"I hate you." The threat in her voice rings emptily. Suzuka feels her face flush.

  He chuckles. "Liar." His hands are on her back, circling, taunting. Beneath them the bedsheets are satin-slick, and when she moves, she can feel the embroidered patterns against her skin, piece the shapes together in her mind. Here, a splayed feathered wing, there a sinuous curve of a scaled back. Even in the darkness, this galls her.

  With a sudden surge of anger, she turns over to face him. The mattress shifts, her elbows are buried in the goose-down softness. She scowls.

  Without his visor, gloves, and claws, Touda looks oddly vulnerable in the moonlight, so pale, so human. And she wonders, where the snake in him is hiding, hissing, that cunning, cruel streak, the cold, black blood she knows is running through his veins, that she longs to draw.

  "Uncomfortable?" He smirks. "You were enjoying yourself a moment ago."

  The familiar battlefield-bloodlust is rising. "Shut up," she snarls, and lunges.

  Her mouth is burning on his, where her hands rake his shirt, she hears them catch and rip. His fingers grasp wildly for purchase as well, and her hair is unraveling, braids spilling down, across them. She leans further in, greedy and scalding. He growls and pushes her back down, and they sink into the pillows, a dragon and phoenix, tangled up in the burnished red and gold and green.

 

return