Chapter 10 #4
The words landed in a place I hadn’t known was tender until something touched it. I squeezed back, and didn’t trust my voice, and the moment held until Gabriella broke it by reaching for the teapot and refilling everyone’s cups.
They helped Sabrina clean up. A bath in the tub, Angelina’s gentle hands working soap through her damaged wings, Gabriella holding towels and asking quiet questions that Sabrina answered in fragments.
I stayed downstairs, stripping off the bloodied shirt, washing the combat from my hands at the pump, feeling the adrenaline recede and leave behind the hollow ache that always followed.
The house settled gradually. Gabriella kissed Sabrina goodnight on the forehead, her eyes lingering on the bruise with a tenderness that made my chest warm, and then she was gone, up the stairs to her room, closing the door.
Angelina went last. She stood in the hallway, one hand on the banister, and looked at me.
“She needs you tonight,” she said quietly.
“However, she needs you. However that looks.” Then she was climbing the stairs, her wings folded, her footsteps fading toward the room at the end of the hall, and the house was quiet except for the soft hiss of the hearth and the occasional creak of settling timber.
Sabrina came out from her bedroom. She’d changed into a nightgown, something thin and pale that left her arms bare, and her hair was damp from the bath, hanging loose around her shoulders in waves that caught the lamplight.
The bruise on her cheek was cleaner now, the edges defined, and someone had applied a salve that smelled of mint.
She stood in the doorway of her room and looked at me.
Not the way she usually looked at me, with teasing and challenge and the confidence of a woman who knew exactly what effect she had.
This was the look of someone who had been afraid and was still afraid and had decided that the solution to fear was proximity to the one person who had proven, beyond argument, that they would come for her.
“Will you sleep with me?” she asked without the playful wrap she usually placed around requests.
“Not… not like that. Though that’s… also.
But mostly I just… I can’t be alone tonight.
I can’t close my eyes without seeing the skyboat, and the cords, and the way they looked at me when they talked about you.
I need… I need you here. In the room. Where I can reach you. ”
I crossed the hallway and took her hand.
Her fingers were cold, and they tightened around mine with a strength that suggested she was still afraid I might change my mind, might remember that this was complicated, might decide that the responsible thing was to maintain boundaries that had already been obliterated by everything that had happened since I came home.
“I’m here,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
We lay down on her bed together. The mattress was narrow, built for one, which meant we ended up pressed against each other the way people do when the furniture is complicit in the outcome.
She turned toward me, her body curving against mine, one arm across my chest, her face buried in the hollow of my neck where the pulse was strong enough for her to feel.
“You came for me,” she whispered. Her breath was warm against my skin. “You actually came, alone. You fought them. All of them. For me.”
“I would have fought more,” I said. “I had arrows left.”
She laughed, and then she was kissing me, pressing her lips to mine and sliding her tongue inside my mouth.
I kissed her back. My hand found her hair, fingers tangling in the damp waves, and she made a sound against my mouth that went straight through my nervous system and landed somewhere south.
She moved against me. The thin fabric of her nightgown did nothing to disguise the heat of her, the curves of breast and hip pressing against me with an insistence that my body registered with considerably more enthusiasm than my brain thought was appropriate given the circumstances.
Which is how the “accident” happened. Her hand tugged absentmindedly at the waistband of my sleep pants until they sat low on my hips, while the hem of her nightgown had ridden high enough to leave her bare beneath it.
Neither of us seemed to notice how far we’d already gone until she shifted against me, her thigh sliding between mine, her hips pressing forward, and the head of my cock, which had been hard since the moment her tongue found mine, slipped inside her.
We froze. Both of us. One heartbeat of perfect, terrible stillness, the wet heat of her surrounding the tip of me, her body tight and ready in a way that suggested her body had made decisions her mouth hadn’t gotten around to articulating yet.
“Gabriel,” she breathed against my mouth. “I… that’s…”
“I know,” I said. My voice came out rougher than I’d intended. “We should…”
“We should not stop,” she finished, and her hand finished pushing my sleep pants the rest of the way down, and mine was at the hem of her nightgown, pushing it up her thighs, and whatever remaining restraint we’d been pretending to maintain evaporated in the space between one breath and the next.
We undressed each other. Her nightgown came off over her head, and I saw her: breasts full and pale in the lamplight, nipples tight and pink, the narrow waist flaring to hips that curved with a generosity that made my cock twitch.
Between her legs, a thatch of light blonde hair, already slick, and a pink, narrow slit, the sight of her there, open and ready, sent a surge through my cock that made my vision blur at the edges.
She saw me too. Her hands traced the scars across my chest, the puckered one beneath my ribs, the long diagonal across my upper back, the countless smaller marks that mapped six years of surviving.
Her fingers were gentle, curious, and when they reached the scar that ran along my hip from a blade that had gone through my armor and missed everything important by the width of a hair, she leaned down and kissed it, her mouth warm against old pain.
“These,” she whispered. “I hate these. Every one. But they’re part of you. They’re why you’re here. Why I’m here.”
Then she was guiding me deeper inside her, her hand around my cock, positioning me, and when I pushed into her the wet heat was so good it drew a groan from somewhere deep in my chest that I hadn’t known I was capable of producing.
She was tight, God, she was tight, her inner muscles clenching around me with each inch, taking me deeper than I’d thought possible, and the sound she made when I bottomed out was halfway between a gasp and a moan and entirely, devastatingly Sabrina.
I fucked her the way the day demanded: not gentle, not careful, but passionate and a little rough, my hips driving into her with a force that had everything to do with the fear I’d been carrying since the messenger landed and nothing to do with restraint.
She took it. She matched it. Her legs wrapped around my hips, her heels digging into my back, her wings spreading beneath her on the mattress with a rustle of feathers that filled the quiet room.
Every thrust drove the truth deeper into me.
This was the girl who used to steal my shirts and leave them smelling like her perfume.
The beauty queen who had grown into a woman while I was gone.
And I was buried inside her to the root, cock stretching her open, her wet heat gripping me like she had been made for this.
“Gabriel—” she gasped, head tipping back, throat exposed. “God, you’re … so deep—”
I growled against her neck. She moaned, loud and unrestrained, the sound punching straight through the thin walls of the farmhouse.
Her nails scored down my back, catching on old scars, and her inner walls fluttered around me in greedy pulses.
Every wet sound of my cock plunging into her was proof that the line we had already crossed with Gabriella had never been a line at all, just a delay.
I rose onto my knees, hooked my arms under her thighs, and folded her almost in half so I could watch.
The sight nearly undid me. My thick cock disappeared into her pretty pink pussy, stretching her open, her light-blonde curls slick and dark with how wet she was.
Her breasts bounced with every hard thrust. Her wings trembled against the sheets.
And her face, eyes glassy, mouth open, the bruise on her cheek a dark reminder of why we were here, was pure, filthy need.
“Look at you,” I rasped. “Taking my cock like you were starving for it. Like you’ve been waiting six years for me to come home and ruin you.”
“I have,” she sobbed, hips lifting to meet every stroke. “I dreamed about this. About you. About you holding me down and, ah, using me. Gabriel, please—”
I gave her what she asked for, harder and deeper.
The headboard knocked against the wall in a steady, shameless rhythm.
The wet sounds of our fucking filled the room, obscene and wet and perfect.
I leaned down and claimed her mouth again, swallowing her moans, tasting tea and salt and the last traces of fear.
My hand slid between us, found the swollen bud of her clit, and rubbed tight circles while I kept pounding into her.
Her body seized. Her pussy clamped down on me like a fist, pulsing, milking, and she broke with a cry that was half my name and half something wordless and desperate.
The contractions dragged me over with her.
I buried myself to the hilt and came hard, thick pulses of cum flooding her, painting her insides, claiming her in the most permanent way I could.
The pleasure was blinding, sharpened by the knowledge that I was pumping her full of my seed after spending the evening carving through the people who had tried to take her.