Chapter 1713: Hunger
Black Fang hit Quinlan before his arms could rise.
The manacles still swung from her wrists with chunks of stone trailing behind them, and she slammed into his chest with a force that drove every wisp of air from his lungs and sent him backward off his feet.
Sera surged forward with golden light blazing on her palms, and on the wall Myrasyn’s chains rattled violently as the queen pressed back against the stone, ears flat, eyes huge.
But Quinlan didn’t even try to dodge.
He’d watched her come, tracked every fraction of the lunge, and his legs hadn’t moved.
A certainty quieter than instinct told him the woman throwing herself at his chest was not going to kill him, and he believed it without understanding why.
Wind erupted beneath his back an inch before the gore would have caught him, a compressed cushion of air that turned his fall into a glide, and Black Fang’s weight drove him across the cell on the current until he settled horizontal above the blood-soaked stone, floating, with not a drop of it touching his skin.
Her hands landed flat on his bare chest. Her thighs clamped around his lower abdomen, and the woman who had been chained to a wall for days towered above the man who’d torn the dungeon apart to reach her.
He raised an open palm toward Sera without taking his eyes off the ones above him.
The purple irises that had burned with defiance since he’d walked into this cell were swirling now, the color moving in slow spirals that deepened with each rotation, mesmerizing and violent, and every channel in Black Fang’s body was screaming toward the man beneath her.
She leaned down until her face hovered just above his, matted hair falling around them. "Why didn’t you listen?"
His hand rose from his side to find her cheek, his thumb tracing the bruised skin beneath her eye with a gentleness that had no place in a cell painted with blood.
"I didn’t feel threatened." His brow creased, as if the admission surprised him as much as it surprised her. "I don’t know why."
Black Fang’s jaw worked. The pull surging through her ribs reached for the warmth of his palm, and the trembling in her shoulders worsened as the spirals in her eyes wound tighter.
"Then it’s time you start listening to logic instead of instincts."
Quinlan’s grin arrived slow and sure. "I refuse."
Her eyes narrowed. "Leave already."
The command came hard, but her body betrayed it the moment it left her lips, her fingers pressing flat against his chest instead of pushing off, and the hunger that [Eternal Hunger] had been feeding through her channels for hours refused to release the only source of relief it had found in days.
She understood fully now. The spell had gone rogue.
It had been running too long, eating through her tissue, grinding against the collar’s binding runes, burning through every poison and debuff the dungeon threw at it until it was the only thing left moving through her body.
Now the collar was gone and a primordial with a unique constitution lay beneath her, and [Eternal Hunger] threw itself toward him with a pull she could not override.
"I can’t pull it back." Her voice cracked. "I don’t want to kill you. You must leave."
Quinlan looked at the woman struggling above him, and the grin sharpened even further, turning sly.
"I refuse~"
"This is not the time-"
"You’re hungry, right?" His voice came low and steady. "I know your spell, Vex and the others told me about it. [Eternal Hunger]. It wants blood."
Wind gathered at his fingertips, thin blades of compressed air so precise they hummed, and he drew them across his own shoulder just below the junction of his neck in a single clean motion.
The cut opened shallow and bright, and blood welled in a line that ran warm down his collarbone.
Black Fang went still.
The swirling in her irises accelerated past anything resembling control, purple bleeding outward from her pupils in rings that swallowed the whites, and every serpent tattoo on her body pulsed in unison as the scent reached her.
Quinlan’s thumb stroked her cheek one last time before his hand slid into her hair, fingers threading through the matted strands to cradle the back of her skull.
"Quench your hunger."
"That’s not how it works. I’m not a vampire-"
"It doesn’t function as it should, no? Why not give it a try? What’s the worst that can happen?"
"Quinlan..." The protest was barely a whisper, every muscle in her body trembling with the effort of holding still while her instincts screamed at her to close the gap between her mouth and the blood running down his skin. "Why won’t you listen to me?"
’Because I refuse to leave you behind.’
He didn’t need to say a third time, the truth ringing in the Venomborne Terror’s head as soon as the words left her lips.
His hand in her hair pulled her down, gentle and firm, and the last of her resistance fell apart.
She lunged at the wound.
Her tongue pressed flat against the cut in a long, trembling drag that gathered the blood pooling along his collarbone, and her eyes snapped wide as the taste flooded her mouth.
Rich and warm and carrying a mana so dense it hit [Eternal Hunger]’s starving channels like water on cracked earth, and the small sound that left Black Fang’s throat was involuntary and entirely too honest for the most feared woman on the continent.
She licked again, harder, tongue pressing into the wound as she chased every last drop, and her fingers curled against his chest with a grip that would have pulverized a lesser man’s ribs.
Quinlan’s free hand came to rest between her shoulder blades and pulled her further into him. "I thought you were hungry? Don’t be shy."
The trembling stopped.
Her mouth opened wider against his shoulder, and the teeth that found the edges of the wound carried a care that lasted exactly one heartbeat before she bit down properly and drank with the earnest, undignified need of someone who had finally stopped pretending she didn’t want this.
Long seconds passed.
Then Black Fang pulled back.
Her eyes were still swirling, the purple spirals slower than before but no less deep, and fresh blood ran down her chin in a line she didn’t bother wiping.
"This isn’t..." Her voice came hoarse and unsteady, and the fingers still resting on his chest curled. "The hunger... it’s not receding."
