Chapter 17
Sky
I woke up before Moerrven, which almost never happened.
He was on his stomach, one arm flung over the side of the bed, his face pressed into the pillow.
The blanket had slipped to his thighs, and in the gray morning light, I could see the marks on his skin, the faded welts across his ass from the paddle, pink against the blue-gray.
His breathing was deep and even and his body was relaxed, sprawled with the abandon of a man who had been thoroughly, catastrophically fucked.
I had done that.
I lay on my side and looked at the marks, and my first reaction was a possessive sort of pride, but this had been our most intense scene yet, and as always, there was the quiet, insistent voice that asked whether I had taken it too far.
It was an old worry, dating back to the first time I’d tried this: the first time a guy had begged for pain, and I’d discovered that coaxing someone to relinquish their control to me made me harder than anything else in the world.
The rush of it, the power, the way a man twice my size could go soft and desperate under my hands, it all made me feel alive in a way that nothing else matched.
But every time, the morning after was the reckoning that followed every sort of unhinged power trip: the inventory of what I’d done and what it said about me that I’d enjoyed it.
He’d asked me to keep going. He’d begged for me to go harder, to make the pain sing. He’d cried, and the crying had unlocked something that had been, I believed, what he needed: therapeutic, cathartic, consensual, good.
But how did I know it was right?
And what kind of fucked up person would get off on it?
Not metaphorically but literally: my cock had been hard the entire time I was hitting him.
The sound of leather on skin, the way his voice broke on the numbers, the tears on his cheeks, all of it had aroused me, and not in a detached, professional way but in a hungry, possessive, fuck-yes-he’s-mine way that I was certain was part of who I was.
I liked ruining my partners, loved the way their cocks got hard from it. I thrilled in the trust it required to let go like that. But there was always a little guilt that came with being hard when your partner was crying. Even when he was begging for more.
Moerrven shifted in his sleep and his breathing changed. He reached for my hip, his hand heavy and warm, and he pulled me closer. His fingertips brushed the bare skin of my waist and tightened, like he was making sure I was still there. He hummed, soft and happy, and nuzzled closer.
I traced a finger over the marks on his skin, reminding myself that they were evidence of trust, not damage.
“Good morning,” I said.
He groaned and pulled me closer, wrapping me up in a body so big I never had to be gentle with him. I liked that about Moerrven.
“How did you sleep?” I asked.
“Mm. So well. Could you spank all my emotions out every night? I don’t remember feeling relaxed, well… pretty much ever.”
I smiled, some of the tension in my chest easing. “You were fully unconscious. I had to check your breathing twice. I was worried I broke you.”
“You didn’t break me, you… Honestly, I don’t know how to describe what you did, but suffice it to say I’m an addict.”
“My little pain slut,” I whispered.
He laughed and rolled over on top of me, pinning my arms above my head, reminding me of his strength, of what he could do if he chose to. He kissed me, and I arched up into it, enjoying the rough capture of his lips. Then he lifted his head and grinned. “Little, am I?”
“Not at all. And that makes your surrender so much more sexy.” I gave a light push, and he went easily, letting me roll on top of him and straddle his stomach. “What’s the plan for today?”
He was quiet for a long moment. “We should make for Frostholm. Kethilda’s library, like Runhilda said.”
“The long way through Clovermere?”
“No.” He shook his head. “We’ll cross Greymere Gorge.”
I cupped his jaw, guiding his face to turn until he was meeting my eyes. “You sure?”
He drew my hands to his horns, to the trolgar. “Do the thing you do with the emotions, but this time, focus on your strength. That incredible force inside you that lets you be brave when everything should scare you.”
For once, it was my turn to blush. “Pretty sure I have a normal amount of strength.”
“No. It’s quite unusual. And I should know, because I’m an author. A student of people and what makes them tick. When I feel you through the trolgar, I feel someone who is steady, warm, and sure of himself.”
“If only you knew what I was just thinking,” I said with a chuckle.
“What? You can tell me.”
“I worry sometimes, about taking pleasure in hurting my partner,” I whispered.
“Is that what you took pleasure in? Or did you take pleasure in the way I responded? In the things you were doing for me?”
This time, I couldn’t think of a joke or deflect, and I was frozen there, holding his horns, staring into his eyes.
“So I would like to take the shortcut,” he said. “If you would be willing to cross the bridge with me, and hold my horns, and let me absorb some of that strength.”
I smiled, leaned down and kissed the tip of his nose. “It’s a plan.”
He pulled my face down to his for a hard kiss. Then he set me beside him, stood up, dressed, and began packing with the efficient precision of a man who had made a decision and was not going to think about it further until the moment arrived.
We loaded the wagon, settled Poppy into her habitat and gave Clover a big carrot stick for all of her hard work before fastening the bridle into place.
We pulled out of the stable and wound down Highmark’s switchback roads, past the Archive with its book-carved columns, past the market square where the too-thin vendor waved goodbye, and out through the lower gate onto the road.
The road to Greymere Gorge branched off a mile south of the city.
Moerrven guided Clover to the junction and turned east without stopping, no hesitation, no long pause at the crossroads. He’d made his decision in bed this morning, and he wasn’t going to make it again.
The gorge road snaked down the mountainside, narrow and steep, the trees thickening around us as the elevation dropped.
I dug into our supplies and made us both lunch on the bench, bread and cheese and dried fruit, tearing pieces and handing them to Moerrven while he drove, because someone had to make sure the man ate when he was in stoic-determination mode.
He chewed mechanically, his eyes on the road.
I didn’t push. I ate my bread, scratched Poppy behind the ears, and watched the mountains get closer and the gorge get deeper. I kept my mouth shut, which was possibly the hardest thing I’d ever done.
We came around a bend, and Moerrven slowed, then stopped the wagon.
He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking past me, down the road, at something the trees had been hiding until we cleared them.
The bridge.
It spanned the gorge like it was part of it, a single, massive stone arch that curved from one cliff face to the other.
The stone was pale gray, almost white in the afternoon light, and the engineering of it was so precise that the arch seemed to float, gravity-defying, over the dark slash of the canyon below.
At the near end, where the road met the bridge, stood a statue carved from the same pale stone: a troll woman, broad-shouldered and steady-eyed, a roll of architectural plans clutched in her hands, with a plaque at the base that I couldn’t read from here but didn’t need to.
This was Bryndala’s bridge, Bryndala’s statue, the thing he’d been driving around for five years, built by the woman he’d loved for a hundred.
And it was beautiful. It was the most beautiful piece of engineering I had ever seen.
Moerrven climbed down from the bench like a man moving through water, and stood in the road looking at the thing his wife had made. Whatever joke I’d had loaded, I let it die in my throat. I swung down off the wagon. This was the only thing in the world that mattered, and it couldn’t wait.
I ran at Moerrven and launched myself onto his back.
He staggered, not from my weight, which was nothing to him, but from the surprise of it, and my hands found his horns and I gripped the bases, thumbs pressing into the trolgar points the way I’d learned to do, the way that opened the door to my emotions.
And I did my best to do as he asked, pushing every ounce of strength and warmth and care I could summon to the forefront of my thoughts.
He made a sound that was half sob, half laugh, and his hands came up, caught my thighs, and shifted me onto his shoulders until I was sitting on them, the way I had that first day on the bridge, when I’d been a stranger climbing him like a tree.
This time, when I pressed into his trolgar, he sighed.
I pushed everything I had at him. I pushed warmth, joy, wonder at the bridge that his wife had built, the bridge that had outlived her, the bridge that was standing in the afternoon light like a monument to everything she had been.
I pushed sadness too, because sadness was part of it, and strength, because he’d asked me for that this morning.
Tears were streaming down his face. From above, they caught the light, rolled down his jaw, and dripped onto his shirt.
He didn’t wipe them away. He stood at the foot of his dead wife’s bridge, a human on his shoulders, his hands on my thighs, and he cried, openly, in broad daylight, on a public road. He didn’t try to stop.
I rubbed his horns in slow, gentle circles on the trolgar points, not sexual, not charged, just present. I held him the only way I could from up here and let him feel whatever he needed to feel, for as long as he needed to feel it.
The bridge waited. The statue watched. Clover stood patiently behind us, Poppy meowed softly in her habitat, and the gorge wind carried the smell of stone, water, and the faintest trace of wildflowers.
After a while, Moerrven took a breath. Then another. Then he squared his shoulders under me, and his hands tightened on my thighs, and he started walking.
He took Clover’s reins, and led her forward, and we crossed Bryndala’s bridge together.