His dark voice trails down her spine, lighting a path of desire that renders her breathless. "If only I were in a position of no consequence."
Alia's breath wavers when the pad of his thumb slowly glides across her bottom lip.
"Then I could give in...
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"I don't own you, you just belong to me." - Pushpa Rana
•
Slow, soft breaths warm Valen's neck as he looks over Ali's shoulder at the journal in his hands. Black ink fills the cream-coloured pages, words describing the memory he relived after locking eyes with Death. His bed covers wrap around Alia's back, holding her body against him whilst she sleeps. Her head rests on his shoulder, fingertips lightly brushing against his lower back with every breath. The feeling of her skin against his is calming, peaceful, and he finds himself fighting the desire to close his eyes and sleep the day away with her in his arms.
Every time he tries to visualise that golden throne, it shifts in his mind and flickers into something black and regal. There was a man who stood beside it, hair a dark brown with a face blurred completely clean. Not a single feature was visible, and every attempt at focusing in on the male caused Valen's mind to swirl into darkness as the memory slipped from his grasp.
Time and time again, he'd restart the memory, and it would always begin with him laying in a flowery field and end after an attempt at identifying the faceless male.
It feels as if the memory is fracturing in his mind, splitting into pieces as he prods the events of his past with a harsher and harsher gaze. It makes him wonder how long it will be before the memory disappears from his mind completely. The thought of forgetting such a confusing part of his past fills him both with anger and relief. Part of him wants to dismiss the things he saw, opting to free his mind from the weight of being a man who used to rule. Whilst the other part of him is enraged at the thought of losing this knowledge of himself, of succumbing to a life with a forgotten past, and for forgetting the only key he has to remembering himself.
An ache blooms inside his mind, purposeful and throbbing. For a moment, he closes his eyes and sighs, disappointed at his lack of progress. Then he closes the journal and places it back onto one of his nightstands.
Alia shifts in his lap, groaning quietly when the ache lingering inside her muscles breathes to life. Her hands ball into fists and she instinctively tries to curl in on herself, legs wrapping tighter around Valen's waist whilst her spine bends her chest away from his own.
Slipping his arms underneath the covers, one of his hands finds the back of her neck whilst the other caresses the middle of her spine. "How are you feeling?" he whispers.
With each stroke of his thumb, Alia relaxes and melts further into him. Her cheek rests above his collarbone, eyes remaining closed whilst her voice is as quiet as his. "Better." She rolls her shoulders in an attempt to remove the strain within them. "Gods," she winces, remembering the unruly heat that burned inside of her, "that was horrible."
"Describe it to me."
"At first I felt warm, sweaty, but then the heat just kept on getting worse and worse until it felt like I was burning on the inside. Nothing was helping, but then you touched me and the heat just disappeared as if it never existed."
