40. Chapter 40 #2
A sound tore out of my throat that I didn't recognize. My spine arched off the ropes. His fingers dug bruises into my flesh and he kissed my heat—deep, open-mouthed, unhurried—like he had nowhere else to be. Like the war had ended and this was the only territory left worth claiming.
I cried out in ecstasy and thrashed against the ropes.
He dug his fingers deeper into my ass and then dug his tongue and teeth in deeper, taking all of me into his mouth.
Both my clit and inner walls being overcome with his hot wet command.
He made a muffled sound of satisfaction.
I instinctively tried to grab his hair but couldn’t with my hands tied and whined pitifully.
He spread my legs as wide as they could go with the ropes and dug deeper and deeper with each kiss.
Rhythmically hitting both my clit and inner sensitive bud with each wildly lapping motion.
My legs shook—trembling against him like everything inside me was coming undone.
I thrashed against the pole and the ropes bit deeper and I didn't care.
His fangs descended.
He sank them into my inner thigh. My vision whited out. My hips bucked and a sound ripped from my chest—raw, animal, stripped of every civilized thing I'd ever pretended to be. The edge rushed up so fast I nearly shattered right there.
He pulled back. Replaced the bite with his mouth—soft, warm, devastating—sealed over my clit with a pressure that made my toes curl against the rock.
His tongue worked in tight, ruthless circles.
No teasing. No mercy. Griffin screams split the air above us.
The ground shuddered beneath our feet—a deep, rolling tremor that rattled my teeth and sent dust cascading from the cliffs.
Somewhere behind us, rock cracked and fell.
Boulders shearing off ledges, the mountain itself groaning apart.
He didn't stop.
Two fingers drove into me. Found the spot that made my brain go white and hammered. Relentless. Brutal. The same rhythm as the quaking earth—harder, harder, the world falling apart around us and his mouth still on me and his fingers still inside me and I was so close it hurt.
Debris drifted onto my skin. Grit and dust settling on my bare stomach, my chest, my throat. The mountain was breaking. The sky was screaming.
His fangs found my other thigh. The pain detonated at the same moment his fingers drove deep—and I broke.
Gold and red light exploded from my skin. The Fury and the Unravel ripping out of me in a blinding pulse that scorched the air. I came screaming, spine arched off the pole, every muscle locked and shaking and gone.
He didn't let me come down.
His mouth sealed back over my clit before the aftershocks had even started. Faster. Hungrier. His rhythm climbed and I bucked against him—snarling, teeth snapping at nothing, my body trying to twist away from the intensity because it was too much, it was too much —
He pinned me to the pole. Both hands. Iron grip. Held me exactly where he wanted me and didn't give an inch. My hips fought him. He didn't care. His tongue didn't slow and his pressure didn't ease and every time I tried to squirm away he dragged me back.
Something bigger was building. Deeper. A wave behind the wave—monstrous, tidal, the kind that doesn't just crest but levels.
I could feel it climbing. Could feel him sense it too—the way his grip tightened, the way his rhythm turned savage and deliberate, driving me toward something I wasn't sure I'd survive.
He growled into my cunt.
"Let go, Little Fox. Now."
The vibration of his voice tore through me like a lit fuse.
I shattered.
Wave after wave after wave—the orgasm crashing through me in pulses that ripped the Fury free, the Unravel free, the Griefweaver free.
Power surged out of me in sonic waves, rolling across the rupture site, shaking the ground, bending the air.
I was screaming or sobbing or both and it didn't stop. It just kept coming.
He stood. One brutal motion. His shirt ripped over his head and hit the dirt. His hand closed around the nape of my neck—rough, possessive, anchoring—and he pressed his forehead against mine. His breath ragged. His skin burning.
Then his mouth. Hard and hot and demanding. Teeth and tongue and the taste of me on his lips. He kissed me like he was staking a claim against the gods themselves.
"Good girl." A growl scraped raw from his chest.
He reached down. Undid his own leathers. Kicked them aside.His hands gripped my hips and lifted. My feet left the ground. The ropes slid up the pole behind me—the cold pole chilling my spine—until my chest was level with his.
Skin met skin. Mark to Mark. For the first time.
His eyes locked on mine.
And the bond ignited.
I gasped. He groaned. The bond slammed open—no suppressors, no armor, my body already surrendered and wide open. Everything we'd been denied for weeks, for months, wanting and not having—it flooded through the channel between us in a torrent that stole my breath.
Him. All of him. Not just his emotions. The shape of his soul. The texture of his thoughts. The way his love felt from the inside—fierce and terrified and absolute.
The power rose.
My Luminar and Griefweaver. Silver-white bursting out of me in a devastating force unhindered. Then his soul-binder, the thread, spun around my own—climbing, pulling my wild power into a moveable and guideable form. Leading it toward the screaming sky. Toward the bleeding rupture.
I opened the floodgates and exhaled. Allowed myself to pour out—my power, my essence, everything I was—and instead of fighting it, instead of clinging, instead of holding back against the drain—
I let go.
And Eryndor poured back into me.
His strength flooding into the places where mine emptied. His power rushing through the bond, filling the spaces I was creating, warm and steady and fierce. Not taking. Giving. Two vessels filling and draining each other in an endless circuit, a loop that had no beginning and no end.
I gave. He gave. We gave to each other and to the Veil and the giving became its own kind of fullness.
His power inside me. Steady. Grounding. The bedrock beneath the storm, the anchor that kept me from flying apart.
My power inside him. Wild. Burning. Primordial. The Fury threading through his calm, the fire meeting the stone.
They twined together. The way my Light and Shadow had last time I was here, but chosen this time. Two becoming one not through force but through surrender.
The Veil responded.
The tear above us shuddered. The endless widening—the relentless spread that had been swallowing the world—slowed. Then stopped.
The edges of the wound trembled.
Reached toward each other. Inching closer and closer.
"Come here." His voice was wrecked. He lifted me up and I angled my hips, sinking onto him in one slow, devastating slide.
The sound that left me wasn't fae. Every inch of him stretched me open and the Veil answered—pulsing in time with my body, each wave of pressure mirrored in the sky above us like the world itself was breathing with us.
"Look at you." His mouth moved against my throat. The words vibrated through my skin.
"You move like a storm just before it breaks," he murmured. "Tight with pressure. Barely leashed."
I arched. Arms stretched above me, bound and useless, my spine curving away from the pole to open myself completely. My hips lifted. Found the angle. Rolled.
"Feral," he breathed against my throat. "Unbent. The kind of strength the gods tried to break and failed." His hands locked on my hips. And he slammed into me so hard my vision cracked.
I screamed and the sky screamed with me—color bleeding through the static grey in a violent pulse, the Veil phasing between death and life.
"Harder," I breathed.
I needed him to wreck me. Needed to feel the full, terrifying weight of what he was—no leash, no restraint, no careful measured distance.
My fangs descended. A growl ripped from my chest. "Harder."
He gave me everything.
He slammed into me with his full power. His full strength. And I swallowed it whole. Devoured every brutal thrust and demanded more because my body was a furnace that could not be filled and I wanted the realm to watch me burn.
The scar on my Mark began to glow. The white line from the Soul-Rend. It burned in recognition. The broken place remembering what it had been. What it could be again.
Above us, the rupture shuddered again. The edges crept closer. Millimeter by millimeter, the tear began to close.
It was working.
For one breath, the world was quiet. The griffins' cries softened. The wind died. Even the Veil seemed to exhale.
Then the Void slammed into us.
The wave hit us like a battering ram.
Cold flooded my body. Absolute. Annihilating. The same cold from the void—the desaturation, the draining, the feeling of the world losing its color, its hum, its life. Grey crept in at the edges of my vision. The basalt beneath me lost its depth. The sky bled out to static.
I was back. Tied to the altar. Ropes biting into my wrists. Power flowing out of me recklessly—not in circuit with Eryndor. Away. Into the Void. Feeding the very thing I was trying to heal. The same brutal, violating tear. The same helpless drain.
I screamed.
Eryndor's hands tightened on hips. I heard him shouting my name distantly. I felt him through the bond—desperate, reaching, fighting to hold the connection. But the Void was between us now. Corrupting the circuit. Turning surrender back into sacrifice. Turning choice back into chain.
The Void whispered.
Not in words. In feelings. Brannick's back as he walked away. The feeling of being used. A weapon pointed at the world. A tool for someone else's purpose. The certainty that every time I opened myself to someone, they took and took and took until I was hollow.
Why would this be different?
Eryndor's face swam in my vision. His hands on mine. His Marks blazing against my skin.
This is what surrender gets you.
The power stuttered. The circuit fractured.