Chapter 10 #2
"You're shaking," she says. The words carry no concern, only the strategist taking field notes even now.
"You're about to be."
I pin her wrists above her head with one hand and press my hips into hers hard enough to feel the heat of her through the layers between us, and the sound she makes when the pressure finds the right angle is worth every principle I'm about to destroy.
Her head drops back against the stone. Her throat is exposed, the pulse hammering at the hollow, and I put my mouth on the skin beside the bonding site, close enough to feel the vibration of her heartbeat against my lips, far enough that the bite stays hypothetical.
Her hips roll against mine. The movement is deliberate, calculated to produce exactly the friction she wants, and the want is mutual and obvious and pressing against the laces of my trousers with an insistence that my body answers by grinding into her until she gasps.
"Bed or wall?" I ask against her throat.
"Are you taking requests now?"
"I'm giving you a choice. Enjoy it. I don't plan on giving you many."
"Wall." The word comes out breathless and fierce. "I don't want to be comfortable."
The rest of our clothes come off in a tangle of pulling and unlacing that has all the grace of a fight and none of the distance.
Her body against mine without barriers is a sensory event that rewires my entire nervous system.
The omega scent is pouring off her skin in waves now, thick and sweet, and my own pheromone output has escalated to a level I can actually smell on myself, dark and heavy, the two scents tangling in the air between us and producing a combined scent that is neither mine nor hers but something new, something that belongs to what is happening between us and will linger in this room long after we stop.
I lift her against the wall. Her thighs lock around my waist, the muscles in her legs taut and strong, and I can feel the slick heat of her against my cock before I'm inside, her body responding to the compatible match with an urgency that falls short of heat but carries enough of its intensity to make the distinction academic.
I push inside her, and the world narrows to the place where our bodies meet.
She's wet and hot and tight in a way that grips the length of me and pulls, her body responding to the match with an intensity that isn't heat but runs close enough to blur the line.
My wolf howls. My vision tunnels. The relief of being inside her after the closeness of proximity and restraint hits my nervous system like a drug, and underneath the relief the fury is still there, white-hot and mutual, because this changes everything and fixes nothing and neither of us is going to stop.
She's slick—the omega biology makes her body grip mine with a responsiveness that sends white sparks across my vision.
My wolf howls inside my chest. My hips snap forward, driving deeper, and she answers with a roll of her pelvis that changes the angle and tears a groan from somewhere in my gut that I feel in my teeth.
The sex is a fight. Every thrust is a counter-argument, every grip a claim contested and answered.
She wraps around me with a fierce refusal to be passive even when she's pinned, and her hips match my rhythm and then break it, establishing her own pace until I pin her harder against the stone and take it back.
She takes it back again. Her heels dig into the small of my back and her hips lock into a rolling grind that changes the angle and puts the control squarely in her body, and the new friction hits a place that buckles my knees and tears a sound from me that I can't suppress.
My hands are braced on the wall and she's using my body as leverage, setting the depth, the speed, the pressure, and the look on her face is the same look she wears across the debriefing table when she's winning an exchange and knows it.
I let her have it for longer than I should, because the way she moves undoes me and the undoing feels like something I've been starving for.
Then I pull her off the wall, carry her across the room, and put her back against the table.
The map crumples under her spine. The water pitcher hits the floor.
Her breath punches out of her, and before she can reclaim the rhythm I've got her hip in one hand and the edge of the table in the other, and I drive into her at an angle that makes her back arch and her hands scramble for purchase and her mouth open on a sound that is not strategy.
"Wall," she manages, her voice wrecked and furious. "I said wall."
"You requested. I overruled."
She bites my shoulder. I growl against her throat. The sounds filling the room are animal and raw and belong to the wolves underneath the people, and neither of us is pretending anymore.
Her nails rake down my back, and the sting of broken skin sends a rush of territorial fury through my body that translates directly into force.
I drive into her harder, deeper, and she takes it and demands more, her voice reduced to sounds that carry the omega harmonic in every breath, and the harmonic is doing something to my biology that I can feel in the base of my spine, a tightening that builds toward a pressure I don't recognize, something my body is reaching for that it doesn't yet have the biology to complete.
The reaching catches me for a fleeting moment then the incompleteness drives me forward.
My hand finds her hip, gripping hard enough to leave prints, and my other hand is braced on the table beside her, and the muscles in my forearms are corded and burning and I don't care.
She's close. I can feel it in the way her body tightens around me, the rhythmic clenching that pulls me deeper, and in the way her breathing fragments into sharp, broken sounds that she's given up trying to control.
"Don't stop." Her teeth are against my jaw, the words more vibration than voice. "Don't you dare stop."
I don't stop. I bury myself in her and grind my hips against the spot that makes her breath catch.
Her back arches off the table. Her hands lock in my hair.
She comes with her teeth in my shoulder and a cry that she'll deny making if I ever bring it up, and her body clamps around me so hard that my vision whites out.
My wolf roars. My body follows hers over the edge with a force that empties my lungs and drops my forehead against her shoulder while my body pulses inside hers.
The silence that follows is not tender.
Her breathing is ragged against my neck.
My arms are burning from the effort of holding myself above her on the table, and the possessive part of my brain is screaming at me to stay, to cover her body with mine, to press my face into her throat and breathe until her scent is the only thing left in my lungs.
I pull out. I step back. The distance between our bodies fills immediately with air that smells like both of us, our scents merged and thick and carrying the evidence of what just happened. It will take hours for the room to clear.
Revna sits up on the table. She steadies herself with one hand on the edge for a single breath, then straightens and reaches for her clothes.
Her hands are steady. Her face is blank.
The flush on her throat and the redness on her wrists where my grip held too long are the only evidence, and she's already covering both.
She pulls the tunic over her head, smooths her hair, and reassembles the composure she wears like armor. The reassembly is fast, practiced, and absolutely ruthless. By the time she turns to face me, the woman who was underneath me is gone and the strategist is back in full.
"This doesn't happen again," she says.
"No."
"The terms haven't changed."
"The terms haven't changed."
She walks to the door. She doesn't look back.
The door closes between us, and I stand in my quarters with her scent on my skin and her taste in my mouth and the welts from her nails burning across my back, and the fury that fills the space she left behind is aimed at myself, at the biology that just overrode every principle I've spent my career building, and at the specific, infuriating certainty that she was right about every word she said before I kissed her.
I pick my clothes off the floor. The bite mark on my shoulder is already darkening, and the sting of it pulses in time with my heartbeat, and my wolf presses toward the wall between our rooms with a focus that the sex did nothing to diminish.
I stay in my quarters. The whetstone stays on the table. Her scent stays on my skin, and the silence between our rooms fills the rest of the day, and neither of us breaks it.