Shattered Souls (Guardians of the Maiden Book 3)

All Cassiel could do was surrender to her. To the sound of her heartbeat and the warmth of her skin. To her lips. Each kiss was yearning. Layered in devotion. Dyna kissed him as though he was the air she needed. Like she couldn’t go another moment without it. His entire body bowed over his mate with some indescribable need to envelop himself around her.

His legs nearly buckled when she finally touched him, too. The muscles of his back constricted as her hands slowly explored the span of it. A soft groan rumbled in his throat at the light scrape of her nails. Dyna’s fingers continued their perusal until she reached the crease of his shoulder blades where they met his wings.

Cassiel jolted. He caught her arms, staring at her for a stunned moment. “You…” came his panting response. He swallowed and pinned her wrists to her sides. “You should not do that.”

“Did I hurt you?”

“Um, no. My wings are merely very … sensitive.”

“Oh.” Dyna glanced down. “Oh.” She reddened and ducked her head. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. You are the only one who makes me feel things I thought I was incapable of or too broken to feel.” Cassiel rubbed the back of his neck. “But perhaps we should finish our vows before we get carried away again.”

A shy smile graced her face. At the flick of Dyna’s hand, the green mist of her Essence lifted the bowl off the nightstand and brough it to hover next to them. The black paint inside glistened beneath its light.

She bit her lip. “No looking until I’m finished.”

Cassiel closed his eyes. “Yes, princess.”

A perceptible pause followed. Then came a soft crinkle of paper and another minute of silence that he almost peeked. The bond vibrated with her nerves. He understood how she felt. To be able to touch her freely without reservations had been nerve-wracking.

Cassiel tensed with anticipation as he tried to guess where she might start. He nearly jumped at the first stroke of her cool, wet fingers on his chest. Every facet of his attention locked on the shapes that left blazing trails behind.

He was secretly pleased she didn’t bother with the brushes. It felt more meaningful somehow. To mark him with her touch the way his had marked her.

“Why did you think you were incapable of…arousal?” came her tentative question.

It wasn’t the personal nature of it that made him hesitate to reply. It was the answer. Being open didn’t come easy, but Dyna had a way of disarming him.

“Not incapable. Merely unlikely,” he said finally. “I felt no enticement by females. I had no interest in love-mates. I saw what such ill-advised vulnerability did to my father and mother, and its result. I did not want that.”

His life presented love as a fantasy. A delusion. He didn’t ever want to be deceived by it.

“What changed?”

Cassiel exhaled a low breath. “You.”

Her fingers paused above his shoulder.

“I…tried to hate you,” he confessed. “I wanted to hate you. I thought if I was cruel and made you despise me as I was used to, I could ignore what you were doing to me.”

He regretted those moments. When his lashing tongue hurt her out of cowardice, to avoid being the one lashed at first. Not seeing her face now made it easier to tell her the truth. That aversion was all he knew most of his life.

“I did not know what it was. This new feeling. It felt a little like fear and helplessness. Like falling out of the sky. Mixed with a longing to have you simply look at me. Your acknowledgement somehow became what I craved. Whenever you did, it was like regaining something that was missing. Something I had lost. I was torn between the need to escape you and guard you and every passing day I became more and more powerless to resist it.”

He opened his eyes and met those emerald pools looking back at him in the way she always did. Like he was something important. Someone. To her. It meant so much to have her see him for who he was, that he didn’t know how he would react if one day she didn’t. But the worst thing? Would be if she suddenly saw him the way he saw himself.

A mistake.

To want something so desperately the way he wanted her was terrifying, because it left him with a question if this could be permitted. Could he take it? Was this truly meant for someone like him? The more he contemplated a life with her, the more he feared losing it. Feared that the world would change its mind and take her away.

“I’m…still afraid,” Cassiel admitted. He lightly stroked the back of his hand down her jaw to her chin. “I believed for the longest time I was never meant to be happy. I somehow managed to find a sliver of it, and the thought of having it taken from me…” His voice dropped to a whisper. “It makes something dark and cold like ice weave through the flames that burn for you.”

His Seraph fire—it only surfaced when he wanted to protect her. The brass bangle hanging from his wrist glinted in the low light. It had a tight hold on his power, but Cassiel suspected it wouldn’t be able to hold him back when it came to her.

“Translate for me,” Dyna said. She crumbled up the scrap of paper she’d been holding. “I will fill our days together with the joy that is meant only for us.”

Cassiel exhaled a low breath, the back of his throat tightening. He formed the ancient literatures in her mind and Dyna’s fingertips continued their course down his arm.

He glanced at where she had previously written I will love you on his chest. It expanded as she amended it with another promise. I will love you through whatever darkness may come, through the ice, and through the flame.

His eyes fluttered closed as an electrical hum sank down his body when her fingers swept the last stroke down his abdomen, so close to his navel.

On his left arm she wrote, Even when the world crumbles and we fade among the cosmos, I will still be yours.

She lowered to her knees at his feet and his next thoughts stalled. Heat whirled through his veins at the adoration in her gaze. She held onto the back of his thigh for support as she painted over his legs with a vow that echoed her confession beneath the willow. My heart will always be filled with none other than you.

Every single word imprinted itself on his soul. With each light stroke of her fingers, his mind hummed with flashes of hers, the greens and golds making him sigh. He could lose himself there forever if she let him. Dive in so deep he would never want to leave.

Then Dyna stood and reached for his tunic with her trembling hands. The soft white fabric slid down his shoulders until it fluttered to their feet. She took her time admiring him, and air passed shallowly through his teeth at the desire on her face. Never had anyone looked at him like that before.

With want.

But his growing haze vanished when she went behind him. Cassiel stiffened and tucked his wings against his back. Not with her proximity but with sudden self-consciousness.

“If I were to pick my favorite feature about you, aside from your eyes, it would be your wings,” she said. “When you wrap me with them, it’s like an embrace of midnight. They are perfect, kohav.”

Something shifted inside of him again. She made another fissure in the rock he carried within his hollow chest and chipped it away. So many rotten pieces had fallen, it left the softest parts exposed. Parts he didn’t know he had.

Star, she called him.

Cassiel listened to the soft crackle in the hearth, breathed in the burning wood to steady himself. “I spent all my life wishing they were white.”

“White is boring.” She pressed a kiss on the left wing, then his right. Another shudder went through them, and his wings relaxed, exposing his back again. At the show of his trust, a sudden feeling of protectiveness flooded through the bond with that same dark coldness he had described, but it came from Dyna. And her next vow fell like embers off her tongue. “I will protect every part of you with all that I am and avenge every wrong done against you.”

Her fingers marked the ardent declaration down his spine, and he thought of the fearsome goddess who had obliterated the throne room on his behalf.

“I may be a healer, but nothing will stop me from protecting those I love.”

Cassiel stilled.

She loved him? She…loved him.

It shouldn’t be a question after everything Dyna had done, every declaration she had made, and yet to hear her voice form the shape of those letters, it made his soul quiver. The back of his eyes stung as something lodged in his throat. He hadn’t heard those words from anyone—in years. So much so that he doubted such a thing could be real.

Until he at last understood what it meant to feel it. To want to see someone, to be with them, and share every thought and mood with them, to feel, and see, and touch, to have and hold, to dream with. To wish with. To want them with you every step through life.

That feeling, that was right here.

Dyna came around and her misted eyes looked up at him. “I will never let anyone take these away.” She stroked his wing, gliding her fingers down the shimmering black feathers. He shuddered at the sensation tingling through his body, and it gathered in places he tried to ignore. “Or make you feel less than for it.” She stroked the other and his head fell back and a groan escaped him. “What does it feel like when I touch you?”

“It feels…” Cassiel cut off with a choked moan when she traced the margins meeting his shoulder blades. He caught her by the waist. “Don’t tempt me, lev sheli. If you continue to do that, you will be responsible for what happens. I have only so much restraint.”

And every passing second was proving harder to keep it in place.

It was delicious, agonizing torture.

As if Dyna sensed it, she closed the inch gap between them, bringing her body flushed against his. Then she rose on her toes and her lips brushed his neck. Flames licked at where she touched.

He gripped her hips. “Can you…do that again?”

She kissed the same spot and the flames shot through him.

Cassiel devoured her mouth as if it was the first time. Her arms snaked around his neck and wove her fingers through his hair. She rose on her toes to kiss along his jaw to his ear. A scatter of new sensations sank deep, sparking his instinct to throw her on the bed. A rumble rolled through his chest in warning. He pressed her tightly against him where he could no longer hide his want. She slid her hands down his torso, trailing over the mounds of muscle stretching across his abdomen, and landed on the waistband of his trousers hanging low on his hips.

Cassiel’s hands halted on her waist. “Lev sheli, what are you doing?”NôvelD(ram)a.ôrg owns this content.

“Exploring?”

He chuckled airily in surprise. “What happened to the Dyna who feared walking into my room not an hour ago?”

“She grew a little brave.” Dyna slowly traced the arch of his exposed hipbone, causing the muscle around it to constrict. “And curious.”

Swallowing against the tightness in his throat, Cassiel searched her eyes. They gleamed in the darkness with a flare that had his pulse racing under her fingertips. The bond danced between them, throbbing in a way that demanded to fulfill the last step that would seal their union completely. Her earlier anxiety had faded to a dim memory and his was quickly following.

Being wanted, standing in this room half unclothed, all of it was still dreamlike to him, yet there was nowhere else he could imagine being than right here.

With her.

“I don’t mean to confuse you with my earlier reservations but…I want to see you. To know you,” she said quietly. “And to have you know me.”

Cassiel held perfectly still, struggling to hold on to the restraint he swore to maintain. But she was making it increasingly difficult with the way she was looking at him. He gave his word they wouldn’t do anything she wasn’t ready for. That it would be her decision.

And she was telling him she was making one now.

“To know you…” His hands floated up her shoulders to her face. Her eyes fluttered closed as he leaned in close and breathed in her honeysuckle scent he couldn’t get enough of. His mouth trailed across her cheek, faint as a whisper. “I would need to learn what pleases you,” Cassiel said, his lips so close to hers. “To learn what makes your body…sing.”

The pleasant sting of her nails dug into his forearms, as if Dyna needed something to keep her standing.

She was trembling.

He took her hand and kissed the inside of her wrist. “You have all the power here.”

“I’ve never…I don’t… know where to start.” She weakly laughed and he sensed her embarrassment at her inexperience. “Have you…?”

“You are my first in everything, Dyna. I suppose we will learn together.”

Cassiel lifted her chin to him and lightly traced her lips with his once, twice, in the way that made her pulse dance. Then he sealed her mouth with a kiss. It wasn’t long before their slow kisses grew hungrier and heated.

He walked backwards, leading her away from the bed. A deliberate decision, he sensed, she was both relieved and disappointed by. He sat on the couch by the hearth pulled her onto his lap. They were a tangle of limbs and fabric and exposed skin. Her shy touches grew bolder with each one of his and he no longer stopped her from exploring every part of him. His heart hammered as a languid heat climbed in his body with every graze of her mouth. Dyna’s red hair curtained around their faces, veiling them together in this moment made for them.

The room was a fog of intimate caresses and devouring kisses. Their touches became a competition of reactions, creating sounds he never thought to make or to draw out of her. He felt every shattering feeling she did and it hummed through the bond with wild currents. All so overwhelming, he had to remind himself to breathe. He had long stopped fighting the affect she had on him.

Tonight, he would only touch. Only savor and tease his desires.

Completely surrendering to the new discoveries, he found in the sensation of his mate. Her body felt so soft and warm. He slid his hands up her thighs beneath her nightgown and chased the music of her soft whimpers. When Cassiel found exactly what pleased her, it sparked a sensation that felt a little like taking to the skies. Each stroke of his fingers branded himself on her, and it left him drunk on every cry and twitch on her face.

He lived for it. Breathed it. Because in this moment he saw how much this wonder of a person became the center of his existence. Then Dyna held him in her hands, rending him to her mercy. Cassiel succumbed to the pleasure that carried them higher and higher until they were both gone.