Zareth
The argument still crackles between us when something shifts in Cybele. Her amber eyes drop to my mouth and, through the tether, want hits me hard and unguarded before she can hide it.
She knows. She feels it too and she's done pretending she doesn't.
I take a step toward her and don’t make it.
Three corrupted creatures burst through the collapsed wall to my left, leaking black ichor and moving in jerking, broken angles. The passage is barely four feet wide. No room for anything except violence done fast.
The obsidian spear is in my hand before the first clears the rubble. I drive it through its skull, rip it free, pivot into the second before it understands the first is dead.
The third lunges for Cybele. She hurls a rock into its face and it staggers. I drop the spear, catch the creature by the throat from behind, and slam it into the wall hard enough to split the skin over my elbow. I barely feel it. I hold on until it stops moving.
I drop its body unceremoniously and drag Cybele through an archway I remember by instinct alone. The sealed chamber beyond holds a stone table and a narrow cot, hidden and intact.
I slam the door shut and turn on her. The careful restraint I maintain around her is gone. “That is exactly why you should not be down here alone. If I hadn’t been there—” The careful restraint I maintain around her is gone completely.
"But you were."
"What if I hadn't been?"
The question lands between us.
Cybele sets her jaw, eyes burning, chest still rising and falling too fast.
"Why do you care if I die anyway?" Her voice is deliberately tight. "I'm just some human. Disposable. That's what your council thinks. That's what you thought four days ago. So why does it matter?"
I cross to her in two steps, and she tilts her chin up to hold my gaze, refusing to be the one to look away.
"You are not disposable." Each word drops separately. "And if you say that again I will—"
"You'll what?" She dares.
I know I should step back. She is human and she is warm and the bond is pulling so hard right now that I can feel her heartbeat like it is mine, and if I do not put distance between us I am going to—
Her hand closes around my wrist.
"Don't pull back." Her voice has changed, raw and terrifyingly honest. Her thumb presses against my pulse point.
"I don't fear you. I haven't feared you in days and I've been—I've been trying to talk myself out of this, whatever this is, because it makes no sense and it is catastrophically stupid. But…"
Her voice drops, a confession. "I don't care. I want it. I want you. All of it. Whatever this pull is between us, I want it, Zareth. With everything I have. I want it do bad and I'm done pretending I don’t—"
My restraint breaks. I kiss her.
I take her mouth the way I have been fighting not to for days, and when the taste of her bursts across my tongue, warm, copper-edged, and alive, she responds. Fusing her mouth with mine like she needs it as much as I do.
I make a sound against her lips that I do not recognize as my own.
My hands find her waist, her back, drag her against me, and she is soft, unbearably so, the generous curve of her pressed flush to every hard angle of me, her breasts against my chest and I pull her closer because closer will never be enough.
My fang catches her lower lip. The bloom of her blood on my tongue is a detonation.
The slits of my pupils stretch, pulse, the world sharpening to nothing but her taste, her scent, the tiny sharp gasp she makes before she comes back for more. I suck at her bottom lip, her tongue meeting mine, and her fingers curl into my shirt.
She breaks the kiss to breathe. "You bit me," she says, breathless, half-laughing. "You actually bit me."
"Mmmm." I mumble into the corner of her mouth, kiss and suck down her throat, breathing in the thick, heady rush of her blood just beneath the skin, the heat of her neck against my lips.
I move lower. I look up at her when my mouth reaches the swell of her chest, her face flushed and dark-eyed above me, and I take the collar of her top between my teeth and tear.
She lets out a breathy moan that should be illegal.
We end up on the cot in a tangle of buckles and urgency, her fingers working my armor clasps while I drag her leather gear off her shoulders, and we kiss in between, hands finding bare skin the moment it's exposed, the bond flaring hot every time we connect.
Her palms flat against my chest. My mouth at her collarbone.
The silk beneath her is cool; she is not.
She gets my tunic off and makes a sound that does nothing good for my restraint, wrestles with the laces of my breeches with admirable determination and absolutely no success. I watch her jaw set with concentration.
I laugh, and she blushes a deep scarlet.
"You're welcome." I reach down and deal with the laces myself, shove the breeches off, and settle over her, one arm braced by her head, the other roaming over her skin.
I take my time with her breasts. Draw one peaked nipple into my mouth, then the other, sucking at the plump, pebbled skin until she is pulling at my hair with both fists. Then I slide my palm down her stomach, over the soft curve of her hip, lower between her legs—
She parts for me like she was waiting.
Hot and silken and already drenched, wet coating my fingers the moment I find her.
The groan that leaves me is not something I choose to make. "Cybele."
She tips her head back, breathless. "Don't say my name like that if you're going to stop."
I push one finger into her and she cries out, her heels digging into the cot, spine arching off the surface and I close my eyes for a moment because the sound alone is doing things to my composure that nothing else has in a century and a half.
"More," she breathes. "Zareth — more—"
I give her more. Two fingers, then three, curling into the blazing, slick heat of her, driving them in deep, pulling back, driving in again, a slow devastating rhythm that has her rolling toward my hand on every forward plunge like she cannot stop herself.
I watch every expression that moves across her face; the parted lips, the flutter of her lashes, the way her hips chase the withdrawal like the absence of me is something she refuses to accept.
I am gone, utterly and completely gone, whatever was left of the prince in me evaporating at the sight of her undone.
She lifts her eyes to mine. The cut on her lip still gleams. "It's not enough," she says softly. "I want you."
I stop thinking.
When I push into her it is a scorching, perfect slide, heat gripping me from root to tip, her walls closing around me in a slick, tight clutch that pulls an animal moan out of me before I can think.
The blazing wetness of her swallows every inch and squeezes.
My vision goes white at the edges, and I drop my head on her shoulder and hold there, buried completely, hands fisted in the silk beneath her, breathing through the sensation threatening to unmake me entirely.
Then I pull out, almost to the edge. Thrust back in, hard, deep, and she lets out an airless, broken little exhale that dissolves into a whimper at the end.
My mind is gone. There is only the slick, clenching grip of her around me. The way she takes every thrust and tightens after, like her body is trying to keep me, and the bond blazing between us with each forward drive until I can feel her heartbeat inside my own.
Pleasure drags up my spine in long, molten pulls every time I sink into her, every time I bottom out in the blazing heat of her and feel her gasp against my neck.
I pull back to the tip, slow and deliberate, feel her walls flutter around the withdrawal, and drive back in hard, burying myself completely, and the sensation that claws up my back is devastating enough to strip thought entirely.
Her legs wrap around my hips, ankles locked, urging me deeper, faster.
I oblige, build a rhythm that has the silk twisting beneath her and her nails leaving marks I will wear gladly.
She runs hot everywhere, soft and yielding, and meets every thrust with her whole body like she was built specifically to undo me.
I feel the moment she begins to tip.
Her grip tightens. Her nails score down my back.
"Zareth—" My name breaks in her throat like a sacred call, and then she clenches around me.
A devastating, rhythmic squeeze that pulls a ragged sound out of me I cannot contain.
Her whole body shudders, hips stuttering up to meet mine as she comes apart and pulls me down with her.
My release goes through me like detonation, from the base of my spine outward, pouring into her in long, shuddering waves, branding her from the inside with everything I am.
Mine, mine, the possessive thing in me howls and for a blinding moment we are not two separate things.
We are one. The bond, raw and enormous and complete, seals between us like a wound finally closed.
I am still inside her, softening. I pull out slowly.
She makes a sound of protest, weak and breathless, limbs too heavy to do anything about it, and the loss of her heat is its own particular cruelty.
I press my mouth to the slit on her lip and lick it clean, slow and deliberate, and she makes another noise entirely.
"You have a problem," she says.
"Several." I do it again.
"Zareth."
She laughs real and unguarded and the sound settles somewhere inside me I did not know was empty. I move off her, roll to my side, and she shifts against my side, tucking herself closer to be warm enough for sleep. The thought is absurd. I let her.
We are close enough that I can see the split at her mouth, the flush still fading from her skin. The silence between us is the most comfortable thing I have felt in recent memory, which is its own quiet alarm.
"How long have you been doing it alone?" she asks softly.
"Since before I was old enough to understand what alone meant," I say, from somewhere I rarely open.
"My mother made me a prince before she made me a son.
The council made me a symbol before they made me a leader.
" I look at her. "The last three members who questioned my decisions openly were people I grew up beside.
I watched their children learn to walk. They still chose the council's fear over me.
" A pause. "Two years ago I lost eleven soldiers to Blood Rot in one season.
Couldn't get them enough supply. I kept the numbers in my head for months. I still have them."
Cybele doesn't speak. She turns slightly against me, listening quietly like what I say matters.
"My people are dying," I say flatly. "Have been dying for longer than I can calculate. And I am the last thing standing between that truth and its conclusion. I have been the last thing for a very long time."
Her eyes find mine then. Not the way she looked at me in the tunnels, charting threats and calculating escape, not through the bars of her fear searching for the monster the surface warned her about.
She gazes at me the way she looks at something real. Something worth the trouble of seeing. I do not know how to hold that. I am not sure I ever will.