11. Cassia #4
"Harder," I pull at his horns again, and the full-body shudder that rips through him translates directly into the force of his next thrust, slamming me up the wall hard enough to scatter concrete dust from the ceiling. "Yes, like that?—"
The impact jolts through my bruised shoulder, and I hiss, pain flaring bright and sharp before his mouth finds the spot and soothes it with a heat that melts the ache into a dull hum.
His own wounds seep into the gauze I taped to his flank minutes ago, dark stains spreading with each thrust, and we refuse to break our rhythm for anything.
He obeys, and his pace builds, each stroke more aggressive, more possessive, his hands leaving the wall to grip my hips and control the angle until the thrusts drag the base of his cock across my clit with devastating precision.
The pleasure coils tight and mean in my core, winding tighter with each impact, and his mouth finds my throat, my collarbone, and the space behind my ear where he bites down hard enough to make me scream.
"Stay with me." He snarls it against my skin, half command and half plea, each word punctuated by a thrust that drives me higher up the wall. "Right here, Cassia—stay with me?—"
"I'm here," I gasp, fingers on his horns, my entire body shaking with the force of what's building inside me. "I'm right here, I'm?—"
Shifting me off the wall, one arm hooks beneath my hips to hold me aloft like I'm weightless before dropping us both to the floor—he on his back, wings spread across the cold concrete, and I astride him, my thighs bracketing his hips.
The new position drives him deeper, gravity pulling me down onto the full length of him, and the sound I make is somewhere between a sob and a scream.
"Ride me." His hands grip my thighs, spreading my knees wider, his claws dimpling my skin. His eyes blaze up at me from below, possessive, awed, and absolutely filthy with need. "I want to watch my cock ruin you, Cassia. Grind down on it. Show me how good it feels."
Planting my palms against the markings on his broad chest, the same ones I traced earlier, the ones that carry his history, his violence, and his sacred oaths, I roll my hips.
The drag of him inside me at this angle is obscene, his ridges catching and releasing, his thickness stretching me open until pleasure and pressure blur into a single overwhelming sensation.
His hands slide up my thighs to my waist, fingers spanning my ribs, guiding my movements with a firm, insistent hold that lets me set the pace while making it clear he could take over at any second.
I ride him with everything I have. Hips grinding, rolling, lifting, and sinking in a cadence that makes his head fall back against the concrete and his fangs bare to the ceiling.
His hands roam my breasts, my stomach, my neck, my thighs, and the place where we're joined, his thumb finding my clit with an accuracy that makes me cry out and grind down harder.
The ceremonial blotches on my palms pulse with heat, and his eyes—devouring my face, on my body, on the place where he disappears inside me—burn brighter than anything I've seen him produce in combat.
"I'm close," I gasp, and the admission makes his hands tighten on my hips, his own thrusts driving up to meet mine with an urgency that borders on frantic. "Rhykor—I'm?—"
He surges upright, lifting me as he sits up so we're chest to chest, his arms wrapping around my back, his mouth finding mine in a kiss that's more breathing than contact. "I've got you. You can let go."
The orgasm tears through me like a detonation.
It's a white-hot cascade that starts where his body meets mine and expands outward in a blinding rush, and the only thing anchoring me to the physical world is his arms around my back, his mouth against my throat, and the resounding heat of him still driving into me through the waves.
He follows me over the edge three thrusts later with a roar that reverberates off the walls in the maintenance room, his hips slamming upward, his arms crushing me against him, his body pouring heat into mine from the points of contact.
I feel the hot, pulsing rush of his release flooding me entirely.
If this were a human partner, I would be screaming about the risks of unprotected exposure—but our vast chromosomal divergence makes cross-species reproduction biologically impossible, making this perfectly safe.
The air around us shimmers and the emergency light flickers, and I know the exact moment his self-control dissolves completely.
His wings snap open, struggling against the tight confines of the room, slamming onto the closet walls and floor as they wrap around our tangled forms in a cocoon of membrane and trembling muscle.
We stay tangled together on the floor of the maintenance room, breathing hard as his wings arc over us, forming a private shelter.
His heartbeat is a frantic drum rattling my own, so perfectly synchronized that I can no longer tell where his pulse ends and mine begins.
His arms stay around my back, one hand cradling the base of my skull, his claws gentle against my scalp.
The heat he radiates soaks into my muscles, my bones, and my bloodstream until the boundary between where he ends and I begin dissolves.
He brushes his mouth against my hair. The sound he makes is deep and wordless and shattered, a devastating submission, coming from a place beyond language, from wherever inside him the word please lived on the observation deck.
"Cassia," he breathes my name against my temple, and each letter hits with the permanence of an oath.
His embrace shifts, his wings drawing inward to shield me, as an unnamed, enormous devotion settles into the hollow spaces inside my chest with a permanent weight.
Whatever this is, it's older and bigger than we are, and it rearranges a fundamental feature inside me that will never go back to the shape it was before.
Curling my fingers against the ceremonial marking over his heart, I close my eyes.
I know what this means. What happened in this room will never fit inside any category I could build to contain it, whether that be adrenaline, proximity, or a mistake made under pressure.
Every careful line I drew to keep us apart—medic and patient, human and Kraaj, bridging caution with catastrophe—is ash now.
Burned through by his hands and my voice saying I'm here like it was the truest thing I've ever spoken.
I should be terrified.
Instead, I lean closer, listen to his heartbeat reorganizing itself around mine, and breathe.
Whatever comes next, the district, the war, the machines, the politics, the centuries of hatred between our species—whatever comes next, it finds us here first together.
On the floor of an abandoned maintenance room deep in a dying transit station, wrapped in wings that have shielded me from collapsing tunnels along with savage machines, protecting me from the worst this world has thrown at us.
"We can't take this back," I whisper against his sternum.
His arms tighten as he leaves a peck on my forehead, warm, steadfast, impossibly tender from a man built for destruction.
"I want to keep it." The confession rumbles through his chest and into mine, settling warm against my bones. "Tonight, tomorrow, and every day after."
Closing my eyes allows the heat to carry me under.
We'll deal with the consequences when the sun comes up.
Tonight, I burn with him.