CHAPTER FIFTEEN #3
The contact hit me like stepping off a ledge, and the dragon rose toward her with a sound in my chest that I contained only through enormous effort.
Corvin’s expression was several things simultaneously, but what stood out most was the fury as he watched my hands with a kind of cold attention that I recognized as threat assessment.
I reached down, below the hem of her braies.
There was no warning, no ceremony. I shoved my hand between her thighs and slammed two fingers inside her without preamble.
She gasped against me, but it wasn’t a gasp of pain.
And it was followed by a groan. The sound came out against my shoulder, muffled but real, the groan of a body responding before the mind had caught up, and I felt her knees buckle fractionally before I caught her, holding her upright.
The dragon stopped shouting. And in that silence, I felt the animal satisfaction of the thing inside me, vast, wordless, and terrible. I hated it because it wasn’t only the dragon’s reaction, but it was mine. That was the part I refused to examine closely.
She was wet; fuck, she was dripping wet. And she was so tight. I pressed deeper, feeling the way her body clenched against the intrusion of my fingers. Her breath came apart in short increments.
I looked at Corvin over the top of her head, and he looked back at me with eyes that had gone flat, still, and dangerous. There was something in that gaze I recognized, a reflection of what I’d become, perhaps. A recognition of the line I was crossing. Had already crossed.
But it was the dragon’s reaction that pulled me away from her. The creature’s satisfaction felt like a low, rolling purr of pleasure that moved through my chest. It was approving, savoring the feel of her wrapped around my fingers. It wanted more. It wanted me to fuck her, and I wanted to fuck her.
That realization leveled me with a hatred so visceral I tasted copper. I hadn’t come here to appease the dragon. I’d come here to teach it a fucking lesson, and that fucking lesson had backfired on me.
I thrust her away from me. The movement was violent, uncontrolled, and I watched her stumble forward with enough force that she would have hit the floor if Corvin hadn’t moved.
His reflexes were instantaneous; he caught her against his chest, steadying her even as his eyes stayed locked on mine, measuring, calculating, deciding whether I’d completely lost my fucking mind or if there was still something of the man he’d once known buried beneath the monster.
His hands were steady. But that was Corvin. Always had been.
“Fuck her,” I demanded, still panting as I moved to the far end of the cell where I could still watch them, but I wouldn’t be tempted to interfere again. I wrapped both my hands around the bars behind me, forcing them to remain there.
The dragon began to roar again, and the pain in my head was as sharp as a sword’s blade slamming through my ears. I did my best to ignore it.
Corvin untied his braies and pushed them down his legs.
Then he stepped out of them and stood there with his hands at his sides, his chest still, and his jaw tight.
He was hard, visibly aching, his cock heavy and flushed, but his eyes hadn’t left my face, and neither had the anger within them.
His expression was one that promised revenge, promised retribution.
And that was when I realized I’d forced him into doing the one thing for which he’d never forgive me because it involved her.
Neither of us spoke, and the silence in the cell was the loudest thing I’d ever heard.
“Bend her over and fuck her. Now.”
The dragon hit me like a battering ram.
Not a surge. Not a pulse. A full-blown impact that drove me back a step and put my shoulders against the bars hard enough that I felt it in my teeth. My hands went to my head automatically, pressing against my temples as though I could physically contain what was happening inside my skull.
OURS, it screamed, but the word wasn’t a word any longer. It was a frequency, something that lived below language in the part of the brain that predates speech, that predates thought, that predates everything except hunger. OURS. STOP THIS. STOP THIS NOW. SHE IS—
—I’m in charge.
YOU ARE NOT IN CHARGE! YOU ARE NOTHING! WE ARE—
—I am the fucking king!
YOU ARE FLESH! WE ARE FIRE! WE WILL—
My vision doubled. The torchlight split into two and then bled back together, and I pressed the heels of my hands harder against my eyes until the pressure was the only sensation I could locate. My knees wanted to buckle, but I didn’t let them.
“Fuck her!” I growled.
The dragon’s answer came as heat, the kind that moved through blood, sinew, and made my hands shake where I pressed them against my skull. It had never pushed this hard before. Not even the night I’d first taken it.
GET HIS HANDS OFF HER!
The creature’s voice dropped from a roar into something quieter that was somehow even more terrible. I lowered my own hands and forced my eyes open.
They were still there, because of course they were. There was nowhere to go.
Corvin had her bent at the waist in front of him, one hand braced on her hip and the other working between her thighs.
His fingers moved with the particular care of a man who had decided that if this was happening, then it was happening on his terms and nobody else’s.
The care of it was worse than the intimacy.
He’s preparing her. The thought arrived cold, flat, and accurate: he was working her open, making sure she could take him.
My eyes traveled down.
I’d seen Corvin naked on enough campaigns, enough mornings after enough battles to know what he was working with.
But seeing it now, in this context, was something different entirely.
He was large: thick, heavy, and already flushed.
Watching him work his fingers inside her with that same unhurried patience made something in my chest feel like it was being pulled apart at the seams.
She had her palms flat on the stone of the cell wall, and her head was dropped forward, hair falling in a curtain around her face. Each time his fingers pressed deeper, her breath fractured audibly in the silence, and a moan released from her mouth. She was obviously enjoying it, enjoying him.
STOP HIM, the dragon demanded. STOP HIM. NOW. PULL HER AWAY. TAKE WHAT IS—
“Stop your fucking fussing,” I said, my voice coming out breathy and pained. “Slam into her.”
Corvin’s jaw tightened as he looked at me over her spine with eyes gone cold. I held his gaze until he looked away. And when he did, he positioned himself and held the head of his cock to her cunt.
Then he pressed forward slowly because he was being kind to her. That was the thing that split me. He pushed into her with the steady, controlled deliberateness of a man who gave a damn, and she—
She fucking moaned, and she moaned loudly.
The sound came out of her completely unguarded: low, long, and broken, the sound of something that had been held back finally given permission to exist, and it moved through the cell and landed somewhere inside my chest.
The dragon didn’t scream. It went silent, and in the absence of its noise, I heard her.
Just her. The catch of her breath as Corvin pressed his cock deeper.
The soft involuntary sounds she made as her body accommodated him, her hips shifting, adjusting, tilting back toward him in the instinctive way of a body seeking more.
It could have been me. I could have been the one fucking her. I could have been the one feeling that slick cunt wrapped around my cock.
The thoughts weren’t even the dragon’s; they were mine.
I pressed my back harder against the bars. My hands were shaking, and in response, I curled them into fists at my sides. Then I held them there and breathed. Or tried to.
Corvin pushed all the way into her. I watched it happen, watched his hips meet the curve of her backside, watched his chest drop, watched both of his hands come up to grip her shoulders, fingers digging into the pale skin there, anchoring her.
His head dropped forward for just a moment.
One exhale with the involuntary concession of a man overwhelmed by what he was feeling.
Then he started moving, thrusting inside her with the kind of rhythm that builds rather than spends itself.
She came apart immediately. Both hands slid against the wall as her head dropped lower and her hair fell further forward.
She was moaning beneath him, continuous and helpless-sounding, as her hips moved back to meet him.
To meet him. She moved toward him. That was what got into me and stayed there. The voluntary motion of it. The choice of it. Her body choosing him, reaching toward him, wanting more of what he was giving her with the same instinctive honesty as breathing.
SHE SHOULD DO THAT FOR US. THOSE SOUNDS ARE OURS. THAT BODY IS OURS. THAT IS—
I straightened against the wall.
—No.
She should be beneath US, not—
—No.
Those sounds should come from OUR—
—Shut up, I thought, and the thought was barely coherent because she moaned again, louder this time, the sound pitched higher and more fractured, as Corvin drove deeper, and the dragon lurched in my chest like something that had slipped its chain.
My own cock was throbbing painfully against my braies, and it was all I could do to keep my hands away from it.
Because I knew the second I touched it, the need I had for her would be so overwhelming I wouldn’t be able to stop myself.
So I put both hands back against the bars behind me and gripped them until my fingers ached.
The pain helped, slightly and barely.
She was gripping the wall in front of her while he fucked her relentlessly, gripping her shoulders as he pulled out and thrust back in again.
And his cock was covered with her juice, glistening with it.
Corvin’s hips had found an even harder rhythm now, less measured, the deliberate control of earlier giving way to something more honest.
And the sounds in the cell were all breath, skin, and the wet percussion of two bodies in the act of destroying each other in the best possible way, and it was all I could do to—
The dragon surged.