"When these pillars get pulled down, it will be you who wears the crown, and I'll owe everything to you. How much pain has quaked your soul? How much love would make you whole? You're my guiding lightning strike. I can't find the words to say, they're overdue. I've traveled half the world to say I belong to you"
I Belong to You, Muse
Chapter Twenty
EPOV
*This chapter is rated M for adult content
I was burning.
I had decided long ago that someday it would all come down to a raging inferno, wicking at my limbs, climbing and claiming every inch of my marble skin until finally it reached my eyes and clouded everything in a dark sickly sweet-smelling smoke. My own cremation chocking me to death as Aro looked down from his pedestal muttering about the 'utter shame' of my demise.
It wasn't a fleeting thought, but rather a fact of the future; a necessity that I knew would come to fruition for one reason or another.
But this wasn't the fire that I had convinced myself I would endure. This was something—more.
Yes, my throat burned with a ferocity that I hadn't felt in decades, one that only came from denying the beast his liquid ambrosia. A harsh stinging ache pounded at the back of my throat as pools of venom gurgled up and were swallowed down, coming in rivets that wouldn't cease as I watched her lunge and slice into the surprised doe.
Yes, my fingers itched and begged to be consumed by her surprisingly warm, glowing body that I pressed up against a thick oak that never thought in its hundreds of years of existence would ever witness such depravity and desperation. Her moans echoed wickedly into the thick moist air while my raging growls vibrated against her deliciously smooth neck where my teeth claimed purchase for no other reason other than that they could.
Yes! The beast hissed as I ripped the last scrap of innocence from her hips and cradled her into my hand, greedily catching every drop of a different kind of liquid ambrosia from where she needed me to make her mine, to show her the heat that was searing inside me, between us, around us.
Yes, everything was burning, but it was the string that finally pulled taut between my ribs that lite the spark, pouring gasoline on a bonfire that had long ago been set, waiting for it's time to rage against the darkness.
One minute I was watching her flee from her fallen spot on the grass beneath the trees that shaded us from the harshness of the glowing late summer sun and the next she was dragging me along by the invisible connection that forced me to keep no more than a few yards between us.
It was instantaneous. Like a pressurized jar of liquid nitrogen finally exploding for no reason other than that it was just—time.
The venom in my veins boiled, my vision fell out of focus, no longer able to look at anything besides her.
Isabella.
Watching the lush, vibrant droplets of blood drip down her plush innocent lips and slowly slide down her neck, finding a home underneath her thin dress, in the skin between her breasts before her neck fell back like it was made of cement and that disastrous cry left her body, was my own polar shift.
No more conscious thoughts, no more wondering why this little mouse drove me crazy in more ways than one, no more Cullen coven to think of—it was just her. Mine.
Her back was against the tree, her blood-red hands digging through my hair, my teeth finally slicing through the space where her jugular would have exploded a river of nectar into my mouth had she been human, but now only gave way to a mix of our venoms as I pushed my own spoiled liquid into the gash I created in her flawless skin.
Mine. The darkness around me egged me on.
Our mouths consuming each other, her soft blazing tongue fighting against me for dominance she would never have, her fingers ripping into the fabric of my borrowed clothes and finally mine making quick work of the barrier that kept me from her drenched core.
Mine.
"Yours!" She had cried out sending penetrating electrocution through the entirety of my commanding form that held her. For a moment I thought the earth beneath us had begun to tilt, to rotate in a motion that was dictated no longer by the sun but by our bodies pressed against each other.
I had spoken of the otherworldliness of this perplexingly silent creature—bent to my will with just my fingers and my teeth—but it was as if it finally made sense. This wasn't random or luck it was a fate that I had once thought to be an eternal prison sentence. But as the burning left no part of me untouched, I realized it wasn't hell that bound mates together, but rather salvation.
All of this came to me in poetic nonsensical waves of realization in the moments between pinning her against the tree and sinking my teeth into her neck—an action so instinctual, I couldn't have stopped it even if I had wanted to, even if she begged.
Over this long week that had once seemed to drag by slowly, frustratingly, I had contemplated Isabella's humanity again and again. Plucking each painfully human part of her and her coven from between the grains of their existence.
But nothing felt more human about her than where my hand cupped the soft intimate skin between her legs. So warm and wet, alive and pulsing. I swore I could almost feel a heartbeat thrum in the bundle of nerves where the heel of my hand was pressed into her. Even after the cry of her shattering had been swallowed by the woods around us, even as her head fell heavily into the nap of my neck, even as her toes unclenched and her legs began to loosen their deathly grip on my waist, I did not move.
She mewed into my neck, little sighs and moans sinking into me like tiny electrical shocks that pulled the string between my ribs tighter and reminded me that the burning was nowhere near sated.
I could feel my own humanity pulsing between us, demanding that I rip her open like an overripe peach—the way I had sliced through the skin of her neck—but this time joining us in a way that only a man and a woman could.
"Mine," The possessive word rumbled through my chest and my hand still held against her twitched just a fraction. But it was enough to remind her of who she belonged to.
"Ah!" She gasped, her legs curling back around me, pressing us closer together, and bringing forth a new pungent wave of her aroma that dripped into my palm and tainted the air beautifully.
Her lips sucked at the skin along my own jugular, her bloodied fingers still working my hair into chaos. I was helpless to the growing need to throw her body across the clearing and finally join us together—to make her cry out that same confirmation of ownership that she had before, over and over until we lost track of how many times the sun had rose and fallen again.
I had known very little of carnal passions in this second life. Like almost everything else that I had come across in three hundred years, I found it uninteresting.
Sex was a favorite topic of mental conversation through every generation that came and went in my mind, but I always thought of it as another weakness of their frail demanding bodies. Men overwhelmed and controlled by the anatomy that lay in their pants—it was pathetic. Not much has changed over three centuries. The world still revolved around sex. It was a currency, a tool for power, a way to incite love, panic, life, and even death.
There were several immortals amongst court who dabbled in acts that I could classify as more sinister forms of the physical relations that humans obsessed over so much, but it always came back to the one thing we wanted more than anything else. Blood.
Had I been in a right state of mind I might have even remembered the revolting acts of Jane and her brother as they played with their food—an unwanted memory I would never be able to unsee.
But I was still burning and the blaze demanded my attention.
Everything was on fire. My teeth were begging to be buried back into her neck, the venom dripping down my throat wanted to taste her sweet poison mixed with mine again. My hand trapped between her legs wanted to push forward and fill her with my long strong fingers, getting her ready to take the rest of me as soon as I threw her to the wet forest floor and rid her of the once alluring dress that now was just hiding what belonged to me.
The beast inside roared possessively, demanding that I assuage the deep ache of my own sex by claiming her in one final way.
She bares your mark on her neck, she has your venom running through her veins, now push your scent so deeply within her that no one will dare come near her again. She is OURS.
I had been ignoring the savage monster that lay inside me for too long since coming to this miserable little town. Resisting that demanding voice now wasn't a possibility.
When I dragged my hand up and away from her pooling core, a deep guttural noise left the small creature in my arms, as if my intimate hold on her was almost painful to lose.
I could imagine vividly the pangs of vehement rage and anguish that would instantaneously overcome me if she would be removed my arms at this moment. I was sure the inferno would finally send me shattering into a million pieces, strewed across the damp forest floor.
"Enough," I growled in her ear, the same word I had hissed at her just minutes ago in the backyard, this time it was my greatest desire to calm her pain not provoke it—a deep promise that very soon I would give her what her trembling body needed from me.
As soon as she was bare before me crying out with desperate pleasure, her back arched in that lovey inhuman curve again.
When I pulled back to ensure that my promise had encouraged her to forget the pain that had scrunched together her flawless face, it wasn't the soft hooded eyelids and slightly parted lips that I expected to see twisting her face into a look of pure sin.
I felt myself freeze instantly as I took in this new look that had suddenly passed over her features. She no longer fidgeted in my hold; the small desperate movements she had used earlier to rub and gyrate against my center were gone. Her legs suddenly fell from around my waist, putting a small, yet unnecessarily painful, space between our overheated bodies.
I couldn't be sure what started the dark and strong snarl to begin violently shaking in my chest. Was it the new inches of freedom allowed between what belongs to me or was it her suddenly wide, black, cloudy eyes that sunk into me like knives?
It was a look I had seen briefly once before as she stared at me in the library after telling her that her thoughts were hidden away from me—the only creature to ever evade my gift.
In the height of our abrupt collision against the tree, it was easy to forget that Bella's quiet mind was supposed to be my reason for a quickly assumed hatred towards a small girl I'd never met before. Now, her silence only added to the need to tear her apart. If my mind couldn't float inside her own, I would push another piece of myself inside. Claim her in every way that I could think.
"Isabella," the snarl that had been brewing broke through my lips as her fingers fell limply from their seemly permanent place dug into my hair.
NO.
The beast and I growled together, a thunderous sound like that of a hungry lion, causing the trees around us to shake. Even the ants and beetles that roamed the ground seem to burrow away from the feral noise.
Bring her back!
I followed the beast's instructions swiftly, needing her pushed up against me as desperately as I had ever needed any blood sliding down my throat—if not more.
The string between us began to knot and twist, shooting a vast pain through my entire body and turning my murderous growl into a pathetic and weak sounding whimper.
"Bella," her name came out sounding like a plea falling from the lips of a desperate man.
My fingers that had been lingering on her waist traveled up, looking to dig back into the soft knot of her braided hair until I was practically sinking into the roots of her chestnut-colored locks. I was starving for the taste of her lips, the feel of my tongue tangling with hers, the sting of our venom mixing in the wetness of her mouth.
As soon as the tips of my fingers touched the delicately pale skin of her temples I was flying through the air.
One minute she was in front of me and the next, it felt like a wall of electricity was flinging me up and away from her. Pushing my strong seemingly impenetrable form half a mile into the forest. When I hit the soft yet dense earth it sprayed up around me in a waterfall of brown and green debris, like an asteroid crashing to earth.
I finally came to a halt only when my back hit the thick roots of thousand-year-old hemlock, buried six feet underground, a chasm of wreckage left behind me in the hundred or so yards where the electric pulse had pushed me along. I could still feel an uncomfortable prickle lingering against my skin, a residual of the greater paralyzing shock that had tossed me around like a rag doll.
For an immortal, there were very few moments that have caused me physical pain. There were discomforts that idle from the beginning of our second birth, the pangs of hunger, the sting of venom, the constant dull pulsing in the marks that made us what we were, but they were all dismissible. True terrifying vehement pain could really only be fabricated by the hands of others that also lived this half alive and half dead existence.
The rippling torment of Jane's gift had sent me crumbling to the floor more than once, Demetri's fingers pushing fissures into the concrete skin of my neck after a heated conversation involving Esme and now this new anguish, one so distinctly different than the others that it left me reeling for a long drawn out moments after.
I stared up at the canopy of green leaves; the small strips of sunshine breaking through made it almost look like a stain glass ceiling. I lay stunned, covered in dirt and leaves, feeling utterly confused about how I had ended up buried six feet in the ground.
Isabella.
When her name grumbled up in my subconscious it was like my body finally caught up with what had just transpired between me and the little mouse I once had my teeth sunk into.
The reminder of our bodies push against each other, her lithe fingers digging into my scalp and her hips sliding against my own had me throbbing almost instantly. My eyes glazed over in a red sheen as I recalled her hands falling away from me, pushing her body back away from where we should have still been connected.
How dare she keep us apart! Does she not feel this burning?
The invisible string yanked at my guts, my ribs, and my non-beating heart. The strange electrocution that sent me flying away from her was nothing compared to the agony that rushed through me.
Find her.
I didn't need any more encouragement as I flew out of my hole in the ground and followed the mouthwatering scent that she left behind her.
I had only been off my feet for a few seconds before feeling the fire rage even brighter than before, but it was enough time to give her a head start. Too bad for my fleeing nymph, I was faster.
The feeling of something unfinished almost had me doubling over in sickening pain. A very human need to retch boiled deep in the pit of my stomach, but I pushed it aside, focusing on filling my lungs with the scent of her heady perfume—made up of both her distinctive venom aroma as well as the heat that was still leaking from her body, ready for me to take her.
This thought propelled me forward, pushing my limbs to the peak of their ability and I was soon rewarded with the sight of her sprinting back towards the house.
One, two, three—the seconds ticked out before me. It was all I needed to have her trapped back into my steal arms.
The noise of her back colliding with my chest boomed into the air, sounding like violent thunder crashes in the middle of a hurricane.
Her feet dangled off the ground and kicked into the air, her nails trying to dig painfully into my forearms that cradled her against me. But even her wail of surprise when I finally caught her didn't deter me from immediately diving headfirst into the crook of her neck where our scents wafted up into the air, drawing me in like a leech.
"Hmmm," I hummed against the marred skin where I once again wanted to dig into.
It seemed that either the vibrations of my hum or the sound of my tenor seemed to calm the flighty bird in my arms and she relaxed into my hold, her head falling back against my shoulder in submission.
A dark chuckle fell from my lips as I lapped at the scars I'd created at the apex of her neck.
"Don't you feel the warmth little dove? Doesn't it feel heavenly?" I nearly hissed at the pleasure that washed over me, taking the pulsing ache from before with it, leaving us both back in the cocoon of want and need we'd started weaving together earlier.
Her soft and yearning whimper had me bringing her to the forest floor, twisting her body so she was forced to look at me. I had to take her all in, to make sure not a single hair was out of place from when she had left me.
The cloudy far away look in her dark melting eyes still lingered, but there was a molten haze pushing that dangerous blackness away. I knew that if I could see myself through her mind's eye that a similar dreamy look would also be rolling in over the black of my irises.
Take her! The beast roared, but I pushed the aggression away.
I wanted her desperately, but I didn't want to scare my little dove away. There was a brutal sense of possessiveness coursing through me that would have torn the last of her clothing from her pale porcelain skin and sheathed myself within her heat in less than a second, but a strange and previously unknown passion demanded just as much attention.
Protectiveness.
I thought I had known what such a feeling was like in the decades that I kept Esme tucked underneath my arm and as far away from the view of Aro and the rest of the court as possible. But this was different—a more all-encompassing feeling that I didn't know could exist.
With Esme, I knew, although with some difficulty, that I could let her go to live a better life away from the demons lurking below Volterra. I could let her live in the arms of another if it meant she would be safe and happy.
That same sentiment would never be true for the girl pinned below me, arching her back almost instinctively to expose her neck to me.
I growled lowly, accepting the offering by pressing my lips against my mark and sucking the skin harshly into my mouth.
Isabella Cullen was mine now. She would always belong to me from this day forward. I would never let her go from my side, never let her spend a day without my touch, without my teeth in her neck, without me filling her over and over again.
And now I would take her and show her how deeply the sting between us ran. Then she would know too.
I had used one hand to wrap into what was left of the braid that her hair was tangled into, moving her neck into the perfect defenseless position for me to find my home underneath her skin, while the other pushed up the hem of her bloodied church dress to find nothing but bare, sharp hip bones waiting for me to sink into.
"Enough!" She cried out in a broken voice, her hands trying to push me away suddenly.
No!
"Mine!" I roared in her ear, the possessiveness quickly swallowing the need to protect my little dove, showing her that she no longer had a say. She was going to be bound to me in every way that I wanted her. I would break her body and she would thank me for it and beg again and again that I never stop filling her with my teeth and the hardness beneath my jeans.
I would start by tearing into that buttery soft neck.
"No!" She screamed
Wave after wave of unrestrained electricity split me in half again, this time not nearly as forceful, but enough to send me several yards away from Isabella.
It was undeniable.
It was this small delectable creature who had spent me flying across the forest and into the ground before—the one to threw my body off of hers just now. I sat up almost immediately, feeling the same leftover prickling of her power begin to mix with the deep-seated fire of wanting that pulled into my stomach whenever we weren't touching.
"Isabella?" I whispered as I stared at her, her eyes folding over with a darkness that knotted back up the string connecting us. "Come here!" I half begged, half demanded knowing that I needed to push away that look and replace it again with the waves of desire that had her whimpering under my fingertips moments before.
I tried to move but only got as far as a foot away from where I landed, running straight into a wall of that same electricity. It stung my skin and shimmered in the air in front of me—a barrier keeping us apart, created by her in some unknown way.
She blinked slowly, still looking up at me from her spot on the ground, her dress hiked up against her naked hip where my hand was just a second ago about to dig back into the honey that pooled between her legs. The blood caking the rest of her dress was beginning to dry and stick the thin fabric against her skin. Her neckline was ripped and exposed to show the fresh teeth marks I had tainted her with. She was almost all mine.
I could have cried at the vehement emotion that dredged up from the very pit of my long-forgotten soul, especially as I watched each slow flutter of her eyelashes bringing with it a deeper darker blankness to her glaze.
"Bella," I called to her own soul.
She was gone before her lashes could meet again, sprinting into the house, leaving the French doors of the back porch gaping open behind her.
I fell to my knees feeling the licking of the flames begin to consume me.
A/N: You can thank Midnight Sun for this chapter. It's giving me life.