50. Caspian
Caspian
Less than twenty hours now. A war at our door. A brother in enemy hands.
And our girl, alive, in reach, looking at us like she needed us.
Nothing had ever pulled at me the way she did. My wolf had her scent to himself now. No wind, no blood, no ash. What came off her in that closed cabin was more than one thing.
Desire first. Bright and rising.
Under it, grief and fear were cold and heavy, the scent of a woman who’d watched someone go and hadn’t been allowed to stop moving since.
And under all that, rage burned.
“I don’t need gentle,” she said. “I’m not glass. Do whatever you want with me. I’m at your mercy.”
“No. We’re at yours, Eirath,” Nikolai said. “We have been since the day we found you.”
“We’ll be gentle.” I grinned. “And then we won’t.”
This time I got my mouth on her first. Beat the vampire to it, and he didn’t like it one bit.
I kissed her the way I’d wanted to since the day I found out she was a woman. Hand fisted in her hair, tongue urging her mouth open.
She made a sound into it. Small, then not small.
Her pulse hammered against my chest. Her scent went thick and sweet.
I kissed her deeper, swept my tongue along the roof of her mouth before it found hers.
Her fingers tore at my jacket. Behind her, Nikolai peeled her ruined leathers down off her shoulders and put his mouth to every inch he uncovered.
Between us, we got her bare.
I stopped breathing.
Hard where she’d earned it, soft everywhere else. Shoulders a swordsman would kill for. A waist my hands could span. Hips that made liars out of every woman I’d had before her, and high breasts with a priceless heirloom hanging cold and bright between them.
Two houses and a fallen star in her blood, and standing there naked on a moving train, she looked like all three.
She didn’t cover herself. She let us look, and she knew exactly what it did to us.
Behind her, Nikolai’s breath went out of him. Mine had already gone.
The wolf wanted her on the floor in two seconds. I made him wait. We had hours, and I meant to spend every one worshiping her.
Nikolai dropped onto the bench and drew her back between his thighs, her spine to his chest, his hands coming around to cup her breasts, rolling her nipples until she gasped and ground herself back against him, wanting more.
The vampire let out a low, satisfied chuckle.
I went down on my knees on the swaying floor. Nikolai’s crimson eyes found mine.
“Do not disappoint our mate, wolf. Work harder.”
Fucker acted like he was my boss. And he thought I’d disappoint my girl? I was born for this! He’d learn. I let it go this once, for the two words he’d got right. Our mate.
I hooked her thighs over my shoulders and put my mouth on her cunt. Licked her from her entrance all the way up, slow and greedy, then did it again, and by the third pass she was gasping.
My girl was soaked. The taste of her went straight through the roof of my mouth and into the animal underneath. Salt and heat and honey. I stayed there and took my time with her.
She lifted her hips and drove up at me, riding my mouth, fingers fisted in my hair, not one bit gentle about it. My wolf rumbled. He liked how she handled us.
Nikolai put her ahead of himself, and not one flicker of that possessive streak showed. He held her legs open wider for me and kissed his way up her throat, purring filth against her skin.
Shit. I didn’t know the vampire had that in him. I’d be borrowing a few of his lines and feeding them back to Max later. Anything for my girl.
She gasped and moaned, eyes bright, face flushed. Fuck, she was gorgeous, laid back against his chest and spread open in front of me.
The rails hammering under us and the hum of the engine couldn’t drown her moans out. My cock ached.
Then the link blew open.
One second I was working her with my tongue and every breathless sound she made was feeding something in me. The next, her pleasure and her ache and her need came pouring down the bond all at once.
I’d never had anything like it. Every wall between us was gone.
I drove my tongue into her heat, twisting, thrusting as deep as it would go. Her leg kicked out. Her moans and gasps grew loud. “Yes, Caspian, yes, my wolf!”
I worked her clit with my thumb while my tongue fucked her sweet cunt, over and over, and my girl came apart for me, thighs clamping down on my ears. It hurt a little. She had Spartan strength in her.
“You like the wolf licking your pussy, don’t you, Eirath?” Nikolai’s voice had gone ragged against her ear. “The little sounds you make have my cock so hard. I’ll fuck you next, after he’s done warming you up.”
Not a chance. I wasn’t his fucking servant.
Max shook, and her scent went sweeter. Addictive.
Then her grief came down the bond underneath the pleasure, sharp as a blade. Her body had tried to hide it and failed.
I lifted my head and looked at her.
“Drakken’s coming home, sweetheart,” I said. “We’re going to get him.”
“We vow it to you, Eirath,” Nikolai said, fangs grazing her temple.
Her fingers tightened in my hair, and the fear went out of her. That went through me harder than the lust did.
“Fuck me. One of you.” She dragged in a breath. “Or better, both of you.”
My wolf swelled up like he’d won something.
“I’ve wanted to fuck you for so long.” I kept a hand on her, not willing to lose contact, and got up off the floor, dropping onto the bench beside Nikolai.
Then I pulled her onto my lap.
Shifters dress for speed. Jacket, T-shirt, loose trousers, all gone the second I went down between her thighs.
Nikolai, for once, was at a disadvantage.
Still in the high-collared oxblood coat with the crest of House Sagittarius gleaming gold over his left breast, shrugging out of it now faster than I’d ever seen him move. I almost laughed.
Max was staring at my cock. It was rock hard and aching for her. She got both hands around the middle of my shaft, because there was no closing one fist around it, and pumped me a few times to get the feel of it. Then she lifted her hips and set the crown against her slick entrance.
Shit. This was real. This was fucking happening.
She slid down slowly, and the pleasure hit me, her walls wrapping me hot and tight. I was barely in and she was already squeezing me. I groaned.
My girl started to move. Up and down, unhurried, taking her time with every inch. I watched myself disappear into her. She tested the angle, rolled her hips around the head of me, then quickened and slammed down to the base.
She found a rhythm and rode me like I’d always been hers to use. My girl was a quick study. For a second I wondered how much of it she’d learned off Aelindor and Drakken. How much she’d liked it.
She rose almost off me, an inch of us still touching, and ground down slow. Then faster. Then she dropped all the way.
“Fuck.” It came out of me half strangled. “Keep that up, sweetheart, and I won’t last.”
She laughed, then moaned as she came back up my length, fucking me harder than any woman ever had. My girl was strong. She didn’t have to hold back with me, and she didn’t.
I thrust up to meet her coming down, our rhythms locking, our breathing gone ragged together.
“Yes, sweetheart. Hottest fucking pussy I’ve ever had.” I didn’t have to be careful with her.
We got rougher.
Behind her, Nikolai stood naked, all hard, pale muscle. He came around and cupped both her bouncing breasts, watching us. My hand went to her clit, stroking, rubbing, dragging her moans up louder and louder.
Shit, she got tighter, so tight I could barely move. I kept thrusting anyway.
Nikolai couldn’t just watch anymore. His crimson eyes had gone bright, too bright. Good thing Max couldn’t see them. If this went to shit, if she got scared, I’d never forgive myself for letting the vamp in on it.
Slick heat on his fingers, he worked Max’s ass open, patient about it, every stroke careful, swallowing her small, shocked sounds with his mouth at her ear.
“Breathe, Eirath,” he murmured. “You can take both of us. You were made for us.”
“Were you made for me, then?” she panted.
“We were yours before we knew it,” the vampire said, bending over her, one knee on the edge of the bench, and thrust into her ass.
Max gasped, pain and pleasure at once, and I glared at him over her shoulder. My wolf growled.
Nikolai stilled before I could shove him off. “Eirath, I—”
“I’m okay.” Max’s breath came short. “I’m just surprised. Where…where were we?”
“You wanted to know if we were made for you. The vampire gave you a shit answer.” I thrust up and buried myself in her. “Not surprised. But hear this, sweetheart. We were yours before we were born. We’re yours now. We’ll be yours when death takes us.”
“Don’t say death.” Her voice cracked. “Not even then.”
“Where you are is home, Eirath,” Nikolai said, driving into her slowly, giving her time to accommodate him. “And there’s only you. Always you.”
“Our mate,” I agreed, and thrust.
Max braced both hands on my shoulders and leaned further forward, opening wider for Nikolai.
I drove up, he drove in from behind, and we fucked our woman like men who’d never had anyone before her.
Never once in my life had I thought I’d share a mate with that vampire and not kill him for it. And here we were, working her over like a pack.
“Fuck. This feels good. Feels right,” he said, pounding deeper.
She’d taken all of him by now. Her moans came louder, more urgent, her eyes rolling back at the feel of us both.
Then a dark pressure dragged along my cock with only her tight heat between us, and my whole body locked.
Nikolai. Right there. The coldest bastard I’d ever stood beside in a fight, and nothing between us but the woman we both loved.
We shared a look.
Then he moved, deliberately, and dragged himself along me through her. My voice came out of my throat wrong, half a growl with the wolf riding in it. Max shuddered violently between us and moaned like she’d been struck.
“Shit, is this real?” she whimpered.
“I don’t believe it either,” I said as another wave rolled through me.
“Fucking believe it,” the vampire said.
Nothing smart came out of any of us after that. Thought was gone.
We found the rhythm of it, his thrust to my withdrawal, rolling her between us so she was never empty, never still, so full she could only cling to my shoulders and sob our names into my neck. And every stroke came back to me twice now. Once in my body, once in hers.
I could do this forever.
My hands were changing on her hips.
It started before I could stop it. Claws where my fingers had been, pressing into her skin without breaking it. The wolf pushing up under my face, wanting out, wanting her, and me holding the shape by a thread I hadn’t had to think about since my first shift.
I never lost control. For her, I was right at the edge of it.
“Careful, wolf,” Nikolai growled.
“Worry about yourself, vamp.”
Neither of us missed a beat.
“Neither of you will ever hurt me.” She rolled her hips back into us.
I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I didn’t try.
The bench groaned. The train roared. Max stopped forming words and just took us, hips grinding, chasing both of us at once, greedy and glorious and mine, ours, and somewhere in the middle of it the bond split the rest of the way open.
Three sets of nerves in one body. Her pleasure building in me. No end to it.
“I’m… I can’t…” she gasped.
“Use words, sweetheart.”
“I’m close. So close! Fuck me harder, wolf.” Her voice broke. “Bite me, vampire.”
Nikolai didn’t need to be told twice. His fangs came out and sank into the side of her throat.
Shit.
He drank, and all of it came through. Hers, his, mine, all three channels at once, and I got the power in Max’s blood secondhand, straight off him.
Sunlight and nectar and better than either.
Nikolai made a sound I’d never heard out of him, a raw, broken groan straight into her neck, and his hips stuttered out of rhythm. He fucked her like she was his lifeline.
She was. She was mine too.
My girl. My mate. My forever.
His fangs were still in her neck. Greedy bastard.
“Let go, vamp. Now.” The wolf put his weight behind it.
He blinked, drunk on it, and I watched him drag himself back from wanting more. If he weren’t pack, my wolf would have taken his throat out with one swipe. The pleasure had gone a long way toward mellowing him.
Nikolai withdrew his fangs with a shudder that went through all three of us and pressed his forehead to her shoulder, breathing like a drowning man. I knew the exact moment he understood what she’d just done to him. To us.
She owned us. Every part of us.
And we needed to make her ours the same way.
We drove into her together.
Max screamed. Her pleasure detonated down the three-way link into both of us, white-hot and enormous. She clenched around us and came, and took us both with her.
Somewhere in the free fall, I swore and emptied myself into her, past holding back, past wanting to.
Nikolai went right after, shuddering, making a sound somewhere between a groan and a growl, and the three of us went up together in one long chain-fire with no gaps in it anywhere.
And with the wolf filling my skin and her taste in my mouth and her pussy still milking me, I bit down where her shoulder met the other side of her neck, opposite his fangs, and held.
Shifters don’t choose to imprint. You carry it your whole life unspent, and then one day the wolf finds her and takes the choice out of your hands.
Our mark, mine and the wolf’s, settled into our mate like a root, and he didn’t lift a claw to stop the vampire from imprinting her too.
Ours. No argument.
It rippled through the three of us in long, shuddering aftershocks, and we stayed tangled on that bench, sweat-slick, her breath still going hard against my chest while Nikolai licked the bite closed, reverent about it.
That was when the smoke came out of her throat.
It surfaced through her skin between our marks.
A serpent of frost-pale smoke, cold rolling off it, coiling once around her neck.
Except it was barely a serpent anymore. Behind the wedge of its head, where the body should have run, there was a ragged stub and nothing else.
It writhed, cut down and furious, and sank back into my girl, and the cold went with it.
Nikolai had gone lethally still against her back, fangs half-bared at a thing he couldn’t bite. My hackles were up from tailbone to skull.
“What the fuck?” I snarled.
“The geas.” Max was shivering. “When Drakken and I mated, we cut off its tail. You two just burned out its middle.”
“Its fucking head’s still there,” I said. “Which means…”
“We need Aelindor,” the vampire offered.
Outside the windows, villages and towns tore past in ribbons of Stormglass light, the whole kingdom blurring toward the capital.
Beneath us, the train Max had fed her metal to ran like it understood the stakes.
Somewhere ahead, the last of us was holding a fortress and didn’t know yet that he was needed to take the head off a snake.
We wrapped her up between us. I put my hand over the mark I’d left on her, and we let the train eat the miles.
Hurry. Fucking hurry.