8. Kaelor #5
Legs wrap around my waist, ankles lock at the small of my back.
Her mouth crashes into mine—hard, teeth clacking, no finesse.
I catch her under the thighs, lift, slam her back against the barrier.
The impact jars a gasp out of her. She doesn’t flinch.
She grinds down against the thick ridge of me still trapped in my lower plates.
I tear at the fastenings. Fabric rips—loud in the quiet dome. My cock springs free, already leaking, ridges swollen and hot. She reaches between us, wraps her hand around me. Strokes once—rough, impatient—then lines me up.
No preamble.
She sinks down in one brutal drop.
The stretch makes her choke on a sound—half moan, half pain.
I feel every inch of her clench around me, walls fluttering, trying to adjust to the sudden fullness.
The heat of her is scalding, slick, perfect.
I growl against her throat. My claws dig into her hips—hard enough to bruise, not hard enough to break skin.
She starts moving.
Fast.
No rhythm at first—just desperate rolls of her hips, chasing friction.
I meet her on the next thrust—sharp, deep, driving up into her so hard her back scrapes the barrier.
The light pulses brighter with the impact.
Outside, something slams against the shield—silent flash, another ring spreading—but it’s background noise.
Nothing exists beyond the wet slide of us, the frantic slap of skin, the way she’s clawing at my shoulders like she needs to leave marks.
I fuck her against the wall.
Hard .
Relentless.
There a rumble, but I’m not sure if it’s us or the volcano.
Each thrust bottoms out—ridges dragging along her walls, catching every sensitive place. She’s dripping down my thighs, slick and hot. Her breath comes in short, punched-out gasps against my ear. “Faster,” she manages. Voice wrecked.
I give it to her.
One hand leaves her hip, slides up to grip the back of her neck. I hold her there—keep her eyes on mine. She’s wild—pupils blown, lips swollen, cheeks flushed dark. She looks at me like I’m the only thing keeping her from flying apart.
I angle my hips. Grind against her clit with every stroke.
She jerks—whole body seizing—and comes hard.
Walls clamp down like a vise. A strangled cry rips out of her throat.
The bond flares white-hot—her pleasure slamming into me, bright and blinding.
I keep thrusting through it—short, brutal strokes—drawing it out until she’s shaking, whimpering, nails raking bloody lines down my back.
She doesn’t go limp.
She tightens her legs. Pulls me deeper. “Don’t stop,” she pants. “Need you—need to feel?—”
I lose the last thread of control.
I spin us—lay her flat on the stone floor.
Hook her legs over my shoulders. Fold her in half.
The new angle lets me drive even deeper.
She arches—back bowing off the ground, breasts bouncing with every slam.
I brace one hand beside her head, the other on her hip, pinning her exactly where I want her.
I fuck her like the volcano is about to blow.
Because it is.
Because we both know the countdown is ticking down outside this barrier and there’s no more time for slow discovery. This is necessity. This is claiming. This is both of us saying—without words—that we made it this far together and we’re finishing it together.
Will the barrier hold back the eruption? I don’t know. Don’t want to take the risk. Don’t want to be here a second longer than necessary.
Her second orgasm hits fast—sharp, almost violent. She cries out—voice cracking on my name. Walls pulse around me, milking, pulling. The bond whites out again—shared, overwhelming. I feel her come like it’s happening in my own body.
I follow right after.
One last thrust—deep, grinding—and I bury myself to the hilt. Heat floods her. Pulse after pulse. I groan—low, guttural—against her throat. My claws sink into the stone on either side of her head, cracking it. She trembles beneath me, still clenching, still riding the aftershocks.
We stay locked like that.
Breathing hard.
Sweat-slick.
Ash clinging to damp skin.
I lower her legs slowly. Stay inside her.
Don’t pull out yet. She wraps her arms around my neck, pulls me down until my weight is on her—comforting, grounding.
Her head tucks under my chin. Both hands press flat over the relic’s warmth in my chest—like she’s trying to hold the glow inside her palms.
The barrier pulses steadily around us.
A heartbeat we’re both inside.
Outside, the impacts have gone quiet.
They know it’s over.
So do we .
The bond goes incandescent.
It moves through both of us — not the pull toward the relic, not the triangle resonance, something beyond those.
The connection completing itself. The thing the third relic has been waiting for since the first arena, since the first basin, since the first moment the Games built something between us that they didn't fully anticipate.
Not the mechanics. Not the ritual.
This. Us. The bond at its fullest frequency, sealed by everything we chose.
And then — expanding outward through the barrier and beyond it — the arena.
It arrives the way weather arrives. The lava. The platforms. The volcanic structure itself, the full enormous weight of it, present and available. The pair that finishes the Games inheriting what the Games were built on.
I feel the volcano.
Not as a threat. Not as the countdown we've been dying inside across every attempt. Something that belongs to us now — and we to it. The bond completing a circuit the relics were always designed to complete.
Olivia goes still against me.
She lifts her head and looks at me and her face — Olivia Carter, who has kept her head through every arena in this place, who has never let herself be overwhelmed, who calculated her way through every impossible problem this place produced — her face is full of awe. Pure and undefended.
"Is that?—"
"Yes," I say.
I look at the volcano.
I look at it and I think about every platform we crossed. Every reset. Every time the fifth shudder came and the mountain opened and we woke up in the pods and started again. Everything it took from us and everything we took back.
I think: enough.
The volcano responds.
The eruption cycle that has been building — the accumulated pressure of the arena's machinery — stills. The summit holds. The pressure goes down rather than out, the bond and the relic and the completed connection redirecting the mountain's force back into itself.
The lake surface settles.
The churning stops. The channels calm. The whole surface goes flat and still and reflective, the orange-red of it steady now, and the ash drifts down through suddenly quiet air and lands without interruption.
The arena is still.
Outside the barrier, Varketh has stopped moving.
He stands with his hands at his sides, looking at the lake.
At the volcano. At the barrier surrounding us.
The rivals behind him have stopped too — every male the Games put in this arena against us — standing in the ash-quiet of a place that has stopped trying to kill them.
Varketh looks at me through the barrier.
I look back at him.
The bond runs between me and Olivia — warm, complete, present without effort. The fullest frequency it has ever run at. Not straining. Not reaching.
Just ours.
Olivia's hand finds mine.
I close my fingers around hers.
The volcano quiet. The lava flat. The ash falling soft and steady through calm air.
The Games are over.
Nothing moves.
That's the first thing. After every attempt in this arena — after the churning and the shuddering and the countdown — nothing moves. The lava lies flat. The ash falls straight down. The volcano stands quiet above us and its silence is more disorienting than any sound it's made.
I breathe.
I let the stillness be the stillness.
Olivia's hand is in mine.
I look at her. She's looking at the lake — at the flat surface of it, the absence of the churning, the wrongness of a place that has stopped.
I watch it move through her face. Every platform.
Every pod. Every countdown and every death and every moment of waking up whole and doing it again.
She lets it land. All of it, without managing it, without containing it — just standing here and letting the full weight of it reach her.
Then the light changes.
It comes from above — cooler, brighter, cutting through the ash cloud with precision. I feel it in my chest before my eyes have resolved what it is.
The ship.
It descends through the ash, unhurried, the Malquaran aesthetic of clean edges and cold efficiency. A ramp extends. Two drones descend carrying a receiving mechanism I recognise from the design of the relics themselves.
For the relics.
Olivia looks at me. Then she looks down at her hands — at the third relic, still warm in her palms, its glow steady and quiet now.
Then she walks to the ramp .
I follow.
The drones hold the mechanism between them and Olivia stops in front of it. She holds the relics for one last moment — the warmth of them, the glow that pulled us across three arenas, the thing we died for more times than I can count — and then she places them in the mechanism.
The glow goes out.
No tone. No pulse.
I feel it through the bond. The triangle resonance going quiet — the third point of the connection dissolving, then the second as I lift the Magma Plate from my shoulders and place it in the mechanism. Then the crown. The amplification withdrawing, piece by piece, until what's left is?—
The bond.
I stand in the absence of the relics and I find it.
The bond. Still running. Quieter than it's been since Arena Two — the resting warmth of it, the thing that was there before the first basin, before the first claim, before any of this. The thing the Games found rather than made.
Still there.
Still ours.
The mechanism closes. The drones ascend the ramp. A single tone sounds.
Varketh stands ten meters away.
He looks at the ship. At the mechanism disappearing up the ramp.
At the stilled lake and the quiet volcano.
I watch him run his calculation — the inventory behind his eyes, the moves and countermoves — and I see the moment it resolves into something I've never seen from him across any reset.
Not fury. Not a new angle. Something older than either of those.
A creature who has run out of moves and is sitting in that fact without flinching from it.
He looks at Olivia .
She looks back at him.
He inclines his head. One degree. Not concession — recognition. The acknowledgment of someone recalibrating around a result they didn't expect and have decided to respect.
She does not inclines hers back.
We walk up the ramp and the ship rises — slow at first, then accelerating, climbing through the ash cloud.
I look at Olivia.
Her face is one of someone who has held something at enormous cost for a very long time and has just understood that she can put it down.
Her chin trembles once.
She doesn't stop it.
I put my arms around her and she turns into me.
She presses her face against my chest and I hold her while she shakes.
The release of something held too tightly for too long, finally letting go.
She cries without care, her hands gripping my arms and the tears coming because she has stopped preventing them.
I hold her.
The ash falls and we continue to rise.
When she pulls back her face is wet and her eyes are clear.
"We won," she says.
"Yes," I say. “We won. And now we go win every single day of our lives.”
“Sounds good to me.”
I hope you enjoyed THE BINDING GAMES. If you did, you’ll love the next book in the series: THE TIDAL GAMES.
Here’s the blurb:
“Five…”
I wake up in a glass pod. I’ve been abducted.
“Four…”
A tidal arena. Five alien males. Three moons that drown everything when they align.
“Three…”
He reaches me first. Gold eyes, impossible calm, a body built like a weapon.
“Two…”
He fights for me like I’m already his. Holds me like he already knows the shape of me .
“One…”
But he refuses to tell me how he already knows my name.
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