31. Sovereign #3
His body everywhere: gripping Cass’s thigh, his hip, hauling him closer, and Cass was—
Cass was meeting him.
Not just receiving. His hips rolling, finding the angle, his legs tightening around Riot’s waist to pull him deeper.
His hands on Riot’s back, his shoulders, his face.
His mouth finding Riot’s jaw, his neck, pressing messy, desperate kisses against sweat-salt skin.
His body had figured out the language and now it was speaking—answering every thrust with a counter-rhythm that was getting better, bolder, his back arching to change the angle, chasing the spot with a focus that was entirely his own.
The pleasure was cresting, wave after wave building to a tsunami, every movement amplifying it— from his core to his extremities, a pressure so intense it felt like his skin might split, his heart pounding as if it would burst.
“That’s—oh, fuck—” He rolled his hips in a circle instead of up. “Oh heavens, oh fuck, oh heavens—”
“Doing that on purpose—Christ—milking my cock with that tight little—you figured that out fast, princess, you’re a quick fucking study when you want to be—” Riot’s voice cracked as he shuddered.
His face buried against Cass’s neck, breath ragged, and the words that came out were stripped of everything but truth.
“So fucking—cum on my cock, Cass—I need to feel you, I need—”
“Close,” Cass gasped. “I’m—fuck—”
The sensation climbed past anything he’d felt before.
Past the bathroom. Past the entryway floor.
Past every peak and crest, climbing higher, gathering from every place they were connected, pouring into his entire body, each thrust adding fuel, the heat coiling tighter, tighter, until it was unbearable, a glowing core on the verge of detonation.
His body trembled with the strain, every muscle taut, the world narrowing to this singular build-up, so profound it bordered on pain, demanding release.
Closer.
Not a thought. A need. His body reaching.
Closer. Closer. CLOSER.
His mouth found Riot’s neck, some desire for closeness deeper than a kiss, deeper than decision or thought.
It lived in a place he didn’t have a name for, like it was older than language, older than corporations, older than anything he’d been taught.
His teeth found the juncture of neck and shoulder and he didn’t decide to bite.
He just bit.
Riot whimpered as his hips slammed forward one final time and Cass felt him pulse inside of him and felt the heat pour into him.
A shock ran through Cass’s teeth, down his throat, into his chest. Like biting into lightning. Like his mouth had found a live wire and his jaw had locked around it. His teeth were sunk into Riot’s flesh and his body would not release them
Everything went bright.
It was a wave that crashed through both of them simultaneously, fusing the place where their bodies met into something that felt less like two people and more like one system finally coming online.
The orgasm was unbearable, world-ending, a cataclysm that ripped through every fiber of his being.
It felt like the universe itself was remaking him, every cell alight, the build-up finally unleashing in a torrent that left him shattered, reborn, and utterly consumed.
Cass’s jaw released.
He fell back, gasping and Riot collapsed onto him, crushing the air from Cass’s lungs and Cass didn’t care because Riot was shaking too, shaking and making broken sounds against Cass’s neck, his body wracked with small twitches and jerks.
“Riot?” His voice was destroyed. A rasp. His hand found Riot’s hair, trembling, clumsy, still shaking. “Riot. I’m sorry, I…I bit you—”
“It’s fine…just…need a second…” Riot panted against his neck.
“I bit you.” Cass touched the place on Riot’s neck. His fingers came away wet with blood. “I’m so sorry Riot….”
Riot lifted his head, the gold slowly fading from his eyes. “Don’t be sorry,” he whispered. “Don’t you ever be sorry for that.”
“There’s blood on my mouth, Riot, I—”
Riot kissed him like he wanted to taste his own blood on Cass’s lips and groaned like it was the best thing he’d ever experienced. When he pulled back, his steady gold eyes searched Cass’s face. “Are you okay?”
Cass nodded as his brain fully came back online, as the haze receded and the stone cellar reassembled itself around him—he heard himself.
All of it. Every single thing his mouth had produced in the last however-long. Playing back in his memory with the clarity of a bell in an empty room.
His entire body flushed so hot he thought he might combust.
“Oh heavens.” He pressed his face into Riot’s chest. “Oh heavens, oh no.”
“What?”
“The things I said.” Muffled. Mortified beyond recovery. “Riot, the things I said—I told you to—I asked you to make me—” He couldn’t even repeat them. His voice dropped to a horrified whisper. “I don’t talk like that. I’ve never—where did those words come from?”
Riot’s chest vibrated. He was laughing. Low, wrecked, like laughing hurt but he couldn’t help it.
“For what it’s worth—” Riot pressed his lips to the top of Cass’s head. “It was pretty great.”
“I told you to make me cum. That is not great, that is—” He buried himself deeper into Riot’s chest. “Spiritually cata-stroh-phic.”
“Spiritually catastrophic.“ Riot was definitely laughing now. The sound was rough and warm and it vibrated through both of them. “I’m going to remember that forever.”
“Please don’t.”
“Every word, princess. Especially the part where you figured out what your hips could do and said oh heavens oh fuck oh heavens like you couldn’t decide which god to blame.”
Cass groaned. But he was smiling into Riot’s skin, and the embarrassment was warm.
Not cold. Not the hollow shame of the Elders’ disappointment or the sick heat of Brother Matthias’s approval.
This was what it felt like to have been someone else for a little while.
Someone who wanted things and said so. Someone who grabbed and demanded and moved their body without asking permission from their brain.
Someone who wasn’t broken. Just new.
Riot shifted, sliding out of him, and Cass winced, his breath catching. Sore. Really sore. His body had strong opinions about what had just happened to it, and most of those opinions involved never moving again.
Riot’s arm wrapped around him, pulling them onto their sides.
Face to face. The sleeping bag was destroyed.
They were both shaking. Riot’s expression was doing something complicated.
The post-predator calm cracking open to show the man “I was too rough.” Riot’s voice was hoarse.
His thumb traced the bruise forming on Cass’s hip where his fingers had dug in. “And mean…I’m sorry, I don’t know why—”
“Riot,” Cass whispered. “It’s okay. Really.”
Riot was quiet for a moment. His fingers found Cass’s and laced through them, squeezing once.
Cass lay still, listening to Riot’s heartbeat. His body was warm everywhere they touched and cool everywhere they didn’t, and the difference made Cass want to press closer to eliminate all the cool places until there was nothing left but warmth.
The warmth was different from heat.
Heat was what his body did—the sweating and the cramping and the slick and the desperate need that turned his thoughts to static. Heat was something that happened to him.
But this warmth, Riot’s skin against his, the weight of Riot’s arm across his back, the way Riot’s thumb kept moving in slow circles like he couldn’t stop touching Cass even when the urgency was gone—this was something else.
This was the after. The quiet that came when the wanting had been answered and what remained was just..
. this person. Right here. Exactly this person.
The Elders had talked about what love felt like for a sacred partner, a rush of divine certainty, the feeling of two halves clicking into spiritual completion. They’d described it in meditation sessions and painted designation energies merging into transcendent wholeness.
Cass had waited years to feel it with Honey.
Through every meditation. Every prayer circle.
Every session with Brother Matthias where the pain was supposed to burn away whatever was blocking the connection.
He’d waited and waited and it never came, and he’d thought the problem was him.
That he was too broken, too deficient, too much of a spiritual failure to feel what everyone said he was supposed to feel.
But this was it. This was the feeling they’d described.
I love him.
The thought arrived the way most of Cass’s important thoughts arrived—not built piece by piece through analysis, but whole. Like something that had always been there and had just been waiting for him to notice it.
“Riot?”
“Yeah?” His voice was a low rumble under Cass’s cheek. Cass could feel it vibrate through his chest before it became sound.
“I think I love you.”
The words came out simpler than he’d planned.
He’d been thinking something about the Elders and Honey and sacred resonance and algorithms, but his mouth skipped all of that and had gone straight to the center.
Riot’s heartbeat kicked. One hard thump under Cass’s ear, then another.
Then the arm across Cass’s back went very, very still.
“I think I love you the way the Elders wanted me to love Honey,” Cass continued, because the silence was getting big and he needed to fill it before it got too heavy to move.
“I think this is what they were describing. Except they said it would come from our spirits and it didn’t. It came from you.”
He could feel Riot’s pulse going faster now. But Riot wasn’t speaking.
“I’m sorry if that’s not...” Cass swallowed.
“If it’s not right. I know you said—I mean, I know things are complicated, and we’re in the middle of—and I don’t even know if I’m using the word correctly because everything I was taught about love was.
..” He trailed off. Started again. “But my body knows. And you said I should listen to my body.”
Still nothing. Riot’s hand had stopped its circles on his back. His breathing had gone shallow and careful, the way it did when he was fighting to hold something back.
“Riot?”
“Yeah.” His voice sounded different. Thicker. “I heard you.”
“Okay.” Cass pressed his forehead into Riot’s chest. “You don’t have to say anything. I just wanted you to know. In case something goes wrong and I never —”
“Cass.”
“— get to say it, and I’d just be thinking about how I should have told you when —”
“Cass.”
Riot’s hand came up and cupped the back of his head, fingers threading into his hair, and pulled him up so they were face to face. In the dim light, Riot’s eyes were green again.
“You’re not using the word wrong,” Riot said. His voice cracked on the last word and he didn’t try to fix it. “You’re using it exactly right.”
“Oh.” Cass blinked. “Does that mean …?”
“It means I love you too, you impossible fucking person.” It came out rough and raw and cracked down the middle, like something that had been locked in a box for a very long time and had gotten damaged in storage.
It was the most beautiful thing Cass had ever heard, and he didn’t even flinch.
“Okay,” Cass said. “Good.”
“Good,” he repeated. “I tell you I love you and you say good?”
“It is good.” Cass’s hand found Riot’s face and felt his eyes start to burn. “All the meditation and hoping and failing Chrysalis…all of it was trying to make me feel this. Exactly this. And it never worked. Not once. And here it is anyway.” He paused. “It just grew.”
Riot’s breath shuddered out of him and he pulled Cass closer—not just in an embrace.
It was like a perimeter. Something in his body permanently rearranged itself around the task of keeping Cass close, and Cass could feel it in the way Riot’s muscles settled, the way his breathing dropped into something deep and sure.
Everything felt right for once.
Outside, the wind sang through rusted blades. Two songs. Depending on who was listening.
Cass was listening to Riot’s heartbeat.
He slept.