Promises and Pomegranates by Sav R. Miller
Chapter 12
The longer Ilie naked in Kal’s bed, staring up at the ceiling with my arms crossed over my chest, the more embarrassed I feel about mauling him downstairs.
Not longago I watched him murder my fiancé and then force me into marrying him. Apparently, after the initial shock and anger wears off during times of stress, my brain takes a back seat and lets my vagina do the driving.
Or maybe it’s just the effect Kal has on me. Maybe an entire lifetime of obsessing over him has brought me to this point, and now I’m free to explore it, regardless of how fucked up the situation is.
I exhale slowly, plucking gently at my nipples, trying to recreate the feeling of Kal doing the same. Goose bumps spread like a rash over my forearms, heat creeping over my chest as his words from before echo in my mind.
‘Has my slutty little wife been walking around every day, hoping to get fucked?’
Not consciously, no. Or, at least, not with the express intention of Kal finding me sans underwear and taking advantage of the easy access. But with no one else around, and my parents’ rules about modesty and purity no longer a factor, ditching the panties just seemed like the next logical course of action.
Another nail in the coffin of allowing the Ricci lifestyle to dictate how I live mine.
Maybe that’s why I dove headfirst into unknown waters, approaching Kal despite him being covered in blood and the almost feral look in his eyes.
When presented with the opportunity for choice, I seem to err on the side of reckless abandon. That much was obvious when I asked Kal to take my virginity in the first place, and it’s even more evident now.
Sure, he threatened the lives of the people I love. Blackmailed me into this union. Yanked me from the only life I’ve known and plopped me down in a foreign place, alone and confused.
But he was a skilled lover, and my body is beginning to remember his talent.
The muscles in my stomach tense up as I slide my hand past my breast, gliding through the slick heat he left behind.
“Whoever said Kal Anderson isn’t husband material clearly never felt his hand between their thighs,” I mutter, biting back a moan at the memory.
“Is that so?”
Even though I’m expecting him, the sudden intrusion of Kal’s deep voice startles me; my arm snaps to my breasts while my hand covers my pussy, acting on autopilot.
Lifting my head, I see him standing across the room in black pajamas, leaning against the doorframe with a strange look on his handsome face.
It’s not quite arousal, not quite irritation. Somehow, his features seem frozen in a place between the two, his dark gaze unwavering in its hunger and his mouth firm in its rage.
He rakes his eyes over me, lingering on my flushed skin, reaching up to stroke his bottom lip with the back of his thumb. “Don’t let me interrupt. You were saying?”
“I was just talking to myself.”
“Do you hear a lot of gossip about me?”
“Not a lot,” I say, heat searing my cheeks. “Just stuff my mom and her sisters sometimes say.”
“Ah, yes. Carmen and her big fucking mouth.”
The animosity in his tone catches me off guard; I know he and my parents have a relationship that predates his time as a Ricci Inc. employee, but it was always my understanding that he was like family to the two of them. The distant, mysterious extended relative who only came to town when he absolutely had to and made a stink about it every time, but family nonetheless.
Kal blows out a breath as if trying to collect himself. “Well. What else?”
Blinking, I frown. “What do you mean?”
“What else do they say about me?” His eyebrows raise, practically grazing his hairline, and he holds his palms out to the sides as if in offering. “Did they turn you against me? Give you the gritty details of all the evil I’ve done?”
My tongue feels too thick for my mouth. “Papá always avoided specifics.”
“But you still heard rumors, right? You can’t exist in this fucking world without the mills working overtime, especially when you make it clear you just want to be left alone.”
Bracing my heels on the mattress, I push into a sitting position, trying to feel slightly less vulnerable as he glares at me. My clothes are draped over the chaise at the foot of the bed, so I grasp at the cotton sheets, moving to duck beneath them.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
I pause, my fingers gripping the bedspread until my knuckles cramp. “This feels like a conversation I shouldn’t be naked for.”
“Put your fingers back on your pussy and show me what you think of the shit they say about your husband.” Licking his lips, Kal moves forward to kneel on the bed with one leg. His arm lashes out, grabbing my wrist, and uncurling each individual finger from the sheet.
“I don’t even know my husband,” I snap, trying to twist out of his grip. The arousal I was feeling minutes ago evaporates as his agitation manifests in his sharp tone, and in its place is the need to fight.
Baring my teeth, I rear my free hand back, sending it sailing through the air at his face.
Stupid, really. Kal catches my hand before it even makes contact; he wrenches the one holding the sheet behind my back, trapping it between us, then brings my other hand up to his lips.
“You know more than you let on,” he replies, taking my index and middle fingers and separating them from the rest. Sucking on the two digits, he laves his tongue over them without breaking eye contact, and it sends a renewed ripple of awareness through me, making my toes curl of their own accord.
Betraying body syndrome, Mamá once called it. When you’re powerless to carnality, despite your mind knowing better. She’d been trying to comfort me before my wedding to Mateo, saying that as long as he made it good for me, my body would learn to enjoy it.
The mind, she mused, was a different battlefield entirely, but one she swore could eventually be conquered, citing her own success in the matter.
Problem was, I already knew what it felt like to want your lover, and there was no chance Mateo would have ever compared.
Even now, as I try to brush off my body’s reaction as biology, I know her reasoning isn’t entirely true. My body isn’t betraying me at all; I just wish it were.
It’d certainly make all of this easier.
Wrapping my fingers in his fist, he brings my hand back to the apex of my thighs, ghosting them over my seam. My hips jerk into the motion, and he smirks, nostrils flaring.
“So?” he taunts, raising an eyebrow, forcing my fingers to swirl gently around my clit. My breath catches, and he leans into it, bending so we’re eye level. “What else do you know about me, little one?”
My head grows heavy in this position, pain lancing through the muscles in my neck; I let it fall back as the pleasure singing in my veins intensifies, making my legs shake.
“You’re thirty-two with a Halloween birthday. You like reading poetry and memoirs, though you don’t write at all. You got your medical degree from Tufts and did your residency at Johns Hopkins.”
He makes a sound, but I can’t tell if he’s impressed or bored by my recitation of his sparse Wikipedia page. Outside of it, I don’t actually know that much about him, except that he’s a danger I’ve never been able to resist.
“Did you know that just before you met me in my office downstairs, I’d just gotten done killing a man?” Kal whispers, his hot breath skimming my face. I can barely focus on his words, though, too lost in the sensation of him guiding my fingers, creating magic between my thighs.
“That’s why there was blood on my clothes. I know you noticed; saw the flash of distress in those tantalizing eyes of yours, then watched your concern drain when you decided you cared more about getting off than what I do in my spare time.”
Releasing the arm twisted behind my back, he palms my shoulder, shoving me so I’m flush with the mattress. He still puppeteers my fingers, switching the motion to a counterclockwise rotation that has me drawing my lip between my teeth to keep from crying out.
“You’ve never cared what people thought of me, have you?” he asks. “Didn’t care about the souls I’ve stolen, or the lives ended at my bare hands.”
I feel his fingers drift over the scar on my thigh, then back up, circling my entrance. The tip of one breaches me just slightly, eliciting a soft gasp from my chest.
My stomach churns, something feral burgeoning inside me as the truth in his words soaks into my skin, furthering my chase for release.
I don’t care about the lives he’s ended. That’s always been my problem.
“Someone is watching us,” he says, setting off red flags in my mind. My eyes widen, searching for him, but in the same second he plunges three fingers inside of me, stealing the words from my tongue.
I moan as he curls them against my inner walls, teasing and massaging as he distracts me.
“I have a feeling it might be your father. I’m just not entirely sure why.”
My hand starts to pull away as his words penetrate my hazy brain, but he smacks the inside of my thigh, and I jolt from having the sensitive flesh there brutalized.
“I didn’t tell you to stop.” He starts to move his fingers quicker, shallow thrusts that have me canting my hips up, silently pleading for more. “If he wants to watch, we’re going to give him a show.”
The notion should give me pause, or make me recoil in horror, but it doesn’t. An invisible fire ignites in my core, spreading like a fever throughout my body, settling in my bones.
“I fear your parents—your mother, in particular—think they can rescue you from me. So, in case they’ve planted that little seed in your mind, let me uproot it entirely, once and for all.” My orgasm crests as he picks up his speed, and I furiously rub my clit in an effort to keep up with his pace, the dueling sensations causing my vision to blur.
“You’re going nowhere, my little Persephone. I didn’t bring you back to my island just so you could leave, and I’m certainly not relieving you of your sentence. You’ll serve it at my goddamn side as the queen of my little underworld, and all your family will ever be able to do is watch.”
I gasp as he finishes his sentence, the image of my parents watching Kal fuck me deliciously forbidden and intoxicating for some reason. An ultimate act of defiance, I suppose.
Arching my back, my release shatters through me, breaking me into a million jagged little pieces. It pulses so thick and fully through me that I choke on it, my sticky hand falling to my side as my clit throbs violently with aftershocks.
“You’re divine when you come, little one.”
Kal withdraws from me, wiping his fingers on my scar, then reaches up to smooth his thumb over my cheekbone. The expression on his face makes my stomach knot up, the gentleness with which he touches me now at odds with how he has every time before.
“Who was at the door?” I ask, coherent thought finally making its way through my brain, the memory of what interrupted us before crashing the post-orgasm glow. “And what do you mean, you think Papá is watching us?”
“Don’t worry about that.” Straightening, Kal slips off the bed, clearing his throat. “Get some rest, Elena.”
And then he disappears from the room.
