12. Tovian
TOVIAN
The pass is a killing ground.
I knew it the moment we rounded the ridge and the wind died — that sudden, unnatural quiet before stone and bodies begin to fall. Tharros's scouts pour from the ledges above us like water from a cracked dam, and then there is nothing left in my skull but war.
I take the first two scouts apart before they clear the rock face.
Another one catches my shoulder with a spiked mace, grinding against the stone-thick muscle there, and the flesh there splits open beneath the blow.
It doesn't slow me. I close my fist around his wing joint and crush it, dropping him screaming into the snow, and wheel to block the next strike.
There are too many. Not so many that I can’t kill them — but enough that I can’t be everywhere at once.
I am aware of Sabine the way I am aware of my own heartbeat. She is twelve feet to my left, back pressed to the rock face, the drakestone blade in her hand slick with black gargoyle blood. She is keeping herself alive. The thought should comfort me.
It doesn't.
Stay alive. Stay behind me. Stay—
The scout drops from the ledge directly above my blind spot. I catch the movement half a second too late — wings folded tight for speed, blade angled for my exposed neck. My body is already rotating, already too slow—
Sabine moves.
She steps into the line. One clean, brutal arc. The drakestone blade goes through the attacker's throat with a sound like marshy gravel, and he folds at her feet.
The world goes white.
I stop thinking.
The remaining scouts learn quickly what it means to draw blood within reach of a bonded Alpha.
I don't count them. I don't remember their faces. I am stone and fury and centuries of grief made physical, and I don’t stop until there is nothing left standing in the pass but windblown red snow and Sabine, both hands gripping the blade, watching me with wide eyes.
The cavern is quiet when we return. The fire is up and she has already dug bandaging from the supply pack before I've fully folded my wings, because she is relentlessly practical even when her hands are shaking.
"Sit," she says.
I sit on the stone bench and say nothing while she moves behind me.
The lacerations across my shoulders are deep.
The cold air bites into the exposed meat of them and I don't care.
What I care about is the frantic, stumbling rhythm of her pulse — I can hear it from here, high and fast and unsteady, and I know it isn't entirely fear.
Her fingers find the first wound.
The touch moves through me like a fault line splitting.
I think. Don't touch me. I think. I am not safe right now.
She keeps going. Her breath is shallow. The chamber smells of iron and sweat and beneath both, a warmth that belongs only to her, familiar and quietly dismantling me for weeks.
Her palm brushes the top of my spine.
I catch her wrists before whatever is left of my control dissolves entirely.
"Tovian—"
"If you keep touching me,” I say, rough and dangerous. “I can’t promise what comes next."
She doesn't pull away.
"I've been watching you murder half a mountainside," she says. "I think I can manage your shoulders."
I turn to face her and the words I meant to say dissolve. She is pale and furious and alive, and the silver markings at her collarbone have gone faintly luminous in the firelight. I can see her pulse in her throat. I want to put my mouth there.
"You stepped in front of him," I say.
"You were going to get your head taken off."
"Sabine." I hold her gaze and I don’t let myself look away, because she deserves to see exactly what she has done to me. "I have not slept since you fell into my mountain. I can’t think without your voice in it. I can’t breathe without your scent on every surface of every room.
" My thumb moves across her wrist, slow and deliberate.
"You have been haunting me since the first moment and I am—" The word scrapes out of me. "—done pretending otherwise."
Then she moves forward and closes the remaining distance herself.
"Sabine."
Her name is a warning. She ignores it and steps closer.
I stand from the stone bench and immediately regret it.
The firelight catches the pale column of her throat, the silver markings at her collarbone, the fullness of her mouth, and every careful wall I have constructed against her dissolves at the foundation.
I try to turn my body away. I can’t. My feet won't carry me from her.
She tilts her face up to mine. Dangerously close. Her eyes hold mine without flinching and she wets her lips slowly and breathes my name like it belongs in her mouth.
The last thread snaps.
My hand wraps around her throat. Claws fully retracted, palm pressed firm against her pulse. I breathe heavily against her face, tasting the air between us, and then my mouth finds hers and I stop pretending I am anything but what I am.
She moans and presses herself flush against my chest. The full, warm weight of her breasts hits me like a blow.
Every nerve ending I have redirects to where her body meets mine, and my cock responds with blunt, immediate honesty, swelling hard and straining between us until it grazes her belly through the thin fabric separating us.
She breaks the kiss to look down.
The heat that climbs her face is almost funny.
She used her hand to cup my girth and the sound she makes — sharp, breathless, half a laugh — does nothing to help my situation.
"I can't even—" She tries to close her fingers around my girth.
"Take it out. Use both hands," I tell her, voice a ruin.
She does, taking my bottoms down to the floor.
The groan that leaves me is involuntary and deep.
My wings spread reflexively behind me, curling outward at the tips, and her hands move — slow, exploring strokes from root to crown — and I feel the throb of my own pulse in every inch she touches.
Thick beads of pre-cum gather at the head and she uses her thumb to work them in slow circles, looking up at me the entire time like she is memorizing my undoing.
"I want you," I say, the words completely wrecked. "All of you."
She releases me, steps back, and holds my gaze as she undresses. I close the distance before the last garment hits the stone floor.
My hands find her hips and I lift her and set her down on the bedding in one motion, coming down over her entirely, my wings half-spread behind me, my cock hard and heavy against her soft belly.
She is flushed from her chest to her throat, her nipples peaked tight, her thighs already pressing against my hips.
"Be gentle," she says.
"I'll try."
She reaches between us without hesitation, wraps both hands around my cock, and begins working the slick head through her folds, coating me in her warmth, massaging the length slowly, spreading the wet heat of her until I am trembling with the effort of holding still.
She guides the tip to her entrance and pauses.
I watch her face as I push forward.
Her lips part. Her breath goes shallow. She keeps her eyes locked on mine as I ease the first thick inches inside her. Her body resists, flutteringly tight, and I go still until I feel her adjust.
"More," she manages.
She lifts her hips and takes more. Her walls clench around the intrusion, slick and scorching and unbearably snug. I feel every ridge and pulse of her body wrapped around the first half of my girth. Her eyes go wide at the stretch of it.
"Tell me how it feels," she breathes.
"Like I am trying to remember how to be careful," I say, "when everything in me wants to bury myself in you completely."
She blushes violently and doesn't look away.
I drop my gaze. Her breasts are pressed together between her arms, full and flushed, nipples hard and drawn tight. The sight undoes what little remained of my composure.
"May I?"
She nods.
I lower my mouth and take one nipple between my lips, rolling my tongue against the stiffened peak slowly, drawing it deeper until she gasps.
And while she is distracted by the wet heat of my mouth I push another inch inside her.
The added stretch pulls a choked sound from her throat.
I feel the give of her body accommodating me — reluctant, then yielding — her slick walls parting around my cock with a tightness that borders on agony for us both.
I palm her other breast — soft and more than I can hold, spilling over my fingers — and squeeze with restrained hunger. She arches into both points of contact simultaneously, hips rolling upward, and that instinctive movement drives another inch home.
"Look at me," I tell her.
She does.
"I won't last," I murmur against her breast, dragging my tongue across the underside of it before taking the nipple again. "You're too tight. Too warm."
"Then be gentle," she says, but her hips are still moving — rocking in small, restless circles, working herself onto the remaining length by degrees, as if her body has decided independently what it wants regardless of what her mouth is saying.
I raise my eyes to hers and answer her the only way that matters, by pressing the full remaining length home in one slow, devastating push.
My slightly curved cock seats itself completely inside her, the thick head pressing deep against the end of her.
And I feel the moment her body receives all of me, the way her walls flutter in shock, the way her breath punches out of her entirely.
Her eyes go wide. Her mouth opens around a soundless gasp. Her thighs clamp against my hips reflexively, heels pressing into the backs of my thighs as if trying to hold me in place, or brace against me, she doesn't seem to know which.
I pull back slowly. Inch by inch. Feeling every ridge of her drag against my cock on the way out — the wet, clinging resistance of her, the obscene slick sound of it — until only the head remains inside and her hips are already chasing me back.
She exhales my name.
I do it again. Slow and deep and deliberate, angling my hips slightly on the return thrust so the curve of my cock drags along the softest part of her inner wall. She jolts. Her fingers claw into my forearms.
"There," she breathes, barely audible. "Right — there—"
My hips memorize the exact angle. The depth.
The way her body clenches hungrily around me every time I find that spot.
I press my mouth to her breast again and suck hard at her nipple and she arches completely off the bedding, driving herself further onto my cock, and the combined sensation rips a genuine moan from my chest.
"Don't stop," she gasps. "Don't you dare—"
I reach beneath her and grip both cheeks of her buttocks and tilt her hips upward, opening her at a new angle. The change in position sinks me deeper than before and she cries out, sharp and unguarded, and I pause.
"Too much?"
"More." Her gray eyes are dark and glassy. "I dare you."
I squeeze her backside hard and begin to move in earnest.
The pace builds quickly — each thrust deeper than the last, hips snapping forward with increasing force, the wet heat of her swallowing me completely every time I sink home.
The sound of it fills the cave — skin against skin, her broken breathing, the low continuous growl vibrating through my sternum that I can’t seem to stop.
I can feel the slick of her coating the full length of me, can feel the way her walls grip and release with every stroke, fluttering tighter as I go faster, her body climbing toward something she can't hold back.
I wrap both hands fully around her buttocks and use the grip to pull her onto me as I thrust forward. Hitting the end of her on every stroke now, and her head tips back and she is no longer trying to muffle herself.
Her entire body locks. Her walls clench around me — tight, rhythmic, devastating — and she calls my name in a broken voice that strips whatever restraint I had left entirely to ash.
I bury myself to the hilt and hold there as the release tears through me, crashing through every vein, every stone seam, every layer of the ancient earth magic that makes up what I am.
I groan into the curve of her shoulder with a force that shakes my own frame.
She grips my arms and holds on and doesn't let go.