Epilogue
RAKTHAR
She slept curled in the clan furs, her small form nearly swallowed by the massive pelts.
A fortnight had passed since I had brought her to Aerie Rock.
I sat at the edge of their sleeping platform in the high tower, watching the steady rise and fall of her chest, the way her dark hair spilled across the bedding like ink tipped and spreading.
The fire in the central pit had burned down to coals that gave a steady, amber light.
The same color as his eyes, which he had always considered an unremarkable fact and had recently revised.
The marking on her wrist glinted in that light. Clan-script written in my hand, settled into her skin as if it had always belonged there. Beside it, barely visible, the Sanctuary bond mark—the one the system had put on her and had chosen to keep.
Aliana-who-chooses-her-fate.
A fortnight of watching her choose. Every morning she was in the archive before the clan’s scholars arrived, reading the histories in the old script with the dogged focus of someone who refuses to be slow at something for long.
Every dispute brought to me she had observed first and then, when I invited it, offered an analysis so clean and direct that my second-in-command had stopped objecting to her presence at counsel within four days.
The Elder Mother had taken to walking with her in the evenings, which was not something the Elder Mother did. Not for anyone.
They had thought I’d wanted a prize when I invoked ancient treaty rights to claim her. The elders who had watched me study the Sanctuary’s matching registry. My warriors who had seen me read her file three times before I’d decided.
Even the Sanctuary officials, who had processed the challenge with the careful neutrality of people who suspected my motivations and could find no legal fault in them. They had all looked at what I’d done and seen calculation.
They were not wrong. I had calculated. I had seen the compatibility markers and understood what they meant for his bloodline, for the clan’s future, for the generations of careful seeking that had finally produced a result.
I had made a plan and executed it with the precision I brought to every campaign.
I had been preparing to claim a prize.
I had not been prepared for her.
What I had found instead, I did not have a word for and was better than any prize he had ever imagined claiming.
Aliana stirred in her sleep, one slender arm emerging from the furs to reach across the empty space where he usually lay. Even unconscious, she sought me. The bond between them pulsed, warm and insistent.
I crossed to her and lowered myself onto the sleeping platform with the careful control of a large creature sharing a space with a smaller one. A habit formed quickly, in two days, and already becoming instinct. Her hand found me immediately.
“Why are you watching me sleep?” she murmured, voice rough with dreams, not opening her eyes.
“Because you are worth watching,” I said. This was true and I saw no reason not to say it.
She smiled, stretching like a satisfied cat beneath the furs.
The movement exposed her bare shoulder, the curve of her breast. My body responded instantly, blood rushing to his cock with such force it was almost painful.
Weeks of mating, and still I wanted her with the desperation of the first time.
She made a sound that was half skepticism, half something warmer, and shifted in the furs. “Come back to bed. It’s cold without you.”
I growled low in his throat, already shedding the few clothes I had on. “I shall warm you properly, then.” I was beside her, my larger body drawing her in.
Her back against my chest, my arm across her waist, the alignment of them easy now and was becoming more natural with every morning.
“You are thinking loudly,” she said. “I can hear it from here.”
“Can you?”
“Something between philosophical and smug. It has a specific frequency.” She turned in my arms, facing my now, her eyes open and dark. “What were you thinking about?”
I considered giving her the short answer. I gave her the true one instead. “I was thinking about what the clan expected when I returned. What they believed I had done.” A pause. “What I believed I had done.”
Her expression shifted to attentive, the way she got when she was processing something at full capacity. “And what had you done?”
“Gone to retrieve something valuable,” I said. “For the clan. For the bloodline. For the future.” My hand moved to her face, my thumb tracing the line of her cheekbone. “That is what I told myself. That is what I planned.”
“And now?”
“Now I think I went and found someone who would tell me exactly what she thought of me and mean every word of it.” My thumb stilled. “I did not know I needed that. I had not known to plan for it.”
She looked at me for a moment. Then she reached up and put her hand on my chest. “Rakthar,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Stop thinking quite so loudly and kiss me.”
I laughed and then did as she asked. Because pleasing my mate was something I wished to do all the days of my life.
She kissed me back with the focused attention she brought to everything, her fingers in my hair, her body pressing closer in a way that made it very clear she had not been as asleep as she’d appeared. I growled low and felt her smile against my mouth.
“There,” she murmured. “That’s better.”
My hands moved across her skin. I had learned the topography of her that he now knew in the dark as well as in the light.
She was soft where he was rough, warm everywhere, and she made sounds that were specific to me, that he had catalogued with the same care he brought to the clan law tome and considered more valuable.
I took my time. There was nothing I needed to rush toward; everything I wanted was already here.
She arched beneath my hands, her head tipping back against the furs. “You are so—” she started but ended as a sigh as my mouth found the place at her throat.
“So?” I prompted, against her skin.
“Devastatingly competent,” she managed. “It’s very inconvenient.”
My laugh vibrated through both of them. “I will try to be less competent.”
“Don’t you dare.”
I moved between her legs, my massive frame dwarfing hers. My fingers found her slick, her folds swollen with desire. I traced her entrance, watching her face as I pushed one thick digit inside of her.
“More,” she demanded, hips rising to meet my hand. “Don’t tease me, Rakthar.”
“Patience,” I rumbled, adding a second finger, stretching her carefully. “I would not harm you.”
She laughed, the sound dissolving into a moan as my thumb found her clit. “You won’t break me. I’m not made of glass.”
To prove her point, she clenched around my fingers, her inner walls gripping with surprising strength. My cock throbbed in response, pre-cum beading at the tip.
The scent of her arousal grew stronger, filling the chamber with her musk. I lowered my head to taste her, my tongue laving across her cunt with hungry strokes.
“Fuck!” she cried out, fingers digging into my scalp, holding me against her. “Oh god, Rakthar, your tongue—”
I growled against her flesh, the vibrations making her shake.
My tongue delved deeper, tasting her essence, drinking her pleasure like the finest mountain spring.
She writhed beneath me, her thighs tensing against my shoulders.
I could feel her approaching climax, her cunt fluttering against my tongue.
“I’m going to—I’m coming—” Her voice broke as the orgasm took her, her back arching off the furs, her release flooding my mouth with sweetness.
Before she could recover, I rose above her, positioning my cock at her entrance. Her eyes, hazy with pleasure, focused on mine. The trust I saw there humbled me. This small, fierce human had given herself to me—not just her body, but her future. Her fate.
“Mine,” I growled, pushing into her with careful restraint.
Her heat engulfed me inch by inch, her body stretching to accommodate my size. The sensation was exquisite torture—tight, wet perfection that threatened to undo me before I’d fully seated myself within her.
“Yours,” she agreed, wrapping her legs around my waist, urging me deeper. “And you’re mine.”
The possessive claim in her voice broke something in me. I thrust forward, burying myself to the hilt in one powerful stroke. She cried out, not in pain but fierce pleasure, her nails scoring my back hard enough to draw blood. The sting only heightened my arousal.
“Take all of me,” I demanded, beginning to move within her, each thrust measured and deep. “Take everything I am.”
“Yes,” she gasped, meeting me stroke for stroke, her smaller body somehow matching my rhythm perfectly. “Everything. Give me everything.”
I lost myself then, in her heat, in her scent, in the magic of our bond that flared with each joining of our bodies. I drove into her with increasing force, the sleeping platform creaking beneath us. Her second climax approached swiftly, her cunt gripping me like a fist, trying to milk my release.
“Come for me,” I commanded, angling my hips to hit the spot deep inside that made her see stars. “Let me feel you shatter.”
Her orgasm crashed through her with such force that she screamed my name, the sound echoing off the stone walls of our chamber. The rippling of her inner walls around my cock was too much to resist. My own climax thundered through me, my seed spilling deep inside her as I roared my completion.
Afterward, she lay against my chest, her breathing slowing, her fingers tracing absent patterns on my skin the way she did when she was thinking and didn’t know she was showing it.
I lay still and let her, watching the coals in the fire pit, listening to the mountain wind moving through the high passes outside.
“You are remarkable,” I said.
“You keep saying that,” she told me, the same thing she always said.
“It keeps being true,” I said, the same answer he always gave, and felt her smile against my chest before sleep took her again.
I held my mate close. My equal, my scholar, my queen, the woman who had chosen me with full knowledge and then chosen me again every day since. I had planned this with such precision and had gotten it so entirely, wonderfully wrong.
Not fate. Her word. Her frame.
Choice. Her choice. My choice.
The strongest magic there was.