Chapter 48
Gemma
M y room in the Hara estate had always been my safe haven. When the doors closed, I could forget…or at least try to forget what lay beyond the room. This room had been my only reprieve when I’d lived in the Collis. This room and my sisters, of course.
When I pulled Azur inside, it was like that switch going off in my brain. I let every worry melt away until all I saw was him. I could almost imagine that we were back on Krynn, in Laras, in our rooms with the windows wide open and the moonlight dappled across the stone floor, salt on the breeze from the Silver Sea. I hadn’t realized how free I’d felt there. Not until I’d returned to the Collis and old memories and fears and worries had begun to flood back in.
I took Azur’s hand and pulled him to my bed.
“We don’t have to do this, Gemma,” he told me, shaking his head, though his red eyes were burning. “This is not why I came. I would drink synthetic blood rations for the rest of my life just to prove that to you.”
I sat perched on my high bed and pulled Azur to stand between my thighs. I was settled a little higher than I normally would be when standing next to him. Yet he still towered over me.
“I know,” I told him truthfully, moving my hair away from my neck and tugging him even closer. He couldn’t help his reaction to seeing my bared flesh. His ivory fangs elongated in a rush, his nostrils flaring. “But I missed this. I want this. I want to satisfy you and make you feel good too. Nothing would feel more right.”
His swallow was audible.
I was wearing a dress today, and I slid the material up my thighs, Azur’s muffled groan following as his eyes were glued to its rise.
“I’ve missed you, husband,” I told him, my heart beginning to pound in my chest when my hands went to the clasps on his pants, tugging at the metal, making him hiss. “I need this, Azur. I need to feel you again. Don’t make us wait any longer than we already have. Please,” I whispered, pressing my lips to his jaw before brushing them across his neck.
His deep growl made my spine tingle. He leaned his head back, allowing me access to his exposed throat, an intimacy in itself that I knew he’d only give to me. His hands came to my thighs and he trailed them up, his touch sending fiery sparks across my sensitive flesh.
“Tell me you’ll never leave me again, little wife,” he rasped, hovering.
“I’ll never leave you again,” I promised, gasping when his fingers teased between my thighs.
I kissed his neck as I freed his cock from his pants. He hissed when I wrapped my hand around him, tight.
“Gemma,” he groaned. And when I nudged him closer, teasing the head of his cock between my thighs, he cursed, “ Vaan , I need you.”
“Then take me,” I pleaded against his skin.
Then, knowing that it would spur him along…I bit his neck.
Hard.
A sharp bellow rose from his throat, strangled and needy, and his hips punched forward with one brutal thrust, sliding that cock so deep that his knot, his seal, nearly seated itself within me.
Whimpering with want , I bit harder, squeezing the thick flesh between my fangless teeth. It broke his skin. I tasted the hot tang of his blood, and somehow, it made me even wilder with need.
“ Raazos, ” he huffed, groaning. “ Yes, kyrana! ”
Gods, he liked this. I wondered if it felt like I was claiming him just as his bite felt like a brand on me. His hard, quick thrusts pushed me into a delirium. A fever of madness and acute feeling where I was entirely focused on the spine-tingling, aching slide of his perfect cock and the taste of his blood sweeping across my tongue.
I needed him so deep. I needed him so deep, imprinting himself inside me, the burn of his seal like a brand, so that I would always feel like he was there .
“Harder,” I keened, licking at the bite, the laps of my tongue spurring him into a frenzy. “ More , Azur! Gods , yes, just like that!”
He hit that spot inside me that made me see stars. Then he was leaning forward, never letting up, the subtle shift in position making his seal begin to stretch me.
“Going to come, wife ,” he rasped. “Going to come so fucking hard in your perfect cunt.”
“Oh gods,” I whispered, my eyes going wide, feeling his own fangs tease at the column of my throat. “ W-Wait. ”
Frustration crashed down on me, his words making me remember .
“ Wait , Azur, I don’t have any marroswood here,” I cried out, even as I bit my lip, struggling not to climax as he continued to mercilessly pound and thrust into me, my bed creaking and shuddering with the ferocity of it. “Ohh!”
“ Good, ” he growled, making me gasp. “I shouldn’t have given you that damn tea! I should’ve gotten you pregnant that very night. Shot my seed so deep and stoppered every drop inside you with my seal. And that’s what I’m going to do right now, little wife.”
It wasn’t the right time for me to conceive, I realized belatedly, but his words unleashed a fire in me.
I’d never given much thought to children, but I knew right then that I wanted as many as Azur would give me. Little Kylorr-human hybrids with budding horns, sharp adorable fangs, human eyes, and black wings, so they could fly in the moon winds with their father.
Just then, Azur slid his fangs deep and the pleasure snapped like a tether. It had been so long. The days had passed slowly, each one an entire year without him. The warming sensation of his venom spread, and then I was orgasming. On his cock, with his fangs lodged deep, drinking what I could only offer him, his words ringing in my ears.
“Tell me you’re mine,” he ordered, muffled against my skin. “Tell me, wife.”
“ Yours yours yours, ” I huffed and whimpered, squeezing him tight. “ I’m yours, Azur! ”
I heard his whispered curse, felt the way his muscles tensed, and the way his thrusts became even more frenzied, sinking deep as he continued to drink from me, each dizzying pull of my blood making me gasp. The addicting burn of his seal stretched me. The way the ache mixed with my sublime pleasure made a strangled cry burst from my throat. I orgasmed again, spasming around him as he slotted deep .
Azur came, the hot lashes of his seed bursting into me, filling me up. The world went white. Bright and white. I couldn’t breathe. All I could feel was him. All I could smell was him. All I could taste was him.
I was his. He was mine.
When reality returned, when I could see again, I was up on the bed, cradled in Azur’s arms. His pants were still around his thighs. My dress was still bunched around my waist. His cock was still seated deep, the swell of his seal holding me tight.
I was still huffing. The familiar burn on my neck felt like a relief.
“You want me to heal it?” he rumbled, his voice rich and husky. I nearly shivered.
The bite, he’d meant. So my sisters wouldn’t see?
“No,” I breathed. “I want your mark on me. And mine on you.”
That pleased him. The deep, rumbling purr threading up his chest brought a flush of delight, knowing I’d satisfied my husband, knowing he’d satisfied me , very, very much.
“Rest, my laraya ,” he murmured to me. When my hands clutched tighter, he said, “I’ll be here. I would never leave.”
I was exhausted. I’d hardly been able to sleep since the night I’d confronted my father. Even before then.
But I was safe in Azur’s arms.
That alone made me close my eyes. I finally let myself let go .
* * *
In the early hours of morning, before dawn, I woke to the bleary view of Azur standing out on the balcony of my rooms. The crisp morning air made goose bumps pebble my flesh, but I slid from bed regardless. My feet landed on a cold floor. I dragged a thick blanket that was draped across an armchair and tucked it around me. I was naked. Azur must’ve undressed me during the night.
And himself too, I realized, lips parting at the sight of his firm, dimpled backside, naked as the day he’d been born, standing out on my balcony.
There was a pleasant ache between my thighs. I’d been well used, well pleasured. Every step toward him made me remember him, and I loved it. I craved it.
Coming up behind him, I wrapped my arms around his torso, squashing his wings, which he kept tucked close.
A rumbling sigh left his throat. “I’m sorry, my love, did the cold wake you?”
My love.
Hearing that was like eating a warm steam cake, straight from Yeeda’s bakery. Sticky and sweet and piping hot, leaving me satisfied and wanting more.
“You not being next me woke me,” I informed him. I pressed my lips to his muscled back and to a panel of membrane of one section of his wings, feeling him shudder. Sensitive? I wondered, fighting a smile. “I still can’t believe you’re here. It feels like a dream.”
When these last two weeks have felt like a nightmare, I added silently. But I left like I could finally wake up with him beside me.
Azur guided me from his back, shuffling me to his front. It was a chilled, misty, quiet morning. There was a fog rolling off of Mount Hara—the sight of the mountain accompanied by a sharp pang of sadness—descending into the pine forests in the valley beneath it, crawling over the land. It was beautiful. A beautiful morning in the Collis as the season began to change.
“I hardly ever come out here,” I admitted softly, feeling his arms drape around my front, warming me better than the blanket could.
Azur shifted. “Because of the lake?” he asked.
My rooms looked toward Mount Hara. But to the right of us, I could just make out the edge of the large, oval-shaped lake toward the back of the house. If I craned my head around to the left, I might’ve been able to make out the front entrance gates.
Strangely, it was silent . I couldn’t even hear voices or sounds coming from around the house. There were always people at the gates. With Azur’s appearance last night, sending them into a speculative frenzy, I thought there would be even more this morning.
“Yes,” I answered him, even now avoiding looking in that direction. I kept my eyes on the foggy forest and turned my head the opposite way, brushing my lips across his arm.
“I shouldn’t have left the bed,” he told me. “But I couldn’t resist this view. It’s beautiful here, Gemma.”
My chest ached.
“It is,” I agreed quietly. “And yet…I think I would be all too happy to never lay eyes on the Collis again. On this house. On this estate.”
Azur pressed his lips to the top of my head, breathing me in as I sank deeper into him.
“There’s so much pain here. In these walls. It feels haunted but not with souls. With memory. With grief. With lies,” I said, voice soft in the quiet morning. “But my mother will always be here. I didn’t even want her buried on the estate, especially next to where she died . Neither did my grandparents. But my father was so…so broken. He was adamant about it. Now she’ll always be here.”
“What do you want to do?” he asked me. “What do you and your sisters want to do with the estate?”
My shoulders slumped. “I don’t know. I don’t even know if we have authority over it to decide. I would assume the estate is in my father’s name, but given the laws of the High Quadrant Council, it would have been forfeit the moment he turned himself over to them. And we can’t find the deed. No traces that he had ever owned it in the first place.”
I felt Azur’s long inhale.
“I own the estate, Gemma.”
Shock made me freeze before I slowly turned in his arms to meet his eyes. “What?”
“I should have told you long before this moment,” Azur said, his gaze shamed . An emotion I never thought I’d see etched on his expression. “For that I’m sorry.”
“Just tell me,” I said. “You…you negotiated the deed into the marriage contract? But Mr. Cross never said anything about that.”
“It was your father,” Azur told him, his lips twisting briefly. “He made contact with the stipulation that I recover the deed to the estate before he would agree to the marriage.”
I reared back. “What? Recover it how?”
His lips pressed. He didn’t enjoy telling me this, I realized. “Your father put up the deed as collateral for a gambling debt he couldn’t repay. Last year.”
When the world seemed to sway beneath my feet, Azur’s arm tightened around me, not letting me fall.
“The house…the house wasn’t ours? Someone else, a collector , had ownership? Who…who was it?”
“A Binshay male on the Qapot’a colony,” Azur told me. I froze. “I told your father that I would reclaim the deed, that I would buy out his debt to the Binshay, but that it would belong to me . To my House. He agreed. The agreement was finalized a couple weeks after our marriage. The deed is in my family’s vault on Krynn.”
“My gods,” I breathed.
“Your father, however, still owned a section of land here in the Collis,” Azur told me. “A section of the estate he refused to give up. Not to anyone. Not even to me.”
Azur gestured to our right. To the lake.
Of course, I thought, feeling conflicting feelings stab me in my chest at the realization.
“He wouldn’t give up the lake,” Azur told me. “At least until he was arrested. That deed went to an open auction two days ago.”
“Someone bought it?” I whispered.
“Yes,” he said, his arm tightening. “Us, Gemma.”
“You…you bought it?”
“For you,” he told me. “We already own the estate. Now we own it in full, and I’ll let you decide what you wish to do with it. Whether you want to sell it, destroy it, or keep it. Whatever you want, whatever you and your sisters decide, I’ll make it happen. You don’t have to worry about that.”
My throat went tight. Maybe he’d bought and kept the deed to the estate out of malice for my father…but he’d bought the lake for me , knowing that my mother was buried there. And now he was giving me the agency to decide. He didn’t care about the estate. He only cared about me and what I wanted.
“We can bring your mother back to Krynn if you’d like,” Azur told me hesitantly, softly, when I didn’t answer him right away. “She doesn’t have to remain here. We can make her a soul gem, just like how we will make Aina’s. Maybe…maybe she’ll find her way to Alara.”
Soul gems were vessels. Azur had told me they lit up when their soul was near, especially on a night of the moon winds.
“It might break my heart if hers never came to life,” I told him honestly, wiping at my cheeks when a stray tear fell. “I—I’ll need to ask my grandparents. But I think they might want her to return home. I think they might want her to return to New Inverness, where she grew up. They wanted that from the beginning, but my father denied them their wishes. She was their daughter. They just wanted her back home, to the place where I think she was always happiest.”
“Then that’s what we’ll do,” Azur told me, pressing his lips to my temple.
“And then I want…” I began, frightened to say the words but knowing that it was the right thing to do. “I never want to return here.”
“You wish to sell it?” he asked.
“No,” I said firmly. “My father… This estate was a reward for my father’s silence after the Pe’ji War.”
Azur’s jaw clenched.
“A reward for Aina,” I told him, and it broke my heart to do so. “He profited from her death, and I don’t want to take a single credit more for it. I want to leave this place and let it crumble to the earth with time. I want it to age and crack and fall. To let all of New Everton know, let all of the Collis know what he did. What the United Alliance did.”
“You’re certain?” he asked, his voice a rumble.
“Yes,” I said, my spine steeling. “I know my sisters will feel the same. We’ll return my mother to New Inverness. And then I want to go home . To Laras. With you.”
He embraced me tight. His horns tangled in my hair when he crouched down.
That was all I wanted. The answer seemed so simple.
“Your sisters, Fran, even Sorj,” Azur started, murmuring in my ear, “they are all welcome to live in Laras. I’ll extend them all citizenship. They can come home with us. Or come and go as they please, if they prefer to live with your grandparents and remain within the New Earth colonies. They can even live in the keep with us, if that would please you.”
I love him, I thought, my chest aching with the sharp bite of the emotion. “You would do that?”
I could feel his frown. He pulled back to look down at me. “ Of course I would. You forget, wife, that you are the Kylaira of Laras. Whatever you wish, you will get. Especially when it comes to me.”
I leaned forward to kiss him, his heat and closeness an incredible comfort, almost as comforting as his words.
“I’ll ask them what they want to do,” I told him.
Azur inclined his head, threading his fingers through my hair.
A brief moment of silence lapsed between us.
Then he said, “Your father’s trial will likely not begin for quite some time.”
I blew out a shuddered breath. I’d had no contact with him, but I knew how long it would take the High Quadrant Council to build the case, to gather the details, to record testimonies and statements, to track down the others involved. And that didn’t include having to drag the Pe’ji War back into focus.
“I know.”
“And I heard from a few sources,” he told me next, “that the United Alliance is already trying to get the charges thrown out, though your father confessed to the crime.”
“Of course they would,” I said, the news chilling my heart. “Because his testimony would implicate the United Alliance. That they were involved.”
“Yes,” he said. “It will be a long road for your father, Gemma. A long road for you. For my family. For your sisters. We all need to be prepared for it.”
I nodded, meeting his eyes. “We’ll get through it. I know we will.”
Azur exhaled a long breath. “We will,” he agreed softly. And hearing that quiet confidence in his voice was enough for me.
I turned in his arms again when our words died away. The beauty of the morning felt like a sharp ache. Soon, I would never see this place again. Even still, I couldn’t wait to leave it behind.
“It’s so quiet,” I commented when the sun began to rise over the mountain. “Maybe the crowd has finally died down. Maybe they’ll leave us alone.”
The bands of his arms tightened around me before he led me inside. Back to bed, where I knew we wouldn’t just be sleeping. “I had my ship’s crew disperse them last night when you were sleeping. They’re standing guard on the roads leading from the gates, making sure there are no trespassers. They won’t disturb you or your sisters anymore.”
I let out a small huff of laughter, feeling my heart warm. Such a small thing to do, and yet it felt so huge . Just knowing that there weren’t vultures on the steps of the estate, waiting for little scraps made my lungs feel less tight.
“You did?”
“Mmm,” Azur grunted. “You think I wanted my cock plastered all over the news coms come this afternoon? The crowd would’ve gotten an eyeful if they’d still been out there this morning.”
And even though it felt strange to do, with the heaviness of this house, with the pain and sorrow that still filled us both, I laughed.
And it felt good .