Chapter 7 #3
He eased one finger inside. Then another.
I bucked again. This time, he allowed my hips to rise, then set his free hand at my lower belly and pressed, working the fingers up and into the slick, then the tongue again, the mouth and the hand and the voice all combining in the worship, in the thing I had not known could be for me.
The well’s light went white.
It was not just the well. The bond at my wrist was a physical band now, tight and alive, braided in red and white and gold, and at my breastbone, just where his hand had pressed, the sigil flared through the skin in a white-hot star.
He took me up to the edge.
He waited until I had begged for it. Not once, but three times, as though he needed the muscle to be trained to ask for what it wanted.
“Please,” I said. “Please, Daddy, please let me—”
He flicked the tongue over the clit in a way that was almost cruel.
“Again,” he said.
“Please,” I said, louder.
He increased the pressure of his hand at my stomach. He curled the fingers inside me. He sucked, hard, at the top of me, and the orgasm that built in my pelvis was like nothing I had ever felt before.
It took me.
It took my hips, my thighs, my back, my voice.
I convulsed against the rim of the well, against his face, against the thick air of the chamber, and the sound that left me was not the sound I had made at twelve, or at twenty-one, or even last night at the ice—it was an animal sound, a wild raw letting-go, a sound that was so full of pleasure and power that I could not, at first, bear it.
He drank it in.
He kept his mouth at the apex of me, tongue moving, hand pressing, until the aftershocks left me shaking, panting, clutching at the rim with both hands to stay upright. The well’s light was white as a new star. I could see the bond's braid of color running up my sternum and into my throat.
He drew back, finally.
He stood. His lips were wet with me. His eyes were alive.
“Beautiful,” he said. “Magnificent.”
He knelt again, and this time, he cradled my head in both hands and kissed me on the mouth.
I could taste myself. I could taste the salt and the heat and the metallic hint of pleasure.
I opened my mouth for him. I let the tongue in.
I kissed back, not as a performance, not as a reward, but as a thing that was mine, that had always been mine, that he was giving back to me in this room at the heart of him.
The kiss broke.
He set his forehead to mine. His hands never left my jaw. He let me breathe. He let me stay.
Then, low, into my mouth, he said, “You are ready.”
I was.
The robe stayed on my shoulders as he carried me, but it did not close. It left my skin open to him. His hands around me were not rough, but neither were they soft; the word for what they were was certain.
He laid me out on a low platform at the edge of the well.
The stone was warm. The gold rising from the basin painted my body, my thighs, the curve of my breasts, the whole line of me. My hair spilled out behind me. He set the robe aside, careful, as if it was a piece of art, but it was not the robe that interested him.
He knelt above me, both knees on the stone, the line of his thighs framing my hips, the length of him bent over me as if sheltering me from every cold thing in the realm.
The pause was long.
I looked at him. For the first time, really looked. The light from the well caught him from below, and the effect was not human.
He was beautiful. In a way that had nothing to do with muscle or symmetry, and everything to do with the fact that he had been cracked by his own magic, and the cracks lit him from inside.
Across his right jaw, down the line of his neck, the fissure at the back of the hand—white, hot, lambent, not wound but window.
In his eyes, the concentric rings had stilled; the whole iris was lit, and in the pupil there was a spark of white, as though the well’s fire had decided it liked the architecture of him and moved in.
I reached for him.
I set my hand at the place on his jaw where the old seam ran down from the temple, and traced it with my thumb, mirroring his touch on me. It was not warm. It was hot, as if the bond was a live wire and my skin the first thing to touch it.
He let me.
He bowed his head, just enough, so I could follow the line down to his throat, to his collarbone. There, the crack vanished under the collar of his tunic.
I wanted more.
“Will you show me?” I asked. “Please?”
His mouth did the full smile. The first I had ever seen on him.
He unfastened the clasp at his collar with care.
The fabric parted. The muscle beneath was corded, not with the aesthetic muscle of a man who lifts for show, but the hard-earned muscle of one built by fighting, standing, bearing up entire cities for an age.
Along the clavicle, the crack ran deeper—down to his heart, then into the fabric again, then gone.
I set my hand over his heart.
There was a pulse. Not fast, but hard. I pressed into it.
He took my hand, raised it to his mouth, kissed the heel of my palm, then set it at the back of his neck.
“You wanted this,” he said. “You wrote it in the contract. To touch, to be touched, without apology.”
I nodded.
He caught the contract at my wrist with his other hand.
He brought my hand up, to his face.
“Tell me what you want, baby. Here. In this chamber, at the root of me, you may have anything.”
There was no hesitation.
“I want to see all of you. I want—” I swallowed—“to touch you everywhere. I want to have you. Not just be had. Not just be watched. I want—” the word was there, under my tongue, as the triple lutz had been there the morning of the final—“to fuck you, Daddy.”
The crack at the back of his hand opened, wider than before.
He inhaled. His whole body stilled, as though he was holding back a tectonic shift in the earth under us.
“I will give you anything you want,” he said. “Anything.”
He stripped the tunic off.
It came free in a single movement, and then he was bare from the waist up. There were more cracks than I had seen. Down the right side of his chest, across the hip, a hairline at the bicep, another running around the ribs. Each glowed white, the light brighter as he let me look.
He guided my hand to each one. Made me touch them all.
At the last, the long one across his chest, he looked down at me. “This one,” he said, “is yours now. It opened the night you came up the parapet after Envy had gone.”
He set my palm to it, hard, as if to press it into memory.
Then, finally, he stood.
He unfastened the belt. It fell. The trousers, too, were gone in a movement so fluid it did not interrupt his looking at me.
He was sex itself. I gazed at his perfect cock again, thick and long and curved up, the head dark, the shaft the same lambent color as the rest of him. A drop of wet had gathered at the tip. The drop caught the white fire of the well and refracted it, so that a ring of gold ran along the underside.
He let me look.
“Is it frightening?” he asked, softly.
“Not at all,” I said. “It’s beautiful.”
The contract burned a line up my arm.
He knelt over me again.
He set his hands on my thighs, parted them. Bent his head, once, to the place he had already worshipped, and then up, planting kisses at my stomach, the rib, the sternum, the hollow at the base of my throat. Then my mouth.
He kissed me with his tongue in my mouth and his cock against my thigh, and I wanted him so badly I could not bear it.
I reached down, found him. The shaft was hot. He hissed at the contact.
I stroked, once, and the light in the chamber blazed brighter.
He pressed the head of his cock to the entrance of me.
He looked in my eyes. “Will you have me?”
I said, “Yes. Please.”
He eased in by degrees.
The width of him was shocking. The head stretched me, and I made a noise, not quite pain, not quite pleasure, but he waited. He let me adjust. He licked the sweat from my brow, then my cheek, and then, when I was ready, he pushed in further.
The length of him filled me. Every inch that entered was a seal, a promise, a thing the contract wrote into my flesh. When he was fully inside, when his hips pressed to my ass, I felt, for the first time, the possibility of being not just had, but changed.
He moved.
Not fast, not hard, not yet. The movement was reverent. Every withdrawal measured, every return to the depth of me deliberate, paced, letting my body learn the size and shape of him.
He fucked me as if writing a book.
Each thrust a sentence. Each movement another clause. I could feel the contract being sealed in my body, each motion of his cock a signature. I wanted more. I wanted the power of it.
“Harder,” I said. “Please.”
He obliged.
He drove in, once, hard enough to slap my ass to the stone. The sound echoed in the chamber. The heat of him, the force of him, the power of him—every sense, every nerve, was alive.
He fucked me, now, as a lord fucks a thing he is making his own.
Hands at my shoulders, then at my wrists, pinning them to the stone above my head, then at my hips, drawing me down onto the cock, then up at my face, my jaw, my open mouth. He kissed me, tongue deep, teeth scraping my lip.
I saw myself through his eyes.
My eyes were not blue anymore. They were ringed, at the iris, with a molten halo. The reflection in his eyes told me it was true.
I was beautiful.
He fucked me, and the well fucked me, and the whole realm pressed in. The light from the white cracks in his skin was so intense I could not look at anything but the line of his jaw, the arch of his nose, the eyes so wide and hungry and proud.
I came, once, quick and hard, clenching on him, and he fucked through it without breaking rhythm. The next one gathered as a coil, a spiral, a force that started at my toes and climbed up my legs, through my pelvis, up my back, and into my arms, my neck, my head.
He pressed his palm to the sigil at my breastbone.
He said, “Come for me again.”
I did.