Grant me Your Grace Chapter 101

“Haa…”

 

A moan—impossible to tell whose—slipped from between their fused lips.

 

As they tugged at each other’s mouths, tongues curling and sliding, their bodies had unconsciously drifted closer until they were pressed against the edge of the bed.

 

Hissin eased Dahlia down onto the sheets, then tilted his head to claim her lips again. Her jaw slackened under the pressure; hot, trembling breaths poured into his mouth.

 

He drove his tongue deeper, stroking every soft, hidden place inside her with slow, deliberate hunger.

 

Dahlia, dizzy and melting under the thick, drugging kiss, only belatedly remembered her original intent.

 

The moment she pulled back just enough to search the bedside for something sharp enough to draw blood, Hissin’s large hands cradled her cheeks, forcing her gaze back to his.

 

“Tonight… can’t we just stay like this?” 

 

His voice was low, almost pleading. 

 

“It’s already been an unbearably cruel day for you.”

 

Even when the hatred runs bone-deep, revenge has a way of clawing at the one who wields it just as viciously.

 

No matter how much truth she now possessed, today was still the day she had sent the man she had called “Father” her entire life to his death.

 

For Dahlia, he wanted—even if only for these few fragile hours—to shield her from any additional pain, no matter how small.

 

“There is nothing in this world more painful than watching your wounds bleed right in front of me and doing nothing.”

 

“Then imagine how it feels for me,” he murmured, voice rough, “to be the one forced to stand by and let you suffer.”

 

“Why just stand by?”

 

Dahlia’s arms slid around the back of his neck, pulling him down with sudden, fierce strength.

 

Before he could protest, she sank her teeth into her own lower lip—hard.

 

The coppery tang of blood bloomed instantly between them.

 

“You’re the only one who can heal me.”

 

Then she kissed him again—deeply, shamelessly.

 

She pushed her tongue past his lips, letting the warm trickle of her own blood slide into his mouth, mingling with saliva, sweet and obscene.

 

Hissin’s eyes widened.

 

The Dahlia beneath him was different tonight—either devastatingly innocent or shockingly depraved.

 

More aggressive, more desperate, more willing to bleed for him.

 

He swallowed her blood almost involuntarily, then let out a short, helpless, incredulous laugh against her mouth.

 

“You…” he breathed, voice wrecked, “are going to ruin me.”

 

Yet even as he said it, his hands were already sliding under her back, gathering her closer, as though he could fuse their bodies together and keep every drop of her pain and every pulse of her desire locked inside himself forever.

 

The room seemed to shrink until there was only heat, breath, blood, and the trembling edge of something neither of them could name—but both refused to let go of.

 

As the thick, metallic warmth of Dahlia’s blood coated his tongue and slid down his throat, the lingering chill of old pain in Hissin’s palms vanished in an instant—like frost melting under a sudden blaze.

 

“Hng…!”

 

A low, swallowed gasp vibrated between their sealed mouths.

 

He drew back just enough to lift her hand—the one still wrapped around his neck—and turned it over.

 

There, scattered across her soft palm, faint red marks had bloomed in perfect mimicry of the scars that had once marred his own skin. 

 

Fresh, angry spots, as though his pain had branded itself onto her.

 

“You really are impossibly stubborn,” 

 

Hissin murmured, brows knitting in fond exasperation.

 

He leaned in and punished her already-healed lower lip with a deliberate bite—sharp enough to sting, not enough to break skin again.

 

Dahlia winced, brows furrowing in mock indignation as she gazed up at him, but the look was so unbearably endearing that Hissin could only exhale a quiet, helpless laugh before descending once more to drink from her mouth.

 

Their tongues tangled deeper, breaths growing heavier, denser, until every inhale felt stolen from the other.

 

Hissin mapped every corner of her mouth with slow, possessive strokes, then pulled away with wet, deliberate kisses along her cheek.

 

He drew her marked hand to his lips.

 

A long, languid lick traced the vivid red line.

 

Dahlia’s shoulders quivered, a fine tremor running through her.

 

Deliberately cruel, he avoided the fresh mark and instead teased the small, raised moles beneath it with the tip of his tongue—circling, pressing, flicking.

 

“Haa…”

 

Her brows drew together in a delicate frown of overwhelmed pleasure; the expression alone was enough to send heat coiling viciously low in his gut.

 

Hissin fought the rising tide of raw desire, pinning it down with iron patience as he pressed the flat of his tongue against one stubborn little mole.

 

Twelve years ago, in the merciless heart of the desert, he had seized this same hand.

 

Blood had welled from her torn skin that day too—and in that crimson gap, he had irrevocably wedged his entire existence, binding his life to hers with something fiercer than any vow.

 

“These marks…” 

 

His voice came rough, almost reverent, the same question he had asked as a desperate boy now resurfacing. 

 

“You could have erased them anytime you wanted. Why keep them all this time?”

 

Dahlia’s eyes—darkened with feverish heat—blinked slowly up at him.

 

Every time his wet tongue grazed her palm, her thighs clenched involuntarily, a secret pulse of need rippling through her body she could no longer hide.

 

“Because…” 

 

Her voice cracked, breathy and trembling. 

 

“These moles… it always felt like they tied me to you. Like threads. Like they were proof… that you were never really gone.”

 

The confession hung between them, fragile and molten.

 

Hissin stilled, lips hovering over her skin, heart slamming against his ribs.

 

Then, with a low growl that was half devotion and half starvation, he dragged her closer—bodies aligning, heat bleeding into heat—until there was no space left for anything but the desperate, blood-tinged rhythm of their shared breath and the unspoken promise that neither would ever let the other go again.

 

“…”

 

As long as this mark remained etched into my palm, I believed—the boy I had pulled back from the brink of death would stay safe.

 

When that boy, returned from the very jaws of oblivion, seized my hand with a grip so fierce it bordered on bruising, even through the agony that swallowed my entire body, a wave of pure, trembling relief crashed over me.

 

This boy burned with such ferocious will to live.

 

This boy—I had refused to let go. I had fought to keep him breathing.

 

The realization struck me like sacred fire: it was an emotion too vast, too shattering to ever speak aloud.

 

Even as consciousness slipped away from me in those final moments, the iron strength of his fingers around mine remained the last, clearest thing I could feel.

 

Later, when I discovered grains of desert sand still buried deep inside the healing wound, I thought—

 

This is what he left in me.

 

This is the stubborn, unyielding will to live that he pressed into my flesh like a brand.

 

So whenever my heart ached too fiercely, whenever loneliness clawed at me, whenever the weight of unbearable things turned the world dark and impassable—

 

I would trace those faint, stubborn marks with trembling fingertips, again and again, steadying myself.

 

Don’t give up so easily on a day someone once fought through hell to reach.

 

Even when the path ahead vanishes completely… endure. Hold on.

 

“Hissin,” 

 

Dahlia whispered, her voice soft and cracked with emotion. Her thumb drifted slowly across the seam of his lips.

 

“You’ve been saving me… for a very long time already.”

 

His breath caught.

 

“Long before you ever came to me as some divine gift.”

 

“…”

 

“From the exact instant you lifted me when I had fallen.”

 

The warmth of his mouth pressed gently against the pad of her thumb—impossibly tender, impossibly alive.

 

The deep, quiet heat he carried inside him seemed to pour through that single point of contact, flooding her veins, filling every shadowed corner of her until she felt radiant with it.

 

Slowly, deliberately, Dahlia lifted her gaze to meet his.

 

Those crimson eyes—rich as spilled wine, fierce as desert sunset—had not once strayed from her since the moment she stepped into this room.

 

They held her with a devotion so absolute it felt like worship.

 

If love could have a color, she thought, it would be exactly this.

 

Exactly these eyes.

 

She rose on her knees, cradling his face between her palms, and pressed her lips to first one closed lid, then the other—soft, lingering kisses laid like vows against the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

 

When she drew back just enough to speak, her voice was barely more than a breath against his skin.

 

“I love you.”

 

The words hung between them, fragile and incandescent.

 

Hissin’s hands rose—slow, reverent—to cup the back of her head, fingers threading into her hair as though anchoring himself against the tide of emotion threatening to drown him.

 

Then he pulled her down, and kissed her—not with hunger this time, but with something deeper, something that felt like surrender and salvation braided together.

 

In that kiss, there was no space left for doubt, for distance, for anything but the raw, aching certainty that they had both been waiting lifetimes to find each other again.

 

And in the silence that followed, when their foreheads rested together and their breaths mingled like shared secrets, the world outside ceased to exist.

 

There was only this: two scarred souls finally recognizing themselves in one another, and refusing—forever—to let go.

 

Dahlia’s raw, unguarded confession darkened Hissin’s gaze until the crimson of his irises seemed to burn from within—deep pools of unspoken longing, devotion, and something almost feral.

 

Words alone could never contain what she had just laid bare, so he poured every fragment of that same unbearable truth back into his voice, slow and deliberate, each syllable weighted with forever.

 

“I love you too.”

 

He lowered his head again, capturing her breath as though it were the only air he would ever need.

 

“Even if I spent every remaining heartbeat pouring this feeling into you, it still wouldn’t be enough. I love you—truly, completely, with everything I am.”

 

After lifetimes of circling one another through pain and distance, the boy and girl who had once been torn apart finally collided again—desperate, aching, ravenous for the feel of each other’s skin.

 

Hissin’s thumb swept across her palm one last time, brushing away the fading red mark as though erasing the final barrier between them.

 

In one fluid motion he parted the folds of her clothing, baring her to the cool air and his heated gaze.

 

His large hand closed over the soft swell of her breast—firm, possessive—and Dahlia’s breath shattered into a sharp, helpless gasp.

 

He rose above her in an instant, covering her completely.

 

Their tongues tangled again, wet and frantic, while he pressed the thick, rigid length of his arousal against the tender inside of her thigh.

 

Her slender body locked tight beneath him, every muscle trembling with the sudden intimate pressure. He hesitated—only for a heartbeat—afraid his own hunger might overwhelm her exhaustion.

 

So he leashed the wild thing clawing inside his chest and began instead to map her body with slow, deliberate heat: open-mouthed kisses down the column of her throat, the flat of his tongue tracing the delicate ridge of her collarbone, teeth grazing just enough to make her arch.

 

But Dahlia—already lost, already molten—couldn’t bear the careful restraint any longer.

 

She broke the kiss just enough to speak, voice wrecked and fever-bright.

 

“Faster… please, faster.”

 

The hand kneading her breast froze mid-motion.

 

Hissin’s lips, which had been drifting toward the pulse point at the base of her throat—where the scent of ripe figs and warm skin was thickest—lifted.

 

He stared down at her, pupils blown wide.

 

She reached for him, fingers curling into his shoulders, voice trembling with urgent need.

 

“I want to feel you… deep inside me. Right now.”

 

Her body had already betrayed how ready she was—how long the slow build of touches and whispers had driven her past patience.

 

Between her tightly pressed thighs, the soft curls at her center glistened with slick, shining arousal, each tiny bead of wetness catching the low light like a secret offered only to him.

 

A dark shudder raced down Hissin’s spine.

 

Lust roared through him so violently his vision narrowed to nothing but her—flushed cheeks, parted lips, the frantic rise and fall of her chest.

 

“You’re going to drive me insane,” he rasped, the words torn from somewhere primal. 

 

“Truly insane.”

 

And then restraint snapped.

 

His mouth crashed back to hers—hard, claiming—while his hands slid down to hook beneath her knees, spreading her open beneath him with reverent violence.

 

The first blunt press of him against her entrance drew matching moans from both their throats, raw and reverent and starving.

 

In that suspended heartbeat before he pushed inside, their eyes locked—red on gold—and everything else in the world simply ceased to matter.

 

There was only this: the unbearable sweetness of finally, fully belonging to one another, body and soul, with nothing left to hold back.

 

Hissin muttered a short, ragged curse under his breath, the sound rough and reverent all at once.

 

His hands found the smooth, trembling silk of Dahlia’s inner thighs and gripped—firm, possessive, anchoring her open beneath him.

 

From between the shyly parted cradle of her legs rose the warm, heady perfume of her arousal: sweet figs and salt and desperate need, curling through the air like an invitation he could no longer resist.

 

“Tonight… make me forget everything,” she whispered, voice fracturing at the edges. 

 

“Hold me until nothing else exists.”

 

When he looked into her eyes again, they shimmered—liquid and luminous, brimming with everything she had tried so hard to bury, grief, fragile relief, regret, and the first faint exhale of release.

 

Even now, even after everything, her heart was still a storm.

 

No amount of steel in her spine could hide how deeply it hurt.

 

“If that’s what you need,” 

 

Hissin murmured against her mouth, voice low and thick with devotion, “then I’ll give it to you. Gladly.”

 

He kissed her—slow, consuming, swallowing the quiet sob that tried to escape. Then he shifted, aligned himself, and pressed forward in one long, deliberate glide—sinking deep, deeper, until there was nowhere left for either of them to hide.

 

Tonigh,t he moved with a tenderness that bordered on worship.

 

He gathered her fragile, clinging body against his chest, arms locked around her like he could shield her from the entire world.

 

Every slow, rolling thrust buried his heat inside her molten core, branding her from the inside out—claiming every shadowed corner of pain and filling it with something fiercer: love, hunger, absolution.

 

When her cries sharpened into something broken and beautiful—half sob, half plea—he opened his mouth over hers and drank them down.

 

Every hidden sorrow, every tear she’d never let fall, every splinter of grief still lodged in her chest—he coaxed them out with the relentless rhythm of his body moving in hers, until they spilled free like floodwater.

 

Hissin rose onto his forearms, hands sliding down to seize her hips in an iron grip.

 

He drove into her harder now—deep, purposeful strokes that dragged her body along with his, slick and obscene sounds filling the space between every ragged breath.

 

“Haa—ah—Hissin…!”

 

Dahlia’s head thrashed against the sheets, dark hair fanning wild across the pillow.

 

The deeper the pleasure sank its claws, the whiter her mind burned—thoughts dissolving into pure sensation, into heat, into him.

 

Below her nael the tight coil of ecstasy swelled and tightened, stretching thinner and thinner, unbearably full.

 

And then Hissin snapped forward—fast, merciless, striking that swollen knot of need at the exact moment it could take no more.

 

“Hnng—ahh—aaah! Haa—!”

 

“Fuck—!”

 

Their voices shattered together—hers high and keening, his low and guttural—as release ripped through them both in violent, blinding waves.

 

Her body arched off the bed, inner walls fluttering and clenching around him in frantic pulses; he buried himself to the hilt and held there, shuddering, pouring everything he was into her in hot, endless surges.

 

For long, trembling seconds, neither moved.

 

Only the ragged symphony of their breathing and the faint, wet sounds of their joined bodies filled the room.

 

Then Hissin collapsed over her—careful, reverent—forehead pressed to hers, arms still cradling her like something infinitely precious.

 

In the quiet aftermath, with tears still slipping from the corners of her eyes and his heartbeat thundering against her chest, Dahlia lifted a shaking hand to his cheek.

 

“You… you stayed,” she breathed, voice wrecked and wondrous. 

 

“You stayed.”

 

Hissin turned his face into her palm and kissed the center of it—soft, lingering, a vow pressed into skin.

 

“Always,” he whispered.

 

“Forever.”

 

They reached the peak together—shattering, simultaneous, absolute.

 

Hissin crushed her against him as though he could meld their bodies into one unbreakable thing; Dahlia’s arms locked around his neck with desperate strength.

 

Inside her, the fierce, rhythmic clenching of her release milked him dry—hot pulses of ecstasy surging deep, flooding her until every tremor felt like shared lightning.

 

Hissin exhaled in a long, shuddering breath, the sound raw against her skin.

 

He bent to her face and—slowly, tenderly—traced the glistening tracks of tears at the corners of her eyes with the flat of his tongue, tasting salt and sorrow and the last fragile remnants of everything she had carried alone for so long.

 

Then he gathered her fully into his arms, cradling her against his chest as silent sobs shook her frame.

 

She buried her face in the crook of his neck, breath hitching, body still trembling from aftershocks.

 

“Let it out,” he whispered into her hair, voice low and steady like the desert wind at dawn. 

 

“Cry as hard as you need to. The night will swallow every sound, every tear. I’ll swallow the rest.”

 

Dahlia gave a small, broken nod, too spent to speak, and let herself collapse completely into him. She surrendered to the storm she had held inside for years—wave after wave of grief, relief, exhaustion, love—pouring out against the solid warmth of his body.

 

Hissin became the darkness for her that night.

 

He held her through every shuddering breath, every muffled cry, every quiet convulsion of pain finally given voice.

 

He swallowed her sorrow the way the endless desert night swallows light—patient, endless, gentle in its absoluteness—until there was nothing left to fight, nothing left to hide.

 

In the hush that followed, two scarred children who had once clung to each other in a freezing, merciless waste finally felt the first faint warmth of morning on their skin.

 

The long night they had endured—the one filled with blood and sand and impossible promises—was, at last, giving way to something softer. Something that might endure.

 

The boy and the girl who had refused to let each other die were no longer just surviving.

 

They were beginning—haltingly, achingly, beautifully—to live.