44. Max #2
Drakken wrapped himself around me tighter, shielding me. His eyes had turned molten gold, the dragon on the surface, and both the dragon and the man fought to take my pain into themselves, as the cold burn savaged him even worse. For I wore the Hellgold, and he didn’t.
Then, above my brows, the First Drop flared.
White-gold light splashed over the two of us as the second strike of the geas hit it. The impact went through my sternum and out through the Hellgold like a hammer meeting an anvil under my collarbone.
I sucked in a breath, and Drakken kissed me while pounding into me harder. His cock filled me, stretching my walls.
Pain and pleasure.
Even as the burn from the geas stopped spreading, it did not stop hurting.
And it did not stop coming.
The third strike hit harder, and the light from the First Drop guttered. For one endless quarter of a second, I saw what came next. The two of us burning on that bridge, joined, in front of a court that would watch us turn to ash.
Drakken’s arms wrapped around me, his body covering me, as he attempted to absorb the hit.
“You’re mine, Max,” he declared again in a rasping voice while driving into me with his dragon’s strength over and over. “Say you’re mine.”
Flesh slapped flesh, the wet sound utterly erotic.
“I’m yours, and you’re mine, Drakken.” It came out shredded. “You knew it and you fought it and you lost. You’re mine!” I said it again, louder, into his throat, into the wind, into the entire watching realm. “I’ll never let you go, dragon!”
“Good.” Drakken lifted his hips and drove down, pounding into me with all that rage and male need. “Then this is mine. All of it. Forever.”
The blinding speed alone made me breathless, yet I still urged him on. “Harder!”
The First Drop’s white-gold light returned, hitting back against the curse furiously, and the geas screamed.
I bucked up and drove my hips into him, taking him deeper. The pain flared white and I fucked through it. Drakken answered with pure male domination.
“That’s my Spartan girl,” he growled. “Take me all the way in.”
Strike four came, wilder, clawing along the edges for any crack it could find, and my father’s blood took it and extinguished it. Drakken drove into me, deep and hard, and the cold burn at my throat lost an inch, then another inch.
Strike five, and it had nothing left in it but hate.
It raged, but it could no longer land.
“Tell me again. Who owns this cunt?” Drakken lifted and bent my legs, his cock impaling me, hitting my G-spot again and again.
“You, Drakken.”
And Aelindor, and Caspian, and Nikolai.
When I got home, I’d fuck them all like there was no tomorrow, the way Drakken and I were fucking now, as if our survival depended on it. Which it did, didn’t it?
“Say it again,” he ordered.
The cold burn shrank back and fucked off.
Pleasure climbed and climbed, fast and hard.
“Don’t stop. Fuck me just like that!”
He drew back until only the head of him held me open, and then he drove home in one long, relentless stroke that dragged countless moans out of my throat.
His dragon made a low and wrecked sound I’d never heard before.
He stilled, buried to the hilt, and dropped his forehead to mine. “That’s my dragon.”
“I know.”
“And he’s horny. He’s never wanted anyone until you.”
The man now pounded into me with both his and his dragon’s fire, and I thrust my hips up to meet his plunges beat by beat.
Shit, this felt so good, and I didn’t want it to end. I wanted him to fuck me on this bridge forever.
This was nothing like my first time. Aelindor had loved me slowly, handling my virginity like spun glass.
This was vengeance and volcano.
Drakken fucked me like a man going to war. He drove into me with a force that dragged me up the gem inch by inch until his arm hooked under my hips and hauled me back down onto him. I raked my nails down his back and gave it to him stroke for stroke.
“You’re squeezing me so hard, Spartan girl,” he said in approval. “The tightest cunt.”
“And you have a filthy mouth.”
He laughed against my throat and did something with his hips that folded my spine.
“This filthy mouth made you so soaked to start with,” he said. “Even now, you’re dripping all over my cock, all over your father’s bridge, in front of everyone. They can watch. They can envy. They can even touch themselves.” He let out a low growl. “But not a fucking one of them comes near.”
“Right,” I gasped. “Because you’ll put your bare hands on their fucking throats and squeeze the life out of them.”
He grinned. “Turns out you’re exactly my type, Spartan girl.”
“Don’t be shy now, dragon.”
“Took me long enough to admit it. I can’t wait to have your smart mouth around my cock when we get home. I’ve been fantasizing about just that every night.”
“And then?”
“And then I had to jerk off in a cold shower.”
“What did you picture?”
“Your lips around my cock. It always ended with me bending you over, spanking you, and pounding into your hot, tight cunt. You begged me to stop, but I didn’t listen. Instead, I fucked you until you changed your mind and begged for more!”
“I wouldn’t be that desperate.”
“Are you sure?” He drove into me with short, rapid thrusts, pounding moans out of me.
Then he got a hand between us and worked my clit with his thumb while he took me relentlessly. The pleasure climbed so fast I couldn’t catch a breath. My heels slid on the bridge. My body wound tighter than the chain of a sanjiegun about to fly.
The geas had failed to kill us, but the dragon prince might finish the job.
“Louder,” he said. His powerful thrusts started to make my vision blur. “Let them hear how much my woman enjoys being fucked.”
The sounds came out of me raw and animal, and the demon court fought to stay quiet and still. Now the torment was theirs.
And I didn’t give a fuck.
Whatever line I’d been holding between the private woman and the public rite blurred. The ritual closed over both of us, magic threading through every nerve, amplifying, insisting, until Drakken’s pleasure fed back into mine and mine into his, higher and higher.
Inhibition wasn’t overcome. It simply stopped existing.
His cock swelled inside me, harder, stretching me deliciously to the extreme, and his rhythm turned frantic. He pounded into me with everything he had, driving so deep every stroke punched the air out of my lungs.
“Come on my cock,” he snarled. “Now.”
I shattered into a thousand pieces.
I erupted around him, clenching in waves, and a second later he chased me over, his cock jerking as he emptied himself into me in hot pulses.
I milked him mercilessly.
Down the span, the ledger tore itself open in Greta’s arms.
On the white page, two crimson drops of blood, mine and Drakken’s, that had sat two inches apart all evening, rolled toward each other across the paper and ran together into a single mark.
“Well done!” Greta shrieked, and her quill was already tearing across the page fast enough to smoke. “The marks are fused. The first step of the rite is complete! This will be the most treasured entry since the last war between Hell and Heaven.”
The mark caught fire.
Not flame. Light. It burned outward from the fused drop across the page, leaving not even ash in the ledger of Hell, as if the finished record had never existed.
“No.” Greta stood there, staring at the missing page on the ledger. “No, you can’t do this!” She then turned to look at us. “That coupling was the most…”
Our powers struck of their own volition.
Drakken’s dragon flame and my Dark Grace merged, surging up through our joined flesh. Red-gold flame and black-laced light wove into a single detonation.
The blast hit the span, and the dark gem broke. Both ends of the bridge blew apart at the towers in twin roars, and the entire high court of Hell fell screaming into the churning ocean.
Including Hell’s royal archivist and her ledger.
The demons would be fine. They could swim, and since they were natives here, the heated sea wouldn’t burn them to death. Right? As I peeked, the lot of them surfaced, shrieking, with their finery burned off and their skin smoking.
Drakken and I didn’t fall.
“I’ve got you,” he said.
“And I’ve got you,” I said.
The merged power held us up, red-gold and black light still braided through us, and we hung there wrapped around each other, his arms around me and my legs locked around his waist, both of us slick and wrecked and breathing like we’d survived a siege.
“You’re magnificent, Spartan girl,” Drakken said, and kissed me.
And then we saw it.
The geas. Visible, for the first time since it had closed around my life.
It rose off my skin, a serpent of frosty smoke, pale and cold-burning, coiled around my throat where every burn had always started. We watched it squirm. We watched dragon flame and Dark Grace close on it and cut off the serpent’s tail.
A full coil of it dissolved into cold motes as it shrieked. It fled, sinking back down into me like a snake retreating into a hole.
A shudder of revulsion passed over me. Drakken held me tighter, his heat radiating into my body.
“It’s not gone,” I said in dismay.
“But we’ve cut its fucking tail off,” he said, stroking down my spine. “We’ll go back, and you’ll claim all your other mates. And then we’ll kill that fucking thing.”
We had twenty-four hours. Home across the Veil and a war, and Nikolai, and Caspian, and Aelindor, all before the clock ran out.
I had this terrible, nagging feeling that something bad was going to happen.
Above my brows, the First Drop dimmed to an ember, its job finished, and poured back down through my hair and my throat into the Hellgold. The pendant settled over my heart, warm and cold at the same time, holding nothing now but a star.