CHAPTER 7 THE FULL LINK #3
I clenched around nothing, empty and aching with it. My legs tightened around his waist, pulling him closer, and the broad head of him notched against me, furnace-hot, hotter there than anywhere else I had mapped him.
He entered me with a slow, steady pressure that whited my vision at the edges. The stretch sat on the line between too much and exactly right, every vein and ridge of him a distinct event as he pressed deeper, my body easing for him in waves I did not schedule.
My body knew his now, knew the shape and the heat and the way the ridges caught and dragged, and when he pushed inside me, my spine bowed, and my hands fisted in the space between his bone plating, gripping the ridges along his skull, and the sound I made was not quiet.
He groaned. Low, sub-harmonic, a vibration that traveled through his body and into mine, where we were joined. His hips moved in a rhythm slower than the Grounding, deeper, each stroke deliberate, weighted with the intent of a man who was not chasing release but building something permanent.
The scales along his neck and chest rippled through the full spectrum, purple to violet to a deep, pulsing crimson I’d only seen during combat.
His pupils were gone, the silver irises reduced to thin rings around dark centers that held my gaze with an intensity that made the air between us feel solid.
I wrapped my legs around his waist. Drew him deeper.
His forehead dropped to mine, the bone plating slick with heat, and when I clenched around him, his control fractured.
The careful rhythm broke into something faster, harder, his hands sliding beneath my hips and lifting me into him with a strength that was effortless and devastating, and the size of his hands on my body was a constant, grounding awareness, how small I was in his grip, how careful he still was even as the last of his restraint burned away.
The bond blazed between us, his pleasure layered over my own, an echo that amplified and reflected until I couldn’t separate my sensation from his, and the feedback loop built and built, his deep, shuddering groan against my throat, my nails scoring the scales on his shoulders, his teeth grazing the marking site on my neck, the ridges inside me hitting a place that made my vision blur white.
My orgasm gathered at the base of my spine, a coil tightening everything inward toward the point where we joined. My fingers found purchase in the scales along his shoulders, my nails digging in hard enough to leave marks, and I used that grip to pull myself up to meet his thrusts.
I came arching beneath him, clamping down on him in pulses that refused to end, warmth flooding outward from where we joined to my fingertips, my release slicking the space between us.
Raeth’s rhythm faltered, turning erratic as my orgasm kept rippling through me. His forehead stayed pressed to mine, his breath harsh against my temples, and his release took him mid-stroke with a sound no Comm-Bead could have translated.
He drove deep one final time and held there, the hot pulse of him flooding me, dragging another wave of aftershocks through us both. Somewhere under us the platform frame cracked, one sharp report, and neither of us stopped to care.
The Link completed at the crest.
A warm, golden thread that wove itself through the bond’s existing channels and settled into place with the quiet certainty of a final circuit closing.
The emotional resonance I had been receiving since Phase Three expanded.
Where before I had caught impressions at the edge of my consciousness, now I stood inside the full spectrum of what he felt.
A structure built from three years of isolation and one thousand days of holding himself together and sixteen days of a human woman who fixed his ventilation and broke a guard’s nose and crawled through tunnels to find the key to his sister’s freedom.
A love that was not soft. That was not gentle. That was built from the same material as the discipline that held him upright after a Thermal-Prod and the fury that pinned a man to a wall by his throat.
I pressed my hand against his chest. His heart beat against my palm. Slow and heavy and certain.
“I can feel you,” I whispered. “All of you.”
“And I you.” His voice came stripped bare, every sub-harmonic gone, every controlled register abandoned. The voice of a male who had stopped hiding. “Kira. What you are feeling. What I am…”
“I know.” I pressed closer. My cheek against his scales, my hand on his heart, my body fitted against his like a component finding its housing. “I know what it is. I feel it too.”
He held me. The blue glow of his scales illuminated the small space of his sleeping chamber, and our breathing synchronized without effort, and the bond between us was no longer a tether, a compulsion, or a mechanism to be diagnosed.
It was a choice. Completed. Permanent. Ours.
Tomorrow we would finalize the plan. Raeth would compile the evidence package from Corsine’s files.
I would complete the comm array bypass through the maintenance tunnel.
We would transmit everything to the Galactic Authority, and we would burn Corsine’s operation to the ground, and we would find Sera.