cloaked in the darkness of the night, Anara studied the daemon.

He stood, alert and imposing, under the yellow glow of an electric lantern.
 

With a rugged frame, longish black hair, and square-set jaw, the daemon was handsome in a brutishly coarse way, as was common with the lower class Vimora.
 

The way he looked now, though, was very different from how she had seen him last, which was mangled, bloodied, and nude.

The daemon had been grievously injured in the border attack a few weeks before, his bravery helping to spare the lives of the women and children in the village from the fire daemon’s destruction. Though his venna had been able to deflect the blasts of the Sumari’s flames, his femoral artery had been severed by a well-placed dagger strike. He had nearly bled out where he fell. Luckily, one of his men had been able to pulse him to her operating table just in time.

When Anara had cut off his leathers to get at his wound, she had been shocked by what she’d found; so much so, her knees had buckled beneath her. She had long thought herself inured to the telltale signs of maltreatment dished out between the Vimora.
 

She could not have been more wrong.

Somehow quelling the tremble in her hands, she had stitched him back together. In doing so, Anara had found herself, for the first time in ages, cursing her healing gift. Since birth, Anara possessed the not-to-be-coveted ability to discern not only injuries, past and present, but also the agony those injuries inflicted upon their host.
 

In the daemon’s case, he had been repeatedly smashed from skull to toe.

The tales told by the daemon’s bones went way beyond anything Anara had ever felt before. Multiple fractures ran the gamut from compound to hairline to stress to compound again. Countless long-healed contusions comprised untold amounts of pain.
 

All this agony had been experienced before he’d reached his state of near-immortality.

As a child, Ales had been unconscionably, unforgivably abused.

Since he’d left the hospital––gone long before she would have ever agreed to discharge him––Anara had looked into him, her interest in his life curious even to her insatiably curious self.

He lived with his mother, a feeble old woman who exhibited classic signs of advanced dementia––dementia Anara suspected was caused by brain injuries suffered from repeated beatings.

Not surprisingly, she had learned that he had murdered his father while the old daemon lay asleep in his bed.

Given the horrors told by Ales’s body, Anara had no doubt the bastard’s death was well deserved. She applauded it. Even as a doctor, she’d never had a problem accepting the righteousness of some of the rougher points of daemon justice.