Come what may, the lighthouse’s beam circled Weeping Hollow again that night.
I stood at the window, waiting for the witching hour with the clock’s tick-tock a daunting echo in the room. The lantern spread a lemon glow on the window, and I could see the reflection of my face in the glass.
Stone is a Heathen, I thought.
And my stomach twisted into knots each time it crossed my mind.
Stone was a Heathen, and this was why he could manipulate the earth.
As much as it hurt, it answered everything.
I wondered if he’d ever hurt anyone before. If he’d killed as the Heathens had killed. Had he taken loved ones from the world as well? Was this the reason his mother poisoned him and trapped him in a coffin?
“You should sleep,” Alice said with a yawn. She was sitting in her chair, coming down from the yawn, eyes watering, and I could tell tonight would be a struggle for her.
“There’s a new moon coming.” The bottle screamed at me from the desk’s shelf, my message floating inside and patiently waiting for the tide. “Like all other new and full moons, I will be off to the shore tonight. You should retire to one of the boys’ bedrooms. Let another maid watch over you so you can get some rest.”
“Are you sure?” she asked, her eyes hopeful.
I nodded, and it didn’t take long before she scurried out.
I followed her to the door and closed it just as there was a tapping sound.
I glanced around the bedroom.
The room was dim, with only the lantern in the window, and the lighthouse beam circling, cascading light into the room every seven seconds.
Another tap and I walked to the window and peered down.
“Adora,” Stone called from below, his voice consumed by agony, arms up at his sides with hands full of pebbles. “Come down, my darling Adora. I need to see you.” He threw another pebble, and it clanked off the glass. “Lest you prefer me to climb the trellis and break the wretched window.”
My eyes bulged out of their sockets. My heart raced.
I hurried to crank open the window with my gut jumping into my throat.
Stone stood in the middle of the snow-covered garden, dressed in all black. He looked like ink splattered in the snow.
“Ah, there she is,” he said, letting the pebbles slip from his closed fists. “How befitting your window was the first one I called out to. Truth be told, I thought it would have been challenging. I must have felt you.”
“Evidently, you have a death wish or you wouldn’t be here,” I whisper-shouted.
Then all his broodiness had gone. “Come down, princess. We need to have a little chat.”
I gripped the sill, my knuckles surely white. “Stop using my heart like an Ouija board!”
He narrowed his eyes, his brows pressed together. “On behalf of 1864, I can assure you we don’t know what the hell that is!” he shouted, and I blindly grabbed something from the desk and tossed it at him. He dodged the paperweight and looked up at me. “Excellent. Now, would you mind throwing yourself at me next?”
“I told you I never want to see you again—”
But Stone didn’t allow me to finish before he was ripping off his gloves and stripping off his coat, tossing each into the snow, and stalking toward the exterior wall. When he grabbed the trellis to start the climb, I jumped back.
He’s really coming up, I thought, starting to pace the room with my nails between my teeth. My feet were wearing out the hardwood, and my heart was doing somersaults in my chest.
Minutes later, he was swinging his long legs through my window.
And then he was simply standing in my room, staring at me.
I dug my teeth into my lip to hold my breath.
To try and hold me together. To not cry.
“This town is absolutely mad,” he said, breathing heavily. “People are having disagreements with inanimate objects. The smallest man in Weeping Hollow named Ocean claims to be my protector, ironically after being stuck in one for a century. And what’s with that man, Jasper, who sits on the damned street and stares up at the clock all hours of the day?” He exhaled and wiped his forehead. “I think it’s time for us to go home, Adora, before this town becomes you.”
Silence filled the room as we stared at one another.
His nostrils flared, his chest heaving.
He was trying to hold himself together, too.
“You haven’t hit me yet,” he continued, more gentler, perhaps to fill the silence. “This is normally the part where you hit me, and my body desperately misses your hands.” He lifted a shoulder. “Whether they’re hurting me or pleasing me, they belong on me.”
My jaw clenched, and I heard my teeth grinding in my ears.
Then my chin shook as the first burn for air hit my lungs.
“Your stubbornness is stupidity, my darling,” Stone whispered, repeating the exact words I’d once told him. “Just take a breath.”
He was here, and I had done all I could to stay away and fight it and pretend I didn’t care. But he was here, not giving me or my grief a place to hide.
So, I couldn’t anymore.
My chest buckled, my lungs opened up, and heartache burst from me.
Tears rained down my cheeks, snot bubbled from my nose, and my chest heaved through each breath-aching cry. My vision went blurry, but I could make out Stone just standing there—body stiff and staring at me.
Then his bottom lip trembled, his muscles seeming to jump under his skin. Like he wasn’t sure whether to run to me or stay back and control himself because looking at me was tearing him apart, too. He wet his lip to hide it, then turned his back to me, hanging his head and folding his fingers behind his neck.
“How dare you come here and make jokes when I can barely hold it together,” I shouted, not caring if it pierced through the walls. “After everything, how are you okay right now?!”
Stone swung around and stalked in my direction.
His eyes were bloodshot and miserable as he closed in on me.
“Do I look okay to you, Adora?” he asked, stopping inches from my face, stabbing his chest with his finger. “Look at me. I’m a rotten mess!”
And then his scent surrounded me.
Just like hearth smoke, winter air, and mistletoe.
I needed to get away. So it didn’t hurt anymore.
So he couldn’t see what he was doing to me.
I stepped to my right, and Stone grabbed my elbows.
“Adora, stop,” he said, walking me backward until my spine hit the wall. He pinned me there with his hips so I couldn’t move.
But I can’t stop. I can’t breathe.
I tried to escape before I broke, but it was useless. Another wave of sobs broke through me, and I covered my face to stow away all the things I didn’t want him to see. The same truth I’d tried so hard to bury.
Stone grabbed my wrists and pried my hands from my face.
He clutched them tightly in his hands, his dark gaze tracing a path across my features until his eyes landed on mine.
And at this moment, he could see that I was not only the angry daughter motivated by vengeance, or the mermaid who refused to drown in her tears, or the tough woman who put on a brave face each time her heart was raped by injury, or the seamstress who did her best to hold her family together, or the villain who hid her hurt with pain, or the girl who lived in a fairytale because it was easier to tell stories on occasions when reality proved to be too difficult. At this moment, he could see the truth. I was a girl in love with a Heathen.
And my stomach twisted into knots, utterly repulsed with myself.
Why must my heart be a sadistic nutcase.
Here, Stone, it screamed from my chest. Here’s the one thing to completely destroy me.
“How did this happen to us?” he asked, his voice crestfallen as he lowered himself, holding my gaze. He swiped hair from my wet cheeks and smoothed it down and behind my ears. He then took my head into his hands, propping his thumbs under my jaw, so I had no choice but to look at him. “I never imagined being another thing you wanted to escape from.”
With my fists clenched at my sides, I froze—fighting my feelings, resisting them. I squeezed them so hard that my nails sank into my palms, breaking open the scabs.
“Adora,” he said as he cleaned mascara from under my eyes with his thumbs. Gentle, gentle. “I have spent my entire life convincing myself that I am not a monster. Please, do not make me have to convince you, too.”
Warm blood slipped inside my closed fist, and my lips trembled. “You are a monster.”
His brows pulled together. “You don’t mean that.”
“I want you to leave!”
He shook his head. “I’m not leaving.”
I pushed his shoulders and slapped his chest, smearing my blood from my palms across his shirt, forearms, and neck. Stone didn’t move. He closed his eyes, claiming the spot with his arms hanging at his sides. When nothing else worked, I screamed.
Then he grabbed me, yanked me to his chest, and slapped his hand over my mouth, breaking my scream in half. He smashed his forehead into mine.
“Stop,” he gritted through his clenched teeth, hurt wrapped around his voice. He flexed his jaw, pressing his palm flat against my lips, his eyes sliding between mine. “You’re being pathetic right now. I would never hurt you.”
I wriggled from his hand and drove my palms into his chest.
Stone fell back a step. And I struck his cheek.
For a second, the room stopped spinning.
Twelve inches separated us as we stared at one another.
Chests heaving, teeth grinding, breathing labored.
We were two enemies desperate for something.
Change. To turn back and start over. A different story.
My vision was blurred, my self-control swayed.
His eyes were hooded, his tenacity bruised.
“You’re a Heathen!” I spat in disgust.
His sin-shaped lips set in a harsh line.
His head shook. “And the irony is that I wasn’t accursed until I met you.”
“Stone,” I cried, my voice losing substance. “You’re a fucking Heathen.”
“No, Adora,” he scraped out, gutted, squinting an eye and pointing at me. “No, I’m fucking yours.”
Another tear fell from the corner of my eye and raced down my cheek.
He stepped aside, gesturing at the door. “You have two seconds to wake your bore of a fiancé and bring him here to kill me,” he said, his voice rising with a blue vein popping in his neck. “If those two seconds pass, and you’re still standing there looking like you’re mine, I will throw you against his wall, rip off your clothes, and claim you in ways your deprived little mind, body, and soul could not even imagine.” His chest was heaving, and my eyes were darting from him to the door. “The only restraints I have right now are respect and decorum, Adora, and both are two seconds from being abandoned.”
My mind was utter fog. “You wouldn’t dare.”
Another second passed.
Stone dropped his arm. “Time’s up.”
Then he grabbed me by the hips and threw me back against the wall.
His body chased me, crashing into mine.
His hands came down on my face, and his lips came down on my mouth, painfully and punishingly. I tried to fight him off, but he was smashed against me, as if he wished to bind us together and never part.
I pushed my mouth into his, hard, until my teeth cut into his lip, and he inched his head back.
When I opened my eyes, his were drenched in despair and longing. He looked at me like I was a girl who’d stepped off a page in his sketchbook, and he wasn’t about to let me go. He looked at me like I was a girl who belonged only to him. He looked at me like he loved me.
I grabbed the back of his neck and stood on my toes, no longer pushing him away but pulling him closer. My lips parted, our tongues collided. We moaned, we melted.
Tingling and dizzy, I sank against the wall and grabbed his waist, hauling him closer until the heat of him surrounded me like a warm blanket. Until there was nothing between us. Not space. Not air. Not sea. Not a covenant. Not a given name.
I felt his heartbeat slam against my breasts.
I felt his cock through his jeans press between my hips.
Stone pushed his fingers through my hair, the tips dragging across my scalp as he deepened the kiss. The kiss that required everything of him. The kiss that took my breath away. And this kiss crawled into my blood, raked my heart, and whispered sweet nothings between the bones of my ribcage. At last, the glass had broken, and we were French kissing in the dangerous pile of it—cut open and bleeding.
“You’ve hurt me repeatedly,” he confessed, his words spilling onto my lips as he pinned my wrists behind my back in one of his hands. “You’ve hurt me, you’ve lied to me, and you’ve let me go, and it’s pathetic how I spend every waking moment thinking of only you.” With the other, he wasted not a second more and lifted my hips off the wall, popped the button on my jeans, unzipped the fly of my jeans, and slid his palm inside my panties, down the front of my jeans.
Stone’s tongue dragged along mine when his long fingers stroked my soaked slit. We both moaned at the feel of it, and I couldn’t get close enough, whimpering and climbing to my toes to inhale his lips. Stone lowered, kissing me deeply, fingertips teasing my clit and slick opening.
Neither of us took a breath. No chance to decline or stop or escape this.
My hands flew to the button of his jeans, and Stone fell forward, palm flat against the wall beside my head, caging me in, breathing heavily into my mouth.
I fumbled with his button and fly, shaking and desperate to feel him inside me. I missed him. I missed this. I missed us. The difficulty. The drunkenness. The desperation of it all.
Then his fully erected cock was heavy and pulsing in my hand.
When I wrapped my fingers around it, his palm slid down the wall, brows slanted upward, mouth falling open, euphoria carved into his face. By my touch, he was weak, and I loved how it stole him. How he didn’t hide it—couldn’t hide it. How the disguise slid off, and he’d become utterly helpless.
I make him feel like this, my heart sang.
Then I was swooped off the ground.
“I’ve been craving you, Adora, and I intend to kiss you everywhere.” Stone cleared off the desk by the opened window, my fountain pen flew, ink spilled, and the clock was bumped off and crashed to the hardwood. He dropped me on the edge and peeled off my jeans as if he were thirsty, aching, and dying.
Winter was slipping into the room, and I started to shiver.
He grabbed my ankles, spread my legs apart, and set my feet flat, my toes curling around the edge of the desk.
My heart was a wild, thrashing beast, and I was at his mercy with a cold draft blowing across my flesh. Then his warm hands came over my thighs, and he lowered, dragging a soft mouth and a greedy tongue up through my soaked slit—deeply, slowly. A fierce, spine-melting crawl that threw my head back.
“Stone,” I panted, my breath catching as he took my clit into his mouth.
He trailed soft lips and sucked on my trembling pink flesh and kissed the insides of my thighs. He then stood between my legs, holding my jaw, slipping his tongue into my mouth. And ...
I.
Was.
Set.
Aflame.
“I’ve missed you,” he whispered into my ear. His hips sank between my knees, a sultry safe place, the thick head of his cock nudging my entrance. Like our parts just suddenly found each other and demanded to be connected again.
Stone leaned over me, sliding his hands under my ass, grabbing me, and hauling my spread pussy flush against his warm cock. I sucked in a breath, the sensations insane, maddening, my nerve-endings skinned and exposed.
“This is going to kill me,” I cried in a whisper, my nails sinking into his skin. “I can’t keep doing this and wake up tomorrow and not think of you. I can’t keep doing this then go on without you.”
“Then don’t.” His thumbs slid down my pussy’s edges to my opening, and he kneaded, drawing heavy circles to get me ready as his cock slid over my clit. I knew what was to come, and I was suddenly sucking on his bottom lip, fisting his shirt, yanking him closer, and grinding into his hands as he worked my pussy until my body was spasming with a climbing orgasm.
“Take a breath, Adora,” Stone whispered knowingly into my mouth. He kept my thighs back with his hips as his cock slid through my slit, the bottom of it scraping my bud. His thumb teasingly dipped inside me and circled the rim, and I shook my head with my legs shaking.
I didn’t want to let go. I wanted to hold on forever.
As Stone grinned against my lips, he moved his hooked fingers only an inch inside me. He stroked my flesh, triggering the orgasm himself.
In one fierce breath, the orgasm hit me, seizing my entire being, paralyzing me, liquifying me into a quivering mess in his palm. One of his hands moved up to cradle the back of my head while the other flirted with my orgasm like a tuning fork. My back arched, feeling his lips trace my jawline, my throat, then he kissed my collarbone, where the skin was thin.
He removed his flirtatious fingers and dragged his cock across my warm center, using my climax to coat himself. All my blood had rushed between my legs. My body hadn’t come down, still locked in an orgasm, trapped in a cage of utter bliss as he prodded my opening.
I could feel his warm breath move across my skin to my lips. I grabbed his jaw and kissed him just as he lined himself up. Then his palm smoothed down the back of my thigh, and there he squeezed the flesh and thrust inside me.
Inch by stretched inch, he filled me to the base.
Stone cursed at the feel of us, and his lips slid lazily down my throat.
At any second, Alice or Cyrus could barge into the room and see a Heathen with his jeans halfway down his ass as he stood between my spread legs. In my imagination, it’s Cyrus, and he walks in, but we can’t hear him, lost in our fantasy world of utter pleasure. “Adora, what are you doing?” Cyrus asks, sounding from a world away, outside this five-foot radius of perfection Stone and I have created. “You are literally my other half. Why are you fucking a Heathen?” But I’m incredibly selfish and consumed by Stone. All I hear is the slamming of Stone’s heart. All I feel is the way we’re bound to each other, as we should always be. All I see are cosmic black eyes. All I smell is crisp winter air. And all I taste are his soft, swollen lips. “Adora! ... Adora! ... Adora!” Cyrus screams, but Stone, Stone, Stone, my heart echoes. Besides, hearts should never have to apologize for feeling the same as the night should never have to apologize for breathing.
The thought made me tear away from Stone’s mouth and gasp for air.
“We shouldn’t do this.” I had to pry the words out of me. “He’s my Finneuma,” I confessed, not wanting to say another man’s name at a time like this. “I’m fated to be with him. He’s my soulmate, Stone.”
Stone paused mid-grind.
He looked at me, benumbed, sweat sliding down his hairline.
“Soulmate?” he asked, surprised.
I couldn’t handle the look in his hooded eyes, so I cast mine away.
“Soulmate,” Stone repeated, steering my chin with his thumb until our gazes locked again. His lips were apple-red and swollen when he looked at me. He shook his head, grabbed the back of mine, and pressed our heads together. “Haven’t I ever told you?”—he thrust inside me—“Soulmates are overrated.” His hand turned into a fist at my scalp as he nailed his cock to the hilt, grinding inside me, keeping us bound together in every way he could so I was forced to feel him everywhere.
We kissed hungrily and desperately, teeth scraping flesh, skin slick with sweat. Hands were ripping off shirts until my breast was in his palm, the pad of his thumb grazing my erect nipple. My jaw fell open, and he sank his tongue back into my mouth until I was a trembling ocean in his arms.
Another orgasm was climbing, attacking my insides. Stone stood straight, his hands flying to my clit. I wriggled against his hold, the feeling already too intense.
“Stone,” I screamed, scratching the oak wood.
But his eyes were raping my pink center, consumed by the sight of the pad of his thumb stroking my clit, the sight of his scarred cock inching inside me, dragging out, then pushing back in. He smashed my clit against his mound, and utter pleasure had a hold on me, my whole body charged. I bit the inside of my cheek to suppress a cry.
Stone’s eyes sailed up to mine before he came down on me, anchoring us together. “Our souls know no boundaries,” he whispered, burying his cock inside me and grinding. “If he was truly your soulmate, why am I here right now and not him? Why am I the one who makes you feel like this?”
I shook my head, an intense cry falling from my mouth as the desk banged against the wall, another climax racing to the brink. The bottle I was supposed to throw into the sea wobbled on the shelf the same way a string of lights wrapped around my bones, bundling inside of me, a tangled mess, every bulb on and shining bright, tripping me toward the edge of the cliff.
I watched the message in my bottle go down as my body free-fell, heading straight for the climax. Blood floating, heart pounding, mind weak, we were all falling.
Then we crashed to the floor, my message and me, a blown fuse, shattering and scattering. A spine-tingling mess and a pile of broken glass. At once, the bell chimed throughout the castle, indicating it was the witching hour.
Stone reached under my ass, squeezing the flesh with a delicious grind that kept me trapped in the never-ending land of ecstasy.
My orgasm convulsed, and it caught Stone’s breath.
He kissed me slowly, passionately until the orgasm was stealing him, too.
Then his forehead fell onto mine as he hungrily rolled his hips until his cock pulsed inside me, and a curse tumbled off his tongue.
He tensed up, his body stiff. Then when the orgasm released him, goosebumps covered his skin and black eyes fell on me. We didn’t want to let go, sweaty foreheads connected, staring at each other as we heaved for a breath.
“You didn’t answer, darling,” he panted.
“I don’t know the answer,” I whispered.
“What do you know then?”
I turned my head away, wishing I was brave enough to say it.
I knew I loved the feel of silk on my legs after shaving them. I knew I loved it when a dress fit perfectly on a woman’s body. I knew I loved old films, vintage pieces, and one-of-a-kind things. And I knew I loved how he touched me, whether it be his fingers, his tongue, his lips. Surely, I could even admit it all out loud. But I could never confess that I knew I was deeply, madly and passionately in love with him.
In the end, it wouldn’t do either one of us any good.
“After knowing the truth, I thought you would hate me forever,” I said.
“I do hate you.” His words were hot steam on my lips as he guided my hand to the nape of his neck for me to hold as he fucked me slowly. His mouth moved like depressed clouds over my lips, my cheek, my ear. “And I hate the nauseating scent you left behind at the lighthouse and the scars you left behind on me. I hate your eyes, your smile, and how awful you taste. And these hideous lips of yours.” He brushed his thumb across my bottom lip. “They’re repulsive, and I have not stopped thinking about them.”
He smiled, his arm snaking around my back, and he picked me up off the desk, my legs instantly wrapping around his waist. His hand slid from my scalp down my spine before squeezing my ass, both palms spreading my cheeks wide as he rocked me, my pussy hungrily stroking his scarred shaft. My lips trailed down his throat in a satisfactory moan, and I clung on to his neck, crushing my breasts to his chest, tasting earth and salt on his skin.
From the corner of my eye, the letter lay on the floor in a pile of broken glass.
To my beloved black sea,
You’re mine, you’re mine, you’re mine, you’re mine, you're mine, you're mine, you're mine, you're mine, you're mine, you're mine, you're mine ... and I think I might love you ...
xx, a
I faced him again. “Stone?”
“Hmm?” he murmured.
“There’s an empty chamber in the tunnel close to where it leads out to the cave. Tomorrow night, meet me at the witching hour.”
“How do I find it?”
I grinned. “You’re the element of Earth, Heathen. I’m sure you can figure it out.”
His eyes were hooded and heavy when he kissed me. And our mouths moved lazily together—lips sleepy, drunk, unable to part.
Outside, the lighthouse beam rotated, penetrating the dirty paned window. It shone its light on us, two bodies tangled together, unable to part.
So, we clung to each other until we were forced to let go.
The Heathen and his siren, with rebellion in our veins.