Chapter 40 #2
He bands me in his arms and hauls me up so I’m crushed against his chest, nudging my head to the side. Plants tender kisses down the line of my stretched neck as I arch my spine, trying to adjust to his heft.
“You still with me?” he rumbles against my ear. A baritone taunt that hooks me right in the nerves.
I snarl.
In a lash of motion, I heave my arm free, upper body twisting, hand clawed into his hair. Have him nose to nose with me while I seethe through gritted teeth.
But one look at the jesting smile spread across his handsome face and I’m a spent breath, groaning through three syrupy words. “You have me.”
I smash our mouths together.
His hand comes up to spread across my jaw as we hunger—tongues lashing. A pointless battle for dominance.
He already won. Did the moment I heard his song in the meadow, luring me forward.
Kaan feeds me a throaty sound that vibrates through my body, pooling heat low in my groin.
I push against him, urging him to thrust.
He rolls his hips, retreats, then spears up with such might that my breasts bounce. Stroking that deep spot that melts me from the inside out.
I barely have a moment to catch my breath before he repeats the motion. Again.
Again.
Unrelenting, he tweaks my nipple, causing a clash of sensations, each claiming strike softening me a little more. Smudging everything but the feel of him pounding into me and the sharp pinch of his canines threatening to pierce the skin in the dip of my neck.
He eases his hand between my legs and strums that yearning nub of nerves, his fingers wet.
Determined.
I’m struck with a cresting pulse that catches me off guard, making my muscles clamp—
“Kaan, I’m—”
“Everything,” he growls, all but crushing me within the bind of his arm as I writhe, buckled by the decadent throb of my release.
Rendered breathless.
Willing prisoner to the dominant strokes kneading me from within. Like Kaan’s facing me on a battlefield, meeting me blow for blow until I’m too weak and malleable to defend myself.
Every nerve in my lower stomach, hips, and thighs turns to lava, molding around his stony heft …
I’m still being lashed by the ebbing shock waves when his grip loosens.
He urges me forward until my chest is pressed against the moss-covered stone, his touch skating down my curving spine. He grips my hips and pulls my ass flush against him, then continues to thrust to the beat of a slow-rolling tide.
But the angle he has me, the way he’s moving, filling me … I feel him everywhere. I’ve never been so bared, swollen, hot.
“Grab something, Moonbeam.”
I have enough wherewithal to abide, reaching forward to wedge my fingers in a crevice.
“Don’t let go.” He pulls back and punches his hips forward—scattering my pulse.
Feeds me such dominant strikes of pleasure that I’m hinging on another crest in record speed, except this one feels like it’s spawning from somewhere deeper.
From so far within me that I’m convinced it’s going to split me apart from the inside—
He pulls out.
The world blurs as I’m spun.
Lifted.
Legs wrapped around Kaan’s hips.
Then he’s moving through the water, into the shallows near the mossy cliff face—steps splashing.
The back of my shoulders are pressed against the stone beside the burbling waterfall spraying us in its haste down the mountainside, my hips angled as I’m lowered onto Kaan’s thick length.
Drugged with its fullness, that ebb of pleasure restored.
Fed.
He grabs my thigh, stamps his other hand above my right shoulder, then moves—thrusting deep and slow, kissing me with all the urgency of someone devouring their final meal.
Fitting, given I’m certain we’ll never recover from this.
That we could solidify right here like dying dragons—coiled together like Kaan’s málmr—and it wouldn’t feel like such a tragedy.
His movements hasten, each adamant stroke seeming to crack through the shell of his self-control, until he’s driving up into me with such hungry force it feels like the world’s about to crumble around us.
He pulls away just enough that I’m able to glimpse his eyes—soft, hooded with devotion.
With enough love to break a heart.
“It’s you and me,” he whispers, planting another kiss on my sweat-dappled upper lip. “You and me, Moonbeam.”
“Until the end,” is my heaved response, and the energy bursts.
His hand shifts from the wall. Grips my jaw. Fingers firm as our kiss turns into a grate of moans and throaty growls. As our bodies clash and tide, wrestling for release.
I clamp down, and his heavy cock begins to flex, emptying within me to the beat of my own thrashing climax.
I lose all sense of time and self, clawing at Kaan, dragging him closer. Like attempting to pull a volcanic explosion upon myself and wrap it around my body. Wrought with such boisterous pounds of pleasure that I coil, tensing into a knot so tight it feels like every tendon’s about to snap.
In the wake of each ebbing throb, I droop a little more, my strength plundered with each slowing thrust … until our motions smooth.
Stop.
My chin comes to rest on Kaan’s shoulder, head tipping against the curve of his neck as we breathe hard and fast, our hearts hammering in such synchrony that it’s almost as though we’re aligned.
As though we’re bonded.
I open my eyes on the world, looking through the trees, past a smudging veil of steam when a flick of luminous motion has my breath stilling.
My gaze narrows on Líri swiping her bloody snout across the grass. Something she does every time she’s finished feasting, since she dislikes the feel of dried blood cracking around her maw.
She lifts her head, passing me a fleeting glance that skewers me through the gauzy veil before she huffs and looks to the sky. Like she’s about to—
My entire body locks up as she flicks out her wings and leaps, drumming the air in billowing thumps. Taking flight toward the moons, but it feels like she’s pounding those same wings beneath my ribs, about to smash through and—
Go.
Leave nothing but a gaping hole in my chest and an empty hollow where she once nested safe within my rapidly beating heart.
I don’t realize I’m wrestling Kaan, thrashing against his flexing might, until he takes my face in his calloused hands. Presses his forehead to mine, eclipsing my sight of anything else.
“It’s okay.”
My vision tightens on his features as I gulp air, filling my lungs with calming bursts of his smelting scent.
“She won’t be going far. It’s okay. She’s not leaving you …”
She won’t be going far …
It’s okay …
She’s not leaving you …
I nod, accepting his firm words of comfort—of certainty—despite the way they agitate my quiet awareness of the silver splinter within myself.
A tiny tombstone that represents the loss of something too big and heavy to bear.
Accepting his firm words even though I want to rip my ribs wide and show Kaan exactly why it’s not okay.
Why it hasn’t been since the moment I woke in that cell beneath a mountain that crushed me under its flaming fist all those phases ago.
I nod because it’s easier than giving that silver splinter the honor it deserves.
Slipping inside myself, I move some of the rocks on my shore.
One at a time, I pile them on the splinter, building a stony pyre while ignoring the luminous presence at my back—watching from beneath the hard surface of my icy lake.
A presence I was once petrified of. Still am, I guess … but for different reasons.
Heavier reasons.
I don’t turn. Don’t stop stacking stones until there is no silver light coming through the cracks. No sign of it there at all, bar the heap of rocks that hides the hurt for another dae.
When I’m stronger. Better.
Not this dae.
As I work, I’m distantly aware of Líri’s presence nesting within me, hardening beneath my ribs like a calcifying moon. As I imagine the world did when it first came to be.
A cold, solid weight I cradle … like the dark cradles the moons in the south.
“Are you with me, Moonbeam?”
Kaan’s dense and jagged words strike like a weapon that hooks into my soul and rips me up. Back to the surface, where I meet his panic-stricken eyes.
His grip on my chin tightens as he searches my gaze, the sound of Líri’s wings thumping in unison with my heavy heart.
“Are you here?”
I draw a shuddered breath and cradle his face with my hands, tip his head, and kiss the creases between his brows. “I’m with you.”
A soft groan moves up his throat, and he loosens like a spent lung.
“You have me,” I whisper, planting another kiss that seems to shudder through his body.
… Always.