Cybele
Zareth finds us a safe place the way he finds everything: instinctively, without explanation, moving through the underground dark like it belongs to him.
I drop the satchel of ancient records against the far wall and finally let myself feel how badly everything hurts.
"You're bleeding through your armor. Sit." I say.
He obeys.
I work the buckles of his chest plate loose and try not to react when I see the damage underneath.
Three deep gashes across his ribs, already knitting at the edges.
I press a cloth to the worst of it and clean the dried blood away in slow, deliberate strokes.
He doesn't flinch. He just watches me with those luminous crimson eyes and that absolute predatory stillness.
We might not survive the morning. The thought surfaces again, quiet and certain. Dark elves above. Half the Vrakken council below. Nowhere left to run.
"You've been quiet," I say.
He doesn’t reply. I know why.
I set the cloth aside. "The warriors you lost tonight weren't your fault Zareth."
His temple ticks. He says nothing. Which means I'm right, and he'd rather swallow the guilt whole than hand it to me.
I want to take it from him. I want to reach into that enormous, ancient chest and pull the grief out with my hands.
Then I make my decision, slide off the stone and kneel between his legs.
His entire body goes very still. His eyes track me, unblinking, glowing brighter at the pupils.
I hold his gaze and slide both hands up his thighs, deliberately, watching his face the entire time. His muscle twitches under my palms through the fabric.
"What are you doing," he says. It isn't a question. His voice has dropped to something low and scraping, like stone on stone.
"Helping you relax." I reach his waistband and find the cord of his loin cloth with easy fingers. I know exactly what I'm doing.
I hold his eyes as I work him free, and the sound that leaves him when cool air hits his skin is between an exhale and a curse. He's already hard, thickening, heavy, the length of him darkening at the tip and I sense the Blood Bond flare in my sternum when my fingers curl around him.
He's enormous.
I part my lips and look up at him, mouth open, expression shamelessly hungry, watch his nostrils flare, eyes lit like coals dropping to my mouth.
His hand slides into my hair. Slowly gripping. His thumb presses against my temple with devastating gentleness for a man who just killed a dozen elven soldiers with his bare hands.
He holds me there, not pushing nor pulling. Stopping me. A fraction from what I want.
He's fighting himself. I can feel it through the Bond, his want crashing against the restraint, enormous and barely contained.
I drag my tongue slowly across my bottom lip. His grip tightens in my hair. His breath comes out jagged and he lets go. I take him into my mouth, keeping my eyes on his face.
I want to see every second of it. His expression as I take the broad head of him past my lips, the way his chest expands on a rough inhale, the way his free hand grips the stone beside him hard enough that I hear it crack.
I work my way down slowly, hollowing my cheeks, keeping the suction tight and deliberate, watching his eyes glaze at the edges, that eerie crimson glow brightening and dimming like embers catching.
When I take him fully, when my nose presses into the flat of his stomach and his tip finds the back of my throat and I swallow around him, My eyes fall shut and I moan.
He breathes out a sharp, ragged exhale, his whole body shuddering once from the base of him upward, his hand fisting in my hair without pulling, like he needs something to hold onto or he'll come apart at the seams.
I suck my cheeks in and constrict around him, tight and wet and airless, feel his thighs tense on either side of me.
I start to move.
Slow pulls up, dragging every inch of him back through my lips before pushing back down.
My breath ghosts against his stomach. His grip in my hair tightens and loosens in rhythm like he can't decide whether to control the pace or surrender to it.
I make the decision for him. I set a rhythm, measured and relentless, and let him feel everything.
The wet heat of my mouth. The soft scrape of my teeth along his length, conscious and calculated, feeling him pulse and throb with every graze, pre-cum bitter-salt on my tongue.
"Cybele." My name in his mouth sounds wrecked. Barely recognizable.
I pull back just enough to look up at him, lips stretched, eyes heavy-lidded and completely unashamed.
"This is to help you relax," I tell him, voice hoarse, breath warm against his slick length.
He stares at me. His chest is heaving. He looks undone. This ancient, terrifying, immovable man, and I've done it with my mouth alone.
"You—" He stops. Swallows. "Relax?"
"It's working, isn't it?"
He lets out a half-growl, half-disbelieving exhale, and his hand tightens in my hair and then I'm being pulled up and off him in one fluid, irresistible motion.
I land in his lap with a gasp, my legs straddling him. Before I can react, his hands find the waist of my trousers and the laugh turns into a sharp gasp as he tears them. Purposefully. Like my clothing is an obstacle he has simply decided no longer exists.
Cool air hits my bare skin and then his hand does.
He runs the length of himself between my legs, thick and hard and impossibly warm now, pressing against my folds in a slow, rolling grind that has me biting down on a moan. He finds my nub with the base of his length and presses, a slow, pulsing massage, and my hands fly to his shoulders.
"Zareth—"
"Getting me relaxed turns you on." He says it low, almost to himself. Like data he's collecting.
"It—" I gasp as he rolls his hips again, the drag of him slick and devastating against my center. I reach between us, wrapping my hand around him, feeling him pulse and throb, enormous and ready as I guide him to where I want him. "Stop talking."
I grip his shoulder. I sink down.
The moment he slides in, one long, devastating arc, filling me completely in a single relentless movement, the Blood Bond rumbles between us.
A physical force, a current, something that fires through every nerve ending I possess simultaneously, and I hear myself cry out and feel him shudder beneath me. A full-body tremor moving through that vast, ancient frame like a fault line shifting.
I sit there for a moment, impaled, adjusting, feeling every inch of him throbbing and alive deep in my core.
I am full in a way that presses the breath from my lungs, and the Bond is singing in my chest, a thrumming, live-wire connection pouring his hunger and his protectiveness and his staggering, barely-leashed need directly into my skin.
I feel him, his relief, his desperation. The thing he won't say with words.
I push up. I slam back down, making a wet slap sound.
His breath leaves him in a sharp exhale. His hands slide beneath the hem of my top and find my breasts, warm, kneading, his thumbs rolling my nipples with devastating precision. I whimper and come back for more.
I find a rhythm. Hard and deep and relentless, each downward slide taking him to my absolute limit, his full girth stretching me open and pulsing there, alive, before I drag back up and do it again.
His mouth drops to my neck. He sucks at the skin over my pulse, possessive, his tongue flat and hungry. A helpless cry tears out of me.
"Don't stop," I manage, my voice already ruined.
He doesn't.
He pulls off my top, then his mouth drops to my breasts, sucking one nipple between his lips and pulling hard while his hips begin working beneath me, matching my rhythm and amplifying it, driving up to meet each descent with a precision that makes my vision strobe white at the edges.
I ride him. He meets me. The sound of us together fills the ancient ruin; skin on skin, the obscene wet slide of him in and out of me, my broken moaning that I've completely stopped trying to muffle.
His mouth travels back to my neck. His fangs graze the skin. A ghost of pressure. Then he's nipping there, lapping at the tiny beads of blood that rise to the surface, and the sensation fires directly down my spine and I tighten around him involuntarily.
He growls, low, vibrating, felt everywhere we're connected. His hands drop to my hips, gripping hard enough to bruise as he wrenches my pace faster, harder, my breasts bouncing with every driving thrust, his mouth leaving fire everywhere it lands.
"Zareth—" His name comes out in pieces.
His grip on my backside tightens, a fierce, possessive hold, fingers digging in, and he drives up into me once, twice, with a ruthless focus that obliterates whatever coherence I had left.
My hands find his hair. I wrench his face up and crush my mouth to his — I need to taste him, I need—
Our lips collide simultaneously, tongue against tongue, and his hands keep moving my hips against him, relentless, and the climax hits me from every direction at once.
Blinding. White and total and seismic, ripping through me from the inside out, my whole body locking and shaking around him, a cry swallowed into his mouth as the pleasure crests and crashes and keeps crashing.
He follows me over.
I feel it through the Bond before I feel it physically, waves of sensation not entirely my own crashing through our shared connection.
Then he spills into me in deep, shuddering pulses, his hips stuttering, a low broken sound vibrating against my lips as he fills me completely, liquid heat in waves, his length still buried and twitching inside me.
We break apart gasping. Neither of us moves.
His forehead drops to mine, breath coming in ragged pulls. My fingers are still fisted in his hair, trembling slightly with the aftershocks rolling through me. He softens inside me, but neither of us pulls away.
"I want this." I say, "More of this. More of us.
" I pull back just enough to look at his face.
"But that doesn't mean the world stops existing outside this ruin.
It doesn't mean Malachar stops existing, or the Wildspont, or your people running out of time.
"I'm not asking you to choose between me and them.
I'm asking you to stop acting like those are the only two options. "
"You're using the fact that I can't think clearly around you," he says. His voice is raw-edged.
"I'm using the fact that you can think clearly. You always could. You were just afraid of what thinking clearly would require."
His hands move to my waist. Settle there, steady and warm against my bare skin.
"Both worlds?" he says.
"Both worlds."