CHAPTER NINETEEN | Dalk
Fiona on her knees between my legs, her sweetness still fresh on my tongues and my cock in her immeasurably perfect mouth, was like something from a dream. Something so beautiful I could not have even dared imagine it on my own. Her skin glowed in the firelight, her slender back arching, hips up and head down as she took half my cock into her mouth and sucked.
Tension swept through me, involuntary and inevitable, my muscles locking up tight in reaction to this exquisite, hot-suck sensation. My gaze grew hooded and heavy, but I would not allow my eyes to close. Not now. Not when I finally had her like this.
“Have you ever done this before?” she asked against the underside of my cock, her moving lips and the stirring of her breath sending a spiral of pleasure from spine to groin.
“No.” I gasped when she let her eyes flutter closed and then drew her little pink tongue in a languorous line all the way up my shaft. And then back down again, down to suckle first one cock spear, then the other, and then the testicles below. My body strained, my cock seeping endlessly for her as she finally returned the attentions of her mouth to my shaft.
I groaned, groaned like a man who’d been on a very long journey and who’d finally come home, when she sucked my tip into her mouth once more.
She seemed to abandon her slow explorations then. Taking up a firm, fantastically merciless rhythm, she sucked up and down my length at the same time that she jerked the rest of the shaft with her hand. Her fingers could not get all the way around me, but her grip was stronger than I’d expected, and any chance I’d had at lasting, at savouring this moment, dissolved.
My claws found their way to her face, her hair. I cradled her head as my hips began to move of their own accord. She stilled, keeping her hand tight and her mouth open around me, as I began to slowly, shakily, rut into her mouth. The effort it took not to grasp her head and thrust back into her throat as hard as possible, as hard as my body craved to, was enormous. But I was a strong warrior — one of Gahn Fallo’s finest — and I was champion of the vaklok combat.
I could do it.
And looking down at her beautiful, trusting face, it suddenly was not difficult at all. A heady feeling, the feeling that I was looking at and touching the most precious thing I would ever encounter in my life, made a breathless sort of ache open up in me at the same moment that pleasure coiled brilliant and bright in my groin. With Fiona naked and taking me, climax closing in on me, suddenly all the words that had always been so hard to say poured out of me like blood from a wound.
“I want to keep you,” I murmured unsteadily, pumping into her mouth. “I want to mate you, not just once but every day. Every night.”
Fiona’s eyes got bigger. Brighter. Shiny, as if with more tears. But maybe not, because none fell.
“I want to share my tent with you,” I went on because I found I could not stop now. “Or even a cave, if that is what you want. I would live in a putrid pool of water with you if only you would have me. But it has to be with you, Fiona.”
This was the heart of it. This was the hard and urgent truth. The inescapable centre of my life. “I have to be with you.”
Her eyes, so huge a moment ago, scrunched shut, like she could no longer bear to look up at me. But she did not pull away, did not pull off from my cock. If anything, her grip only got stronger, the suction of her slippery, silken mouth tighter, until there was nothing I could do, no more words that I could speak into the air, nothing left except skull-smashing, spine-rending pleasure ripping out of me with the force of a fighting man. My entire body contracted, as if with excruciating pain, but it was not pain. It was a sort of ecstatic reverence. I watched myself come into Fiona’s pink human mouth and I revered her.
I did not know what she would do next, but she remained in place far longer than I expected. She allowed me to spew what felt like endlessly into her. I moaned, hips spasming, when I both felt and saw the contraction of her throat as she swallowed. Swallowed my seed. On the face of it, such a thing sounded disgusting. But actually experiencing it was so erotic it made my claws curl and my heart feel swollen and heavy as it beat.
Eventually, though, she had to release me. Probably a good idea. It appeared as though, as long as her mouth was on me, then I would not stop coming. And now there seemed some slim but growing possibility that I actually might drown her. My organ throbbed, my cock spears shuddering as another weak spray of seed erupted when she pulled her mouth away. Her mouth and her chin and her hand glistened.
I should have been basking in the enormously powerful afterglow of such an encounter, but I could tell as Fiona straightened up that something was wrong. For such an expressive human, her face was curiously solemn. She avoided my gaze as she slid off the bed and hurried over to the little nook in her cave. The sound of water splashed into the room, an unwelcome cacophony, and it was as if someone had dumped that insufferable water directly down my spine. The thing Fiona had said before came suddenly back to me, an apt phrase. The moment is ruined.
She had smiled when she had said it then. But she was not smiling now as she came back out into the main cave.
Something was definitely wrong, and even in that wrongness she was heart-killingly beautiful. I stared, unable to speak as she moved naked through the room, all smooth skin and ink, artistry and pain.
And then the pain was mine, catching beneath my lungs like a lodged spear, when she quickly dressed herself. She came back to me then, but she did not touch me. Instead she sat on the edge of the bed and looked down at her still-bare feet.
“Dalk,” she said quietly. “What you said just now... When you said you wanted to mate me. Does that mean you want to have sex with me? Or does that mean you want me as your mate mate? Like, in a permanent way?”
“It meant both,” I told her, surprised she had not understood my meaning. But she was not of this world. Her customs were different. “When I said I wanted to share my tent with you, I meant as my mate. And I meant it forever.”
Though it was truth, apparently that was not the right answer, because she stiffened, her hands drawing into tiny fists on her thighs.
“This makes you unhappy,” I observed out loud slowly, internally berating myself for making some unseen mistake with her. I had not told her anything but what was in my heart.
But she did not seem to want that.
“No, it’s not that. In fact, that’s just the thing,” she said, finally turning her face towards me. “It made me extremely fucking happy when you said it. And then I got scared.”
“Scared of what?” I asked, cupping that astonishing face in my hands, unable to keep myself from touching her any longer.
“I’m scared,” she whispered, “of what will happen if we’re not meant to be mates.”
“We are.” I said it firmly and decisively, leaving no room for argument.
But this was Fiona. And she always found room to argue.
She yanked herself out of my grip and stood, pacing the floor of the cave while I watched her.
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” she said, and it sounded more like she said it to herself than to me. “Well, no, I do know what I was thinking. I was thinking that I like you so much, care about you, maybe even... But what the hell am I gonna do if you get bonded to someone else?”
That question was no doubt aimed at me. She ceased her pacing to face me.
“When you talked about mates and sharing tents and forever,” she said, her eyes looking wet-bright again. “It sounded so good, Dalk. But what if that isn’t what’s actually going to happen? What if you get bonded to somebody else?”
“I won’t,” I said, and that too felt like truth, because any other possibility felt so wholly wrong as to never even come close to existing.
The only future that existed for me was her.
“You don’t know that!”
I got off the bed. It seemed that the naked portion of this evening had sadly ended, and now we were entering into some new terrifying round of events. So I grasped my loincloth and retied it, trying to formulate what I wanted to say, how I would convince her as I did so.
But such a thing proved impossible. Because Fiona’s next words knocked all arguments and sounds and breath right out of me.
“Maybe we shouldn’t... Shouldn’t keep doing this...”
I froze in place, turned away from her, staring into the fire but not seeing it. Turmoil scraped my insides raw and ragged. I could not soothe the feeling and I could not fight it, so I forced my body into motion, spinning back around to pin her with my sight stars.
“Yes we should,” I hissed.
“But-”
“I found you, Fiona!” I nearly roared it, and she looked startled.
That little shudder of surprised fear in her hurt me more than I could bear. I wanted to touch her so badly but I worried that would only make things worse. I forced my voice lower, quieter, though not at all calmer and continued.
“I found you and I took you from the zeelk’s killing claws and now I will keep you,” I informed her with savage certainty. “You gave me your kiss and you gave me your cunt. Do not give me a taste of you, the sweetest taste that was ever upon my tongues, only to rip it away from me now!”
“I’m not!” she cried, looking stricken. “I don’t...”
“Tell me once,” I growled, desperation clawing at me, making me feel unsteady and afraid. “Tell me once and tell me true. Do you still want me?”
“Yes!”
Strangely, I felt no relief at her admission. Only dread, which I tried to shut down the same way I tried to shut down this entire event.
“Then there is no more discussion to be had.”
“Of course there is!” she exclaimed. “We need to... To figure out what would actually happen! Seriously, Dalk. What are you going to do if you get bonded to somebody else?”
“That will not happen.”
“But you don’t know for sure! You could wake up tomorrow and get summoned and end up with a bond to, I don’t know, Tilly! Or a Sea Sand woman from your tribe!”
“I do not want any of them the way that I want you.”
How could she not see that yet?
“But you would want them that way,” she countered, “and maybe even more, if you had the mate bond awakened.”
“I seriously doubt that,” I seethed. Feeling that strongly for someone, someone other than her, was beyond the realm of comprehension.
“Alright, well, what if somebody else comes knocking claiming they got a mate vision of me?” she asked, throwing her little hands onto her hips. “What then?”
I did not reply right away. I only breathed. Breathed and smelled blood and heard the screams of that faceless man as I threw him from the height of some unsurvivable ledge. Finally, knowing she would not accept mere silence, I told her flatly, “I do not think you want my honest answer to that question.”
“Of course I do!” she snapped instantly. “I wouldn’t ask you something if I didn’t want to hear the answer. What would you do if I got a different mate?”
I hesitated, but she had asked twice now, and I would answer honestly.
“I decided some time ago,” I said slowly and very clearly, “not long after you first kissed me, that I would kill any other man who tried to claim you. Whether he’d had a mate vision of you or not.”
The colour drained from her face so rapidly it looked like her skin had been replaced with bone.
“Alright,” she said weakly, “you were right. I didn’t actually want to hear that answer.” She swallowed, as if against a rising tide of vomit, then took a steadying breath and said, “See, but this is what I’m talking about. If it’s getting to the point where one of us is going to get hurt, or if somebody else’s life might literally be in danger, I don’t...”
“You don’t what?”
“I don’t see how we can go on like this! I’m scared that we could be falling in love and it’s only going to end in tragedy!”
Her hands flew out at her sides in a gesture of helplessness. Then she closed them into fists and let them fall.
“Listen to me, Dalk,” she said quietly, her face furrowed with emotion. “What do you think would happen if you killed a man just for having a mate vision with me in it? The Vrika and the Lavrika, their word is like law! If you killed someone because of that, I don’t even want to think about what would happen to you as punishment!”
Her voice splintered, as if with great pain, when she spoke of my punishment.
“And if you got your own vision of someone else and rejected it, what then?” she went on. “You could be exiled, just like Lerokan was! Not to mention leaving that poor other woman without a mate she might be waiting for!”
“I do not care if I am exiled so long as I can take you with me.”
“Oh, come on! They’d never allow that and you know it! They barely even let a male take a female who isn’t his mate two steps out of the settlement in the Sea Sands! They’d kill you before you could even have a hope of taking me anywhere. And I don’t want to abandon my human friends. They’re all I have left of my old world.”
“You do not need anything from your old world,” I told her, my words coming out hard so that they wouldn’t come out sounding hurt. “You have me.”
“You’re the one who talks about missing his homeland,” she shot back, “and you have family there! Are you telling me you would throw that all away, never see those hills, those flowers, or your uncle again? Just for me?”
“That is exactly what I am telling you,” I answered plainly.
It would hurt, and it would no doubt be dangerous, but I would do it. I would take her out of our old lives and together, from the scars of what we’d left behind, we would build a new one.
But she was already moving further and further away from me. Literally. Taking small steps backwards and putting more space between us. But I did not need space, did not want it, and I collapsed the distance between us with ground-eating strides because perhaps if I could simply get close enough to her again then maybe she’d come back to me.
I reached for her.
But I snapped my claws closed around nothing but empty air, my back straightening. We were no longer alone. Footsteps entered the cave beyond, followed by Valeria’s voice.
“Fiona? Are you here? We’re looking for Dalk and Oxriel said he saw you two together earlier.”
I remained silent, my sight stars begging her not to speak. Not to let them know we were here. I had the helpless feeling that if she turned fully away from me now then I would never get her back.
“We’re in here,” she said.
And then she turned her back on me.
Valeria entered the cave, followed closely by Grim. She seemed slightly surprised to see us alone together in here, but she did not say anything about it.
She nodded at Fiona then turned her attention to me.
“Dalk,” she said brusquely, “I’ve had a message from Chapman and Fallo back at the settlement.” She spoke as she usually did, quickly and efficiently, but there was a grimness to her tone and a probing sadness in her eyes that made my guts heavy with sudden dread. This would be so much easier if Fiona were beside me... She had turned around to face me again, but she did not move closer.
“What is it?” I snapped, claws flexing and tail thrashing with impatience.
“It’s your uncle. Taraken,” Valeria replied gravely.
I stilled.
She did not need to tell me the rest of it. The way a man knows he will fall the moment before his foot lands wrong, I knew. I knew it so suddenly and with such certainty that when Valeria finally did say it, her voice trailed ever so slightly behind the one inside my own head.
“He’s dying.”