CHAPTER FIFTEEN #2
The heat subsided, but only barely. The thing inside me was in agony at the thought that its prize was about to get fucked by another man, and it wanted company in that agony, but I refused to give it any.
This was the entire point, the exact reason I was here: to feel the dragon’s madness, to stand inside it and not move.
Because I was the king, and my word was law. Whatever happened next happened because I decided it was going to happen, not because a feral beast with a hunger it couldn’t name demanded it of me.
I looked at Corvin. He looked back at me, and neither of us blinked.
She was the one to act next. She reached up and took Corvin’s face between her hands.
He resisted her touch for half a breath, but then she pressed her thumbs to his jaw and turned his face toward her, wanting to meet his eyes, and he let her.
That was the part that got to me. The letting.
The way he did as she asked, not because she forced him, but because some part of him had been waiting for permission.
“Imagine it’s just us,” she said quietly. “Just the two of us.”
Corvin shook his head as his hands came up and closed around her wrists, not pulling them away, just holding them there. As if holding her was the only thing that made sense, and he couldn’t work out whether to stop or continue.
“This isn’t how it should happen.” His voice was low and rough. “It isn’t how it was meant to be between us, Guin.”
Guin.
The name landed wrong in my chest because of the mere fact that it wasn’t her full name or a title.
No, it was the diminutive, the familiar.
It was the kind of name a man used when he’d been saying it in private for long enough that the shortened version felt more true than the one she’d been born with.
I held very still.
END HIM! The words burned up through me like something trying to crack bone. END HIM NOW! HE TOUCHES WHAT IS OURS!
I didn’t respond because I was too busy watching the way they looked at one another. And in their expressions was something I didn’t want to see: genuine caring.
SHE IS OURS!
The heat didn’t leave; it spread instead, up through my shoulders, into my jaw, and I realized I’d set my teeth together hard enough to make my jaw ache.
I released the pressure deliberately, rolled my jaw, and stood with my arms crossed and my back against the wall, my face arranged into something that resembled mild amusement.
But inside, it was another story altogether.
Inside, I was wrangling the beast, forcing it into submission.
“This isn’t worth either of our lives,” she whispered up to him. “So we give the king what he wants.”
This was the only time she’d ever said anything close to that sentiment, and I fucking hated every word.
But I stood there because I had to. Because I’d brought this on myself, and my reasons for being here still remained.
I would best the fucking beast. I would prove who was master and who was not.
And this was the only way I knew how to do just that.
Corvin was silent. His chest rose and fell with the visible effort it took him to restrain himself.
I knew him well enough to know that he was seething.
I’d seen him seething before, across twenty years and half a dozen battlefields, and I recognized the signs: the stillness, the controlled breath, the way his shoulders sat an inch higher than they should.
She didn’t wait for his agreement; instead, she backed away from him. He just watched her.
Her fingers went to the laces of her tunic, and she worked them loose without ceremony, without any apparent acknowledgment that I existed in this room at all. That was deliberate, or at least I cataloged it as deliberate and filed it away without reaction.
She pulled the tunic over her head.
Corvin’s anger changed shape then. I watched it happen. The rigidity in his jaw shifted, his breath slowing fractionally as his eyes tracked her. The seething drained out of him and was replaced by something else entirely: something older, quieter, and far more complicated.
Her back was to me, and the light in the cell worked along the lines of her spine, the dip of her waist, the flare of her hips. She undid her braies and let them drop to the ground, then she stepped out of them.
OURS, the dragon said, and the single word came with a pressure so immense it was almost physical: a full-body want that wasn’t entirely mine and yet felt as if it was.
The line between us had gone indistinct in the heat of it, and for a moment, I couldn’t tell with any certainty where the beast ended and I began.
She stood still; she didn’t turn around. And I was overcome with the need to touch her, to feel that silken cavity between her thighs. My cock was engorging just thinking about it.
Take her, the dragon urged. She is here. She is bare. She is—
—No.
She bares herself but not for us—
—No.
She should bare herself for US—
—She bares herself because I ordered it. I held the thought like a weapon, cold and clean. I ordered this. It happens because I decide it happens. Because I am the fucking king. And you are nothing.
The dragon screamed at me.
I stood against the wall and felt it scream, but I didn’t move. Didn’t move, even though I had to clench my hands into fists to keep from wrapping my arm around her so I could pull her against the hard length of me.
I watched Corvin instead, watched him look at her, watched his hands open at his sides, and watched the thing between them, the weight of it, the obvious years of it. There was love in the way he looked at her, like she was the center of the world he’d incorporated into himself without meaning to.
I hated that too. With everything in me.
I am in charge, I reminded myself. I ordered this. Every action in this room was happening because I’d willed it to happen. Because I am the king.
I kept saying so to the thing in my chest until it almost sounded true.
But now I wasn’t sure what I’d done. Regardless, she moved toward Corvin with the kind of calm that I recognized as courage, as though she was deciding to move through any fear she might have had.
Her hand found his arm, and her fingers curled around his forearm just above the wrist.
She rose up on her toes and put her mouth near his ear, and I heard the words despite myself.
“It’s just us,” she said. “Just like it was in the tavern.” She paused for a breath. “It’s just you and me.”
Corvin’s eyes closed for a moment, then his head came down slowly, like he had every right in the world, and he took her mouth.
The dragon inside me went very, very still.
For a single breath, there was nothing but silence in my chest. No roar. No fire. Just the kind of stillness that comes before a storm breaks, before lightning splits the sky, before everything that was held in check comes loose all at once.
I watched his mouth close over hers, watched the way his hand slid up to cup the back of her neck, his fingers threading through that silver-white hair like he’d done it a thousand times before.
And I watched the way she yielded to him, her mouth parting, her body going soft against his in a way that spoke of trust and intimacy.
Of a history I hadn’t known existed until I’d first seen them together.
The dragon’s reaction was something almost overpowering.
The force of it came up through the soles of my feet, through my spine, and cracked into the back of my skull like I’d just been hit in the head with an axe.
I put my shoulder against the stone wall and held my ground.
And the cold of the wall was the only real thing for a moment; everything else became noise, heat, and the relentless hammering pressure of a hunger I hadn’t asked to carry.
OURS, it screamed. OURS. OURS. OURS.
Every repetition was louder than the last. I pressed my shoulder harder into the wall and breathed through my nose as I forced myself to watch them, forced the dragon to watch them through my eyes.
She kissed him back, eagerly and with both hands fisted in the front of his tunic, her body arching up toward him the way a flame leans toward a draft.
And he was taking everything she offered.
His arm had wrapped around the small of her back as he pulled her flush against him.
One of his hands was in her hair, tilting her head back, and the kiss had gone deep and unhurried in the way that intimacy does when it’s been building for longer than either party will admit.
Her hands moved. I watched her fingers find the ties of his tunic and work them loose. She pulled at the fabric as he reached back and grabbed a fistful of it, pulling it over his head himself.
He was broad across the shoulders, but that was no surprise. Corvin had always been built like someone who had earned his body rather than been given it. Old scars mapped his torso in silver lines: a record of every battlefield I knew by name because I’d been there too, bleeding alongside him.
She pressed herself against him, those round and beautiful tits now thrust up against the wiry hair of his chest.
At the feel of her, the sound Corvin made came from somewhere below speech.
It was a low, broken thing that barely made it past his teeth, and the moment it reached me, something inside my chest answered it with a rage so complete that my vision went narrow and red.
END HIM, the dragon screamed, but the words were no longer urgent. They were inevitable. It was the voice of a thing that had stopped asking and started expecting. THOSE SOUNDS ARE OURS ALONE! HER BODY AGAINST HIS IS OURS. HER BARE SKIN IS OURS. TAKE HER BACK.
The wall was the only thing keeping me upright. I pushed off it.
Now panting, I crossed the cell in four steps, took her by the shoulder, and pulled her away from him.
I had to. Because I had to touch her. And not gently.
I had to touch her with the intention and the force of a man reclaiming something he believed to be his.
She didn’t fight me. That was the thing that caught me sideways, the thing I hadn’t expected.
She simply allowed me to turn her, coming away from him without resistance, and ended up with her back against my chest.