Currency in Flesh

Chapter 28

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

H er lips were bruising, the force of desperation from behind them propelling her into me like a comet crashing to earth. I could taste her need, her heart, her soul; and I knew in that moment it didn’t matter if I was moral or just, it only mattered that I was hers. Time here was undefined, and I may have existed in the Underworld for weeks or for months, but it simultaneously felt like lifetimes and mere seconds. My memories of my life before this felt like a film I’d seen long ago, the edges beginning to blur as I stepped into the bright light of this future.

Lady Cora’s hands came up to cup my face, one sliding into my hair, fingers pressing into my scalp. She made a small noise, and it set my skin on fire. It was as though accepting how I felt about her, no matter how irrational, had struck a match. We both burned.

“I need you,” I panted, pulling away for one frantic breath.

“You have me, Grace,” she replied before pulling me to her again. Her touch moved from my cheek to my back, my waist, my ass. Her hips pressed toward mine, our bodies begging to be closer. I tugged my dressing robe open, letting it fall from my shoulders, and Lady Cora growled. Her skirt hiked up her thighs as she shoved her knee between my thighs. The heat of her leg warmed me from beneath the paper-thin layer of nylon and arched my back when I felt my wetness on her skin. I reached around her, searching for a zipper or some way to get this goddamn skirt off of her, letting out a frustrated huff of air when my fingers found only fabric.

She laughed, and it was light and sweet, her hand leaving my ass to pull down the hidden zipper at her side. The few seconds where she stepped back to shimmy out of the skirt and her nylons felt like an eternity, but once the clothes were thrown aside, she stood before me in a grey button-up blouse that reached halfway down her thighs. Her hair was wild, platinum strands tucked behind one ear and falling across her face. She looked powerful and vulnerable, like sin and salvation. Her name tumbled from my lips, honorific abandoned as I looked into her incandescent gaze.

“Cora.”

She knelt at my feet, hands sliding up my calves to circle my thighs, and bent to kiss first the left, then the right. My fingers slid through her hair as hers moved up to the generous curves of my ass. A sound of appreciation hummed in her chest while her fingers kneaded my soft flesh. She licked the place where my thighs pressed together, tracing the line up toward my center, and I whimpered. I could feel my skin growing damp with arousal and the caress of her tongue, my body melting into want and need. But what I really wanted, what I really needed, was to touch her.

Disentangling my fingers from her hair, I reached down, tugging gently. “Please,” I pleaded.

She got to her feet, kissing me again slowly before dropping a hand to my hip and guiding me back toward the bed. My thighs hit the plush velvet, and I sat, dropping to my elbows and scooting back even as she continued to nip at my lower lip. Spreading my legs, I made space for her and my head fell against the tangled sheets. “You are so beautiful, blossom,” she murmured, looking down at me. Her hips were flush with mine, hands splayed on the mattress above my shoulders, and I turned to kiss her forearm. She ground into me, her pubic bone almost sharp where it pressed against the chubby swell of my own mound. Even the tiny tease of sensation it provided was almost too much, and I whined for more.

“So needy,” Lady Cora chuckled as she rolled her hips against me again. “Do you want me to give you what you need?”

I was panting when I replied. “Yes, Cora, yes.”

She moved one hand between my thighs, and I noticed her nails had dulled themselves again as her middle finger slipped between the slick seam of my pussy and over my clit. “Say my name again,” she said with a groan.

Her finger made a circle over my sensitive flesh and a plaintive moan replaced her name on my tongue. I sucked in air like a woman drowning and cried out, “Cora!” just as she did it again.

She shivered, and I felt her body quiver everywhere it was pressed to mine. “The name I had before,” she said breathlessly, “is dead to me. Nothing in this realm or any other has ever sounded more perfect than this one on your lips.” Her finger slid down, toying with the puddle of arousal pooling at my entrance, and she groaned as she pushed it into me. Leaning down so her mouth met mine, she fucked me with quick movements of her wrist, her finger curling up to coax waves of pleasure from me. So quickly, too quickly, I was teetering on the edge of orgasm.

“Not yet,” I begged, “I don’t want to come yet.”

Her answering chuckle was wicked, and she didn’t stop.

As she withdrew her hand, she added two more fingers, pushing deeper and grinding the heel of her hand against my clit. It was too much, and I came with a ragged cry, shuddering around her hand as she pulled the climax from my helpless body. My stomach muscles flexed and twitched, my soft middle shaking gently with each wave of pleasure that hit me. I let it roll through me, lost in a blissful haze where all I could feel was this and all I could see was her. My eyes fluttered closed as my body began to come down, but shot open in a second as she pulled her hand from my pussy and slid her glistening fingers into my mouth.

I tasted myself on her, and it was like a warm wind drifting over the sea—clean and bright and saline. My lips closed around her knuckles so I could suck the slick evidence of my orgasm from her skin. She pulled them out with a pop and my gaze found hers, both of us breathing heavily.

“I’m yours, Cora,” I said in a near-whisper. “Completely.”

Her eyes flared with what almost looked like fear. “Do not make promises you cannot keep.”

My brows furrowed, and I pushed up slightly onto my elbows so my face was close enough to feel her breath. “I’m not,” I asserted. “Do not tell me how I feel.”

Her body shifted, retreating, hands walking down the mattress on either side of my body. She sat on her heels. “I am not being playful,” she said with sudden gravity. “I mean it, Grace. You cannot say things like this without certainty. Not here, not to me.”

Indignation coursed through my veins, and I pushed myself up to face her. “Is it so impossible to trust me?” I snapped. “I’m trying to tell you how I feel, Cora. Just because you have been on your own here for however many years doesn’t mean you have to be. I’m a grown woman, I think I’m capable of knowing how I feel.”

There was a ripple of darkness that seemed to flow beneath her skin, her eyes flaring white-hot before resolving to a shade of green much brighter than usual. The air around us felt warmer, and every hair on my body stood on end.

Another Cora, the Goddess , now knelt between my awkwardly spread legs, and I felt immediately insignificant and fragile. She was glorious and beautiful and utterly terrifying, the Queen of the Underworld in every sense. Her pupils had stretched to narrow slits, inhuman beneath the shadow of her long, dark lashes, and every feature seemed to have sharpened. I shivered beneath her gaze, body beginning to cower instinctually, like a weakened animal accepting an unavoidable fate.

“Do you know, truly, what you say?” she said in a deep, many-layered voice that hurt my teeth. “Do you understand what I am?” The room around us shimmered, fading with the wavy, radiating heat of asphalt beneath the summer sun, and we were blanketed in darkness—only a faint vermillion smolder lit the planes of her devastating face. Around us flowed a molten river, the sound of thousands of screaming souls echoing from its banks. Blistering wind whipped my hair around my face and my skin felt tight and ready to split. She closed her eyes, and the air went piercingly cold, the river of fire replaced by towering walls of black ice and the whistle of an impending storm.

Though I shook, teeth chattering and muscles cramping, I kept my eyes on hers. “This doesn’t scare me, Cora,” I bit out. My lungs burned with the effort of taking in the freezing air, but her hand darting out to grip my neck stopped the biting cold and replaced it with a bone-deep fear.

“If I do not fill you with fear, you are either stupid or blind.”

Incendiary fury burst from my chest, and without thinking, I flung an arm up to shove her off. I couldn’t stop the words from tearing their way up through my throat and out of my lips with vicious rage. “You can’t force me away!” I screamed. “You might control this realm, you might be able to rip the memory from my mind, hell—you might be able to cast me into the pit and burn me to fucking ash, but you cannot take it from me!”

I inhaled and tasted smoke and the irrefutable truth. My anger quieted into something that was equal parts strength and tender fragility. “You can’t tell me I don’t belong to you when my soul is yours already.”

I blinked, and the world of ice and darkness was gone. We were surrounded in velvet and silk once again, sitting across from each other on Lady Cora’s bed. Her eyes were limned with silver, filled with unshed tears. They spilled over, tracing lines of light down her cheeks, and she swallowed.

“I used to live in the meadows,” she began. “I thought that even if I was fated to rule this realm for all of eternity, my life could still have beauty. But so much time passed by—hundreds and thousands and millions of souls came here to find repose, and then evanesced without leaving any trace behind. What once seemed like an honor turned into a curse.” She wiped her cheek with the back of one hand and took a deep breath.

“It was the great injustice of my existence—doomed to guide the dead to peace without ever finding it myself. I created the brothers in a moment of weakness and desperation, hoping that if I could tear myself into pieces, maybe I would feel the darkness less.” She let out a rueful chuckle. “But if anything, it made everything worse. Do you know why the days are shorter in winter? Because the world tilts further away from the light. It has been winter in the Underworld for a long, long time.”

I reached across the space between us, taking her hand in mine. “Have you ever wondered why I called you daffodil?” She didn’t wait for my answer before continuing. “Because you felt like spring. I have spent so many winters alone, bargaining with mortals just to steal a sliver of light. That is what I receive in return. When I collect a soul before its time, I get to spend a fraction of a second in the sun. So again, and again, I grant fortune to wicked mortals just to feel the spring—if only for a moment.”

Sadness floods me. The tender, naked truth of her life lies exposed in her emerald gaze. “I told you, Cora,” I said gently, “my soul is yours.”

She laughed, and it came out as a sob. “Then you grant me everything I could ever wish for. The thing Christos has been looking for all this time.” My forehead creased in confusion. “Someone whose peace could be me.”

Tears streamed down her face, moving far too quickly to blink away, and I leaned into her, pressing my lips to them even as they fell. My arms moved around her, pulling her to me in a wordless embrace. In that brief moment, the Goddess of the Underworld was soft, unshielded by her power or ferocity, and in that same moment I knew my soul understood.

We existed in the space between morality and vengeance, the hair-thin line separating purity and darkness. We were together in the eternal hour of dusk.

“Come,” she said as she turned her face to mine, “let me see you on your throne.”