Chapter 30 #2
I slipped into the water with hardly a splash and gathered her in my arms. This.
This was what home felt like, what it would feel like when I reclaimed my place in the Borderlands, when I slept again in my chamber, in my bed in the Borg, Tamsyn beside me.
It was the antithesis of my life for the last year.
In her arms I felt … rescued. Whole again. “I said I would come back.”
“Can you blame me for wondering?” Her smile dimmed a bit, and it was my turn to frown. “You looked so angry. Angry with me.”
“I was angry … I am,” I admitted, sliding a palm against the side of her face and holding it there. “But not at you.” I felt a stab of guilt that I had made her feel that way.
Regret lived in me. It had chased me through the last year—at least in my waking moments, before I’d descended into the void and the misty fog had turned on me—before my magic, with nowhere else to go, had turned inward and begun to devour me.
In the absence of air, I had breathed in the sour, fetid taste, inhaling regret right along with my thirst for revenge.
I should have never trusted my newfound brother.
I thought I knew what I was doing—that I was warrior enough, that my experience as the Beast of the Borderlands equipped me to handle anything and I could just slide into the Crags and the pride as easily as any other dangerous and precarious situation.
If I’d been wiser and more discerning, the Borderlands would not be suffering the Terror right now.
I had to live with that. That guilt was mine alone.
“I was wrong,” I said.
She blinked spiky wet lashes, her arms circling my shoulders, hands moving, brushing, smoothing over my skin, as though she could not help herself. As though she had to feel me, touch me, pet me like something treasured. “You couldn’t have known.”
“I left you … and—” I blew out a curse and claimed her lips as though kissing her would make everything right.
Buoyed in the water, she wrapped her legs around me. We moved in slow languorous circles in the pool.
It was an easy matter to dip my fingers between us and find her, ready and eager—to trace her, to slide inside her slippery flesh. Her inner muscles clamped tightly around my fingers, her thighs tightening around my hand.
She dropped her face into my neck, clinging tightly, moaning and panting as I fucked her with my hand. First one finger. Then two. I curled them inside her, stroking deep, setting a relentless tempo, watching her face as rapture took her.
She worked herself against the thrust of my fingers, dropping her head and sucking on the pulse point at my throat as she chased her pleasure and claimed it, clenching, seizing hard all around me.
Only as she came apart, ripples shuddering throughout her body, eddying into me, did I slip my fingers free from her and replace them with my cock.
Seated fully and gloriously inside her, I moved, stroking into her again and again until she was wound up once more, her body tossing and arching …
We operated as one, maneuvering together, our flesh pushing and pulling, straining toward that sweet release, water sloshing all around us as I let myself go, as I released my anger in the carnal act.
Her body hummed and vibrated against me, the hot clench of her sex clamping around me. We came hard and fast together. I gripped her shoulders, holding tight as we both flew apart simultaneously, brilliantly bound, linked. Her shattering release was mine and vice versa.
Gasping, I backed her against the pool’s edge, both of us relaxed, limp and boneless. Turning, still holding her tightly against my side, I draped an arm along the lip of the pool and wrapped another arm around her waist, keeping her close.
We were quiet for several moments, content and satiated in the aftermath, the only sounds that of our heaving breaths and the gentle lap of water.
Once my breathing had evened, I finally said, “Tell me you’ve been treated well.
” My fingers drew small circles over her silken shoulder. “Tell me you weren’t harmed.”
There had been times, in the early days before the void, trapped in my tomb, when I had sensed her suffering, and it had only added to my own.
Her pain. Mine. It was a confusing jumble.
Often indistinguishable. But the sticking point?
The thing that crushed me even now? I had not been there for her.
Not only had I been powerless and unable to help myself, but I had been unable to help Tamsyn and I would carry that failure with me as deep as any wound—forever.
Protecting her had been the one thing I vowed to her following our wedding and bedding, during the crossing when we had both been such different people, warily circling each other as strangers do … forced together, drawn together, not knowing yet who we would be to each other.
She held motionless, not moving a breath for a long moment before nodding. “I have no complaints. They treated me … fine. They indoctrinated me, schooling me on all things related to dragonkind. It was … useful. I was fed and clothed and they trained me as though I was one of them.”
Fine.
I nodded slowly, mulling over that word as I rolled my head against the lip of the pool to stare at her through tendrils of steam. “That is good,” I said carefully. “You can teach me all you learned.” I smiled at her even as I had a flash of doubt.
My brother may have betrayed me, but apparently she had been safe and well cared for with him. As much as it pained me to admit it, perhaps the pride had been the best place for her all these months. Clearly, Penterra would have been less than right for her with the fucking Terror at the helm.
An uncomfortable thought entered my head.
Perhaps I was doing her an unfairness by taking her away, by bringing her back where the one who sought to destroy her held sway. Did she even want to go with me or was I making an assumption on her behalf?
Who was I kidding? I gazed at her, mesmerized by the droplets of water trailing her collarbone, dancing down her chest to meet the steaming water. I was never letting her go. And Stig would not be long for this world. She would be safe because I was going to fucking end him.
A knot of unease gathered in my throat as a vague memory struck me, intruding on my revenge fantasy. Just a whispery-soft echo of a feeling, a sense of something I’d felt from her when I was trapped underground. Tamsyn … with another. Tamsyn wanting another. Tamsyn forming a bond with someone else.
As repellent as the idea was, I realized she had thought me lost. Forever gone. I could not expect her to have waited for me. Not after so long.
She nodded jerkily. “Well. How about I share one lesson I learned with you right now? Perhaps the most significant thing I have discovered? If you are keen to hear it.”
“Of course.” I offered her a smile. “Enlighten me.”
She inhaled, the cords of her throat working.
“The pride is not for me. I cannot spend the rest of my life living among them. My home is in Penterra, helping the people there. Helping humans, which, I realize, is a serious transgression to dragonkind. And that is not to say I reject my dragon. Or that I don’t want to help dragonkind, too.
I just think I can help both humans and dragons best in Penterra. ”
I nodded slowly, thinking about that, turning it over in my head.
“So let’s do that then. It is settled. You come back with me.
” As I had hoped for all along. “We will oust Stig and reclaim our home together.” I brushed a hand along her shoulder idly, letting the caress slide to dip down her back in a leisurely stroke.
My fingers met raised, bumpy flesh—and that was … different. New.
She stilled beneath the touch.
I stilled, too, slow dread slithering through me.
“Tamsyn?” I whispered, and then I was up and moving, turning her over in my arms to look, to see for myself.
Her back was a nightmare. A landscape of pain. Suffering etched into every crisscrossed scar. Someone had whipped her, leaving her skin beyond recognition—just a sea of pink ridges and valleys. There must have been so much blood. It was a shock she had survived such abuse.
My lips worked, trying to get out the words, trying to communicate the horror and anguish I felt staring at the proof of her own pain.
“Who did this to you?”
She trembled beneath the shaking graze of my fingers and tried to move, shrinking away from me. “Fell, no … I know it’s ugly.”
I turned her to face me, holding her shoulders tightly in my grasp, my voice a hoarse torment. “Nothing about you is ugly. Do you understand me? You can never be ugly. You are fire and light and all that is beauty. And I am yours and you are mine.”
She nodded jerkily, eyes wide on my face.
“Now, who did this to you?” I pressed. I would have the name of the one I would delight in killing in slow, agonizing degrees. No quick end for him. He did not deserve that.
The sight of her pain destroyed me. It wrecked me to know that while I had been suffering, so had she.
They treated me fine. Apparently she had not been so fine in the care of the pride, after all. That was one fat euphemism if the condition of her back was any indication.
“Was this Vetr? Did my brother do this to you?”
Her eyes widened, and she shook her head wildly. “No. No! Vetr would never hurt me! He would never do such a thing. He’s not like that.”
And in her voice, in her loud insistence and defense of Vetr … I heard something else. Something that gave me pause, that sent a cold trickle down my spine.
Her voice lowered, speaking more calmly. “You recall that I mentioned I had seen Stig.”
I tensed, nodding.
“Stig did this. He wanted me to confess. To show my dragon so everyone would believe him.”
I held myself tight, hands clenched as she told me about the rekon and what had happened when they went south. “So no,” she finished. “Your brother did not do this to me.”