Chapter 45 #2
She laughed softly, and the sound struck him with such profound familiarity that he stopped breathing.
For an instant, the room disappeared.
He heard that laugh in a sunlit library, beside a garden wall, and across a dining table surrounded by brothers who had temporarily remembered how to behave like men instead of weapons.
Then the memory vanished.
The woman beneath him touched his face.
“Where did you go?”
Rhen caught her wrist.
“I’m right here.”
The statement sounded more like a vow than he intended.
He kissed her before she could ask again, and she responded by shifting beneath him with deliberate invitation.
Rhen pulled back only far enough to meet her eyes.
“I could hurt you.”
“You will not.”
“You have an unreasonable amount of faith in someone you met tonight.”
“No.” Her gaze remained steady. “I have faith in the man who has spent hours proving he could have taken whatever he wanted and chose not to.”
The words broke the last of his resistance.
Rhen rolled onto his back and brought her with him, placing her astride his hips while supporting her weight with both hands.
She looked down at him, startled.
Her hands settled upon his chest.
The connection tightened with anticipation, but she did not move immediately. She studied him first, avoiding his eyes as though committing the sight of him to a memory neither of them understood was already filled with his face.
Then she lifted herself and guided him toward her.
Rhen’s hands tightened upon her hips.
“Look at me.”
She did.
Only then did he allow her to lower herself onto him.
Her breath caught as he entered her, and Rhen held perfectly still while her body stretched around him. The connection between them surged with enough force to shake the candle flame.
She closed her eyes.
“Open them.” he growled.
Her gaze returned to his.
“I need to know you are here.”
“I am.”
She sank lower until he filled her completely.
The sensation dragged a growl from him, but he did not move beneath her. His entire body had become rigid with the effort of allowing her to set the pace.
She remained still for several breaths, adjusting to him while the lingering ache of the transition melted into a different kind of pressure. When she finally rolled her hips, the movement drew a broken sound from both of them.
Rhen’s fingers flexed against her waist.
“Fuck! Again.”
She moved once more, slowly at first, learning the angle and depth that transformed the final traces of pain into pleasure.
The bond responded to every motion.
It pulsed beneath their skin and through the walls, making the air shimmer while the glyphwork around her wrists began glowing more brightly. Neither of them noticed. Their attention had narrowed to the place where their bodies joined and the impossible familiarity of each other.
Her rhythm quickened.
Rhen guided without controlling, lifting his hips only when she leaned closer and silently asked for more. Each thrust drove him deeper, and the sound of her pleasure stripped another layer from the discipline he had spent centuries perfecting.
“Rhen..I …I want…” she breathed.
“Take it.” He pushed her hips down and his into her. A cry escaped her lips as he filled her.
“Yes!.” She pressed one hand against the center of his chest. Her head rolling back, her long hair brushed his slick thighs.
He could feel the gathering tension inside her, the pleasure tightening through her body, and beneath both lay the echo of an emotion that felt far older than the hours they had known each other.
Rhen sat and caught the back of her neck and pulled her into a kiss.
She began moving harder, her thighs trembling around him as she chased the release building between them. Rhen slid one hand between their bodies and found the sensitive point above where they joined.
Her cry broke into his mouth.
“That?”
“Yes.”
He circled slowly, matching the movement of her hips until her control began to fracture.
The room filled with the sounds of uneven breathing, skin against skin, and the low growls Rhen could no longer suppress. The fire bent toward them as though caught inside the same pull, while silver light traced the hidden symbols beneath her skin.
“Look at me,” he hissed, gripping her throat as she moved, grinding on him harder and harder.
She held his gaze even when pleasure made it difficult.
Rhen felt her tightening around him, felt every tremor as though it moved through his own body.
“I cannot—”
“You can.”
Her fingers dug into his shoulders.
“Rhen.”
“Take it, fuck! Harder, take it harder!”
The words reached somewhere deeper than desire.
She came apart around him.
Her body tightened as the orgasm tore through her, pleasure and magic breaking together until a cry of his name filled the room. The force of it pulled Rhen past the last boundary of his control.
He drove upward once, holding her against him as his own release struck.
At the instant their bodies locked together, the bond completed.
Power detonated through the chamber.
The wards screamed inside the walls, the windows rattled, and every flame rose white before being extinguished at once. Something ancient closed around their joined blood with the finality of a door locking.
Beneath the darkness, the heretic glyphs blazed.
A fracture raced through the glamour.
Neither of them saw it.
She collapsed against Rhen, trembling as the final waves of pleasure moved through her. He wrapped one arm around her and held her against his chest while the violent tension gradually left her body.
For a few stolen moments, the world became quiet.
Across the stronghold, the tether inside Veya wrenched taut.
Her body bowed sharply from the mattress as pain tore through the blood Rhen had used to create her. Dax caught her before she could strike the wooden frame, one arm braced behind her shoulders while his other hand closed around hers.
“Veya. Look at me.”
She tried, but the room had already vanished beneath the force dragging her toward something happening beyond the locked suite.
Rhen’s presence surged through her, immense and violent, carrying an awareness that was not hers and had never belonged inside her. Another connection closed around him with absolute finality, and the unnatural opening between maker and progeny strained beneath the weight of it.
Then the pressure reversed.
The tether did not break.
It narrowed.
What had existed like an open wound beneath her ribs drew inward, forcing Rhen’s hunger, anger, and invasive awareness back along the bloodline until only a thin thread remained.
The sudden silence hurt almost as much as the pressure had.
Veya sagged in Dax’s arms.
He caught her face between his hands, forcing her to focus upon him.
“What happened?”
She pressed trembling fingers against the center of her chest and searched for the connection that had occupied her since the night she died.
“It changed.”
“Is it gone?”
Veya closed her eyes.
The thread was still there, ancient blood recognizing what it had made, but Rhen no longer filled the space behind her thoughts.
She could not feel his rage, his hunger, or the foreign connection that had forced her tether closed.
She knew only that he existed somewhere beyond the suite, distant and separate.
“No,” she whispered. “His blood is still there.”
Dax’s expression hardened.
“But he isn’t inside me anymore.”
“The pain?”
“Gone.”