Maris
His mouth was on mine again, and sensible was gone.
This wasn’t the desperate, pained kiss from the safe house, or the testing, wondering touch from moments before. This was new. Slow. Sure. The bond hummed between us, clean and warm, and for the first time, I could feel him in it, without the static of his pain.
His hands tangled in my hair, angling my head so he could deepen the kiss. I made a sound I’d deny later and pressed closer. The kiss turned hungry, desperate, years of loneliness trying to make up for lost time in a single moment.
When we broke apart, we were both breathing hard.
“Clothes,” I said. “Off. Now.”
“Bossy.” But he was already pulling at my shirt.
“You love it.”
“I do.” He got my shirt off, tossed it somewhere. His hands immediately found skin, tracing the new scars I’d collected. “I love everything about you. Your ruthless efficiency. Your terrible sense of humor. The way you’ve always been too good for me.”
“Shut up.” I was working on his pants, trying not to aggravate his wounds. “You’re an idiot.”
“Your idiot.”
“Mine,” I agreed, and felt possessiveness surge through me so fierce it should have scared me. “You came back to me.”
“Always.” He caught my hands, stilled them. “Always, Maris. Even if it took all that time. Even if it hurt. Always.”
I couldn’t handle the sincerity in his voice. The raw honesty. So I kissed him again, putting everything I couldn’t say into it.
He responded instantly, his hands roaming my back, relearning my body. When his claws traced lightly down my spine, I arched into him, a gasp escaping. He did it again, deliberate this time, and satisfaction rumbled through his chest at my response.
“Missed that,” he murmured against my throat. “Missed learning what makes you fall apart.”
“I haven’t—” I started, then stopped. But he already knew. Could feel it in the connection between us.
“All this time?” His hands stilled on my skin.
“Don’t look so smug.”
“I’m not smug.” He pulled back to meet my eyes. “I’m... honored.”
“That’s worse. Stop talking.”
He laughed, low and warm, and the sound went straight through me. I’d forgotten he could laugh. That underneath the silent, intimidating exterior was someone who found the universe absurd and had decided to find that funny rather than depressing.
I pushed him back on the bed, straddled him properly. His hands immediately found my hips, steadying me. The pressure against his injuries made him wince, but when I tried to shift, his grip tightened.
“Don’t you dare,” he said.
“You’re hurt.”
“I’m healing. There’s a difference.” His hands slid up my sides, thumbs brushing the underside of my breasts. “And I’ve waited for this.”
“For this?” I said, then gasped as his thumbs moved higher. “We already… in the safe house.”
“That was breaking through the pain.” His voice was rough, his eyes intense. “This is the first time in a decade I’ve been able to just feel you. Without the fight. A little soreness isn’t going to stop me.”
“So technically,” I said, my voice a little breathless as his thumbs moved again, “you have waited a decade. For this, anyway.”
“I wasn’t counting the year we were together before.”
“I was.”
Something shifted in his expression. Darker, hungrier. “Ten years then. Ten years since I first had you.”
“Had me?” I raised an eyebrow. “Pretty sure I had you.”
“Semantics.” His hands curved around my breasts, and I forgot what we were arguing about. “We had each other.”
I leaned down to kiss him, and he made a sound deep in his throat. Satisfaction. Possession. Mine, that sound said. Mine, mine, mine.
I ground against him, felt him hard beneath me, and his control splintered. Suddenly I was on my back, the shift so fast I barely registered it
“Hi,” I said, looking up at him.
“Hi.” He was braced above me, his scales shifting through a spectrum of greens and golds I’d never seen. “You’re overdressed.”
“So are you.”
We fumbled with the rest of our clothes, graceless and eager.
His scales caught the dim light as he moved, and I cataloged the damage.
Patches where scales had been burned away and grew back wrong.
Lines of scar tissue that would never hold color right.
The Consortium had marked him, changed him, tried to break him.
But he was still mine.
I pulled him down for another kiss, wrapping my legs around his waist. He groaned into my mouth, and I felt him trembling. Not from pain. From want. From need held in check.
“Maris,” he breathed against my lips. “I need—”
“I know.” I reached between us, guided him home. “I know, love. Come here.”
He pushed inside me slowly, carefully, watching my face the whole time. The stretch, the fullness, the rightness of it made my head fall back. He pressed his forehead to mine, and for a moment we just breathed together, overwhelmed.
“Fuck,” he whispered. “How can this be...”
“What?”
“How perfect you feel. How perfect we—” He moved slightly and we both gasped. “This. I forgot it could be like this.”
I hadn’t forgotten. I’d remembered every second, used those memories to torture myself with what I’d lost. But this was better than memory. This was real, present, his weight on me, his scales warm under my hands, the sound he made when I clenched around him.
He started to move, slow and deep, and I lost the ability to think in complete sentences. There was just sensation. His mouth on my throat. His hand gripping my hip. The slide of him inside me, hitting angles that made sparks shoot up my spine.
“Look at me,” he said, and I opened eyes I hadn’t realized I’d closed. His face was intent, focused, memorizing. “I need to see you. Need to know this is real.”
“It’s real.” I touched his face, traced the edge of a scale. “We’re real.”
His control snapped. The kiss he gave me was messy, desperate, a claiming. His rhythm faltered, his hips stuttering against me. I could feel him getting close, fighting it, trying to make this last after a decade of starvation.
“Don’t hold back,” I panted, gripping his shoulders. “Thoryn, don’t. We have time now. We have—”
“Forever,” he finished, the word a raw groan. He thrust deeper, harder, a possessive, final stroke that buried him to the hilt. “We have forever.”
That was all it took. The promise of it, the certainty.
His hands gripped my hips, lifting me, and the careful, reverent pace was gone. He moved like he was staking a claim, driving into me with a rhythm that was all hunger and possession.
And the bond... instead of screaming, it sang.
It was a feedback loop. Every pulse of pleasure in me echoed in him, amplified, and returned to me stronger.
I felt his want, a crushing, desperate need that mirrored my own.
I felt his hands on my skin, his mouth on my throat, the scrape of his scales, the slide of him inside me—I felt it all as if it were happening to both of us at once.
He leaned down, his mouth finding my ear. “Feel that?” he growled, his voice vibrating through me. “That’s us. No pain. Just you.”
He bit my shoulder, not hard, just enough to make me cry out as I arched against him. The pleasure was too much, a white-hot coil tightening in my center.
“Thoryn, I’m—”
“I know,” he rasped, his own control shattering. “I can feel it. Come with me.”
He thrust twice more, deep and devastating, and the universe exploded.
My climax ripped through me, a raw scream tearing from my throat, and I felt his release at the exact same instant—a dual explosion that lit up the bond like a supernova.
His whole body went rigid, a guttural roar vibrating against my chest as he shuddered, his name a prayer on my lips.
After, we lay tangled together in the too-narrow bed, slick with sweat, limbs intertwined, trying to catch our breath. His weight should have been uncomfortable, but I didn’t want him to move. Ever.
“You okay?” he asked against my shoulder.
“No,” I said honestly. “I’m approximately six hundred percent better than okay.”
He laughed, the sound vibrating through me. “Your math is terrible.”
“Your face is terrible.”
“Mature.”
“You love it.”
“I do.” He grew serious, his hand tracing the scar on my jaw. “I need to tell you something.”
His voice rumbled through his chest into mine.
“During the worst of it, when they were... experimenting. Trying to break the bonding instinct. I’d think about you.
Not the big moments. The small ones. The way you organize everything into lists.
How you count exits even in your sleep. That face you make when someone’s being inefficient. ”
“Romantic,” I managed, my voice thick.
“It was.” He pulled back to look at me. “It was everything. You were everything. The only real thing in all that time.”
He held my gaze, his own full of a raw sincerity that stole my breath. “I love you,” he said. “I’ve loved you for ten years. I loved you when they were taking me apart piece by piece. I loved you when I thought you were dead. I’ll love you until—”
I kissed him quiet. When I pulled back, I made sure he could see my face.
“I love you too,” I said. “You absolute disaster of a lizard.”
“Romantic.”
“You want romance? Fine.” I cleared my throat.
“Thoryn, you magnificent bastard, you came back from the dead for me. You survived torture and experimentation. You fought through conditioning that was literally killing you to touch me. You’re mine.
I’m yours. The Consortium can go fuck themselves. Better?”
“Perfect,” he said, and meant it.
We should have moved. Should have cleaned up, checked his wounds, maintained watch.
Instead we stayed wrapped around each other, listening to The Haven’s chaos.
Somewhere a deal was going bad, voices raised in three different languages.
The air recycler wheezed. A ship’s engine fired, rattling our walls.
“We need to contact your crew,” I finally said.
“Mm.” He was tracing patterns on my hip, and I could tell he had no intention of moving.
“The Consortium is still hunting us.”
“I know.”
“We’re sitting targets.”
“Five more minutes.” He kissed my shoulder. “We’ve been dead for years. We can have five minutes.”
He was right. We’d earned five minutes. We’d earned a lifetime of five-minute increments stolen between disasters.
I reached over him for the encrypted comm unit I’d bought from a paranoid Xelarian. Military grade, supposedly untraceable. The connection took thirty seconds to establish, bouncing through enough relays to hopefully keep us alive another day.
“Raptor, this is Maris Elen.” I kept my voice steady, professional, even though Thoryn was now kissing my neck and making it very difficult to concentrate. “Thoryn and I are secure. Transmitting coordinates for extraction.”
A pause. Then Serak’s voice, controlled but with definite relief: “Confirmed. Estimated arrival eighteen hours. Can you hold?”
I looked at Thoryn, saw my own determination reflected in his eyes. “We’ll hold.”
“Good. Raptor out.”
I set down the comm unit. Eighteen hours. We just had to survive eighteen more hours.
“Think they’ll make it?” Thoryn asked.
“They better.” I curled back into his side. “Otherwise, I’m stealing a ship and flying us out myself.”
“That’s my queen.”
“Damn right.”
We waited.