24. Tovian
TOVIAN
One moment the tunnel holds. The next, the earth above us screams and the passage behind us detonates inward.
My wings snap wide on instinct and I spin with Sabine in my arms as a wall of jagged granite erupts through the passage in a cascade of screaming stone and choking white dust, right between Velka and Vorgrym on the other side.
It takes the blink of an eye and the tunnel behind us no longer exists.
"Vorgrym." My voice does not echo. The rock absorbs it.
Silence answers.
I am at the cave-in before I finish thinking, my claws sinking into the face of a boulder larger than a war horse, hauling at it with every muscle and sinew straining.
The stone doesn't move. I dig deeper, dragging furrows through granite like it's wet clay, throwing rubble behind me with both arms while the dust burns my eyes and Sabine coughs somewhere at my back.
"Tovian." Her hand lands between my shoulder blades. "Stop."
I don't.
"Tovian." Firmer now. She steps around me and puts both palms flat against my chest, which is the only thing that works, because I can’t move forward with her in the way. "They're on the other side of a ton of granite. You'll bring the rest of the ceiling down."
My claws are bleeding. I hadn't noticed.
I look to the wall of collapsed rock. I take in her face, pale in the dark, lit only by the faint bioluminescent moss growing in the seams of the stone around us. Her eyes are steady even when nothing else is.
"We keep moving," she says. "We find the secondary passage and we reach Leif. Vorgrym knows these tunnels nearly as well as you do."
The secondary passage opens into a chamber that the war above has not touched yet. The ceiling arches forty feet above us, black and glistening with moisture, and the air here is perfectly still.
Sabine stops walking.
I stop three paces ahead and turn. "We can’t afford—"
"I know." She isn't looking at me like she wants to argue. "Come here."
I don't move.
"Tovian, come here."
I close the distance between us and she tilts her head back to look up at me and doesn't flinch at what she finds.
"I need you to hear me," she says. "Not your instincts. Not the bond. You."
"Sabine—"
"I choose this." Her voice is quiet and completely without wavering. "I choose you because you are the most infuriating, terrifying, and wholly devoted creature I have ever encountered. And somewhere between the cavern I fell into and this tunnel, you became the only ground I trust to stand on."
"I love you." The words come out of me rough. "I love you, Sabine. That is mine. No ancient magic owns it."
She exhales slowly, reaches up, wraps both hands around the back of my neck, and pulls my face down to hers.
She is warm. That is what I notice first, always—the alarming, impossible warmth of her, radiating against my cooler stone-threaded skin like the sun has taken up residence inside her marrow.
I lift her carefully, both hands spanning her waist, and she wraps her legs around me without a moment of hesitation.
I carry her to the chamber wall. My wings spread wide and fold forward, sealing us inside the darkness together, blocking everything that isn't her.
My cock hardens against her belly, thick and aching, and she feels it. Her breath catches a bit, she doesn't pull away.
I work her clothing loose with deliberate patience, claws blunted carefully, always with her.
When I drag my rough tongue across the silver markings running the length of her collarbone, she shudders violently, head falling back against the stone, the bond-marks glowing faintly in the dark like embers buried in pale earth. I follow the light with my mouth.
Then lower.
I take the full, warm weight of her breast against my tongue and she grabs both my horns with both hands, gripping hard for balance as her thighs lock tighter around my hips.
"Tovian." My name has never sounded like that before her.
I lose all composure.
I shift my grip, lifting her higher, and reach between us to guide the swollen, aching head of my cock through the slick heat between her thighs.
She's wet enough that the contact alone makes us both inhale sharply, her arousal coating the broad tip of me as I press forward, not entering yet, just dragging slowly through her folds until she is trembling and her grip on my horns turns desperate.
Then I press in.
The first inch parts her open and she gasps so hard her whole body convulses.
I stop. I feel her stretching around the tip — her entrance fluttering, trying to accommodate the girth, her slickness easing the breach but not erasing the stretch.
The fit is obscenely tight. I can feel her pulse around me, rapid and frantic, her inner walls gripping the crown of my cock like they can’t decide whether to pull me in or push me out.
"Breathe," I tell her roughly.
She does and I push in another inch.
The sound she makes is half moan, half sob, and entirely involuntary.
Her thighs shake around my hips and her wet heat slowly yields another fraction, her body beginning to understand mine.
I pull back the smallest amount — dragging the thick ridge of my head back through the clutching grip of her entrance — then press forward again, deeper this time, working her open gradually with short, unhurried strokes that coat more of my length in her slickness with every pass.
"Too much?" I ask again.
She looks directly into my face. "Don't you dare."
I push in further. Three inches. Four. I feel the slight curve of my cock beginning to drag across the front of her inner wall and she makes a broken, high noise and her back arches away from the stone and I have to use the arm around her to hold her in place so I can keep the angle.
Her arousal is running freely now but she is still impossibly snug, her inner walls stretched taut and trembling around me, gripping my length like she was made for the specific, devastating purpose of undoing me completely.
Five inches. Six.
"Gods—" she chokes. Her head drops back against the stone wall. Her legs are shaking. Her hands on my horns must have gone white-knuckled. "You are—you are enormous—"
"I know, keep breathing."
I pull back until only the swollen head of me is seated inside her clenching entrance, feeling every ripple and flutter of her walls dragging back across my cock on the withdrawal.
Then I drive forward — one long, deep, purposeful stroke — and bury another two inches into her that haven't been reached before.
She arches violently and screams. I feel the blunt head of my cock press against the soft resistance at the back of her, the deepest point of her, and I stop there and hold completely still while she convulses around me.
Her inner walls are gripping me in rhythmic, involuntary pulses, her body shuddering close to release just from the fullness alone.
Her arousal has soaked the junction of our bodies entirely and every minute shift of my hips causes it to slick further down my shaft and the sensation is catastrophic.
Her eyes are unfocused. Her lips are parted and she is not producing coherent sound anymore, only breath and my name in fragments.
I pull back. Slowly. Torturously. Dragging every inch of my cock back through the soft, strangling grip of her until just the swollen head remains lodged inside her stretched entrance.
Then I bury myself to the hilt.
She screams.
I thrust in again. And again. Each stroke long and deep and deliberate, the slight upward curve of my cock catching the front of her inner wall on every thrust, her slickness easing the passage just enough that the stretch becomes something she is chasing rather than enduring.
I feel the moment she crosses that threshold — the moment the fullness stops being overwhelming and starts being necessary — because her thighs stop shaking with tension and start pulling me in.
My knees weaken. Her soaked, clenching walls gripping me on every withdrawal threatens to dismantle my entire nervous system and I take three steps back until I find the low stone platform in the corner of the chamber and I sit, carefully balancing her across my lap without withdrawing a single inch.
She adjusts. Tests the new angle. Then she laughs — short, breathless, surprised. "This is actually—"
I lock her nipple between my teeth and bite.
The laugh dies into a scream.
I use the arm around her waist to begin lifting her up and driving her back down the full length of me, this position burying every inch deeper than before, reaching places that make her eyes roll back completely.
Her head drops backward, the tendons of her throat standing out visibly as she cries out into the dark ceiling, and the sound travels through me like something structural giving way.
I tighten my grip and continue. Pumping upward into her, pulling back just enough, then filling her completely again.
Then something shifts.
She starts to move on her own.
Tentative at first, a roll of her hips against my upward thrust. Then more confident. She grabs my horns again, both hands, uses them as handles, and rides me.
I go very still.
She doesn't.
She grinds her hips in a slow, devastating circle and then begins to slam downward in a rhythm entirely of her own design, her inner walls gripping my cock with deliberate, crushing tightness on every descent.
I growl her name into the valley between her breasts because I can’t hold my head upright.
She looks straight at me and does it harder.
My jaw drops. I say something. I have no idea what it is.
I try to turn my face away. She grabs my horn, holds my head in place, and stares directly into my eyes while she continues to destroy me.
"I want to watch," she says. Breathless. Smiling. Merciless. "Don't hide."
"Sabine—"
She tightens around my cock and whispers my name like a key turning in a lock.
"Let go."
I try to resist.
She grinds down harder, gripping me so tightly I lose the capacity for resistance entirely, and she leans close to my ear and says quietly, "Give me everything. I can take it."
I don't hesitate.
My arms crush around her. My wings explode open behind me, full span, involuntary.
I growl directly into her face as my hips begin to jerk upward in violent, uncontrolled pulses, and she swallows the sound with her mouth against mine.
The kiss doesn't last because she starts screaming into it as her own body breaks apart, her inner walls convulsing around me in waves.
And then I pour into her. Completely. Knees jerking. Wings snapping. Every spasm wringing my composure loose thread by thread.
"Don't let go," I manage.
"Not going anywhere." She grips tighter, squeezing the last of everything out of me, and I jerk once more and finally go slack, my face dropping forward onto the warm, soft weight of her breasts.
She rests her chin on my head and her fingers find my horns and stroke them slowly, mindlessly.
"Your horns," she says eventually, still stroking, "are genuinely absurd handles."
A sound escapes me. Low. Startled. Suspiciously close to a laugh.
"Strategically placed," I say into her chest.
"Mm." Her fingers keep moving. "Evolution had plans."
"Don't." But there is nothing threatening in it.
She hums. Warm and satisfied and entirely too pleased with herself. Her heartbeat is slow now, steady, and I feel it through every place our skin touches.
Outside, the war waits.
Inside this stone chamber, in the dark, held together by what we just surrendered to each other — nothing can reach us yet.
I let it stay that way for one more minute.
Then I lift my head. "We should move."
"I know," she says.
We emerge from the secondary passage into grey twilight.
The cold hits first. Then the smell of smoke and unwashed soldiers and the distant, low percussion of Tharros's encampment spreading across the valley below like a wound that hasn't finished bleeding.
Sabine stands beside me at the tunnel's mouth, her shoulder against my arm, and we look out over what is waiting for us together.
I feel nothing that resembles fear.