Draekir
The banquet is arranged by rank and mutual suspicion, every noble watching the others for weakness. Malrec sits opposite me, contributing nothing while absorbing everything.
I told Elowen she doesn't need to be here. It's better she isn't. Not because she couldn't handle the room, but because every face here carries an agenda, and her presence would give them a target I'm not willing to offer.
"You've noticed because I permitted you to. The patrols shifted three weeks ago. The boundary stones are intact. Your scouts should learn to distinguish fresh prints from old before filing reports that waste my time."
Two hours of territory disguised as concern, then the sound cuts through the hall.
Three sharp strikes. The outer perimeter alarm — the breach pattern Vuldren's hunters use only when something has broken through. A servant drops a ceramic pitcher and the crash sends movement rippling through everybody in the room.
I'm up before the second strike ends. All I can think of is Elowen, alone. The thought strips everything I've maintained sitting here. I pulled the guard rotation to cover this room. Whatever breached is between the outer wall and wherever she is right now. I grab my bow, and head to the east wing.
Her door is open. The room is empty. Bed untouched. Gone. My pulse slams through my palms as I face back toward the hall.
My return is short, but each second costs me. I round the corner and stop dead in the archway. The beast fills a third of the hall, broader than the others, its fissured hide weeping black and its jaw warped beyond anatomy.
Elowen stands between it and the banquet guests with a fire iron — wrenched from the nearest hearth bracket. She must have heard the alarm and come through the servant passage, because she was there before me. Behind her: everyone. The beast's bulk blocks the only exit they could have reached.
I run to her side as the beast swings. Elowen drops beneath the strike, one hand bracing against the flagstone, and drives the fire iron into the warped joint of its foreleg. It is not enough to wound it properly. It is enough to turn its weight. Enough to make the creature expose its throat.
My world compresses. I drop the bow, dart into the opening she made, and aim for its head. My blade is out. I open its throat, then keep cutting long after it falls. Green-black blood coats my arms before I realize my hands are shaking.
I glance at the guests who are untouched.
Fenra is crying, and the servants grip each other.
Ardent's attendants are appalled. I turn to Elowen.
She's on both feet, torn fabric at her hip.
I walk toward the exit with my hands by my side to hide the tremors.
The image of her on the floor has seared itself behind my eyes where permanent things live.
Vuldren stands in the doorway, staring at Elowen with open awe, as if he has watched her earn something no rank could purchase. I shoulder push him, and the force rocks him. I don't slow, don't look back, don't care that I nearly put him on the floor.
"Clean that up," I call back. My voice carries nothing but instruction.
The corridor to my chambers stretches ahead and I take it at a pace that refuses to be called running. I reach my door as footsteps behind me close in. Purposeful in the rhythm I have memorized without meaning to. It's Elowen.
I try to shut her out, but her shoulder forces the door wide. Her eyes lock on mine with an intensity that tells me she has decided this confrontation is happening regardless.
"Get out." I bellow.
"No."
"I am not capable of this conversation right now—"
"Good." She kicks the door shut behind her. "Because I'm not here for conversation. I'm here because you butchered that beast past killing, walked out shaking, and thought I'd let you stand alone in the dark rebuilding whatever wall you're reaching for. I won't."
"What I am feeling right now is not something you should be near." The rawness surprises me. "What I wanted to do after I saw you on the ground is not something you want to see."
"It was obvious you lost yourself. Because it touched me." She is close enough that I can smell the iron on her hands. "That is not weakness, Draekir."
"It is the definition of it." My back hits the wall, but she's still advancing.
This woman who is half my height and carries no weapon makes me feel as though my territory could be exchanged for her being unharmed.
"You're becoming my greatest weakness. Every decision I make runs through whether it keeps you alive.
I saw you fall and became something with no strategy. "
Her eyes soften. The combative edge is there but underneath it, there's a recognition, a warmth that she's not trying to show.
"Then stop fighting it." She reaches out and pushes me. "Stop treating what you feel like a flaw in your defenses."
"Elowen—" My rage settles and rises at once. I grip her jaw, then kiss her like the last nothing happened, hauling her against me. Gripping the back of her neck and her waist with my other hand, I haul her against me.
She reciprocates, biting my lower lip, not gently either.
The sting of it shoots through me making me growl.
I lift her, both hands beneath her thighs, pushing her against the wall with my hips pinning her in place.
Her legs wrap around me and the heat between her thighs hits against the front of my trousers where I'm already hard — have been since she walked in, since the adrenaline found somewhere else to go.
I drop her to the bed without breaking the kiss. The torn dress comes off first — her brown skin flushed, her breasts rise with every rapid breath. I admire her skin, and trace my finger only slightly around her cheeks.
"Don't stop." She requests.
I lift her arms above her head and, drag my mouth down her throat. My lips cover one nipple with my fingers teasing the other. I suck hard enough to feel her spine arch off the bed, and her hips roll up against nothing.
I pull back to strip. She watches me with an attention that is evaluative and hungry at once, tracking my torso to where my cock stands thick and hard, the head already slick.
I drop back over her, and her hand wraps around my length immediately — firm, deliberate pressure, her thumb dragging across the wet tip and spreading it down the shaft.
I thrust into her grip involuntarily and the sound that comes from my chest is guttural, stripped of every pretense I maintain in front of other people.
She lets it into her mouth, tightening the base with her hand and easing as she pulls back to the head.
Her eyes are locked onto mine as she does.
I catch her wrist. "If you keep doing that, this ends too soon."
"Then don't wait."
She's wet — I can see it when I spread her thighs, the shine between them catching the candlelight.
I run two fingers along the length of her slit and she bucks against my hand.
I push both fingers inside and feel her clench around them — hot and tight — impossibly ready.
Her pussy grips my knuckles until I withdraw them and position myself between her thighs.
The head of my cock presses against her entrance, parting her, and I push forward in one steady stroke that seats me completely.
She cries out — not from pain, from the stretch of it, and her nails dig into my shoulders hard enough that I feel the crescents forming in my skin.
I hold myself there. Buried to the root inside her, feeling her walls pulse and adjust. Her breathing is in short fractured bursts.
I pull back slightly, then drive forward — hard, deep, a thrust that pushes her up the bed and tears a moan from her throat that I feel vibrate. Again. The rhythm builds fast because neither of us has the patience for slow — not tonight.
I grip her thigh and sink deeper, opening her wider. She grabs the headboard with one hand and my shoulder with the other. "There — right there, don't stop—"
I don't. I drive into her at an angle with strokes that rock the bed against the wall, and the sound of our bodies meeting fills the chamber — wet, obscene in a way that would scandalize every noble currently sheltering here.
Her pussy tightens with each thrust, pulling at my cock on every withdrawal as though her body refuses to let me leave.
Her breath is hot against me. I can feel the tension building in her. I reach between us to find her clit — swollen, slippery — and work it in firm circles without slowing. The combination makes her scream with pleasure.
"I'm going to —" She can't finish. Her thighs lock around me and she makes a sound I want carved into memory — raw, and loud.
I pull out — she protests — and flip her over. She lands on her stomach, I grab her hips up and pull her ass up until she's on her knees, and I push inside her again from behind in one stroke that buries me even deeper than before.
The sound she makes is different from this angle. More animal. Her fingers curl around the linen and her face presses into the pillow. I take her with long thrusts as she gets wetter, her arousal coating the base of my shaft, and the sound of it pushes me closer.
"You are the only thing in this world I can't survive losing.
" The words come from me against her spine where I've bent over her.
"Everything else — the territory, the houses, the title — all of it is structure.
You are the thing the structure was built to protect and I didn't know it until you were on that floor tonight. "
She reaches to my hand on her breast, and threads her fingers through mine holding with a grip that is beyond physical.
The pressure coils at my spine while I'm plunging deep enough that my hips meet the curve of her cheeks.
She shatters — louder, longer than last time — and the grip of her orgasm around my cock breaks the last restraint I have.
I feel myself explode inside her, and my head drops against her shoulder blade.
I ease out of her carefully and she turns beneath me, settling onto her back.
I pull her against my chest, one arm beneath her head, the other resting across her stomach where I can feel the residual tremors.
Her breathing changes. A slight hitch — not from pain.
From the specific discomfort of realizing something she didn't plan for and can't undo.
She presses her lips against me. When she pulls back, there is something in her eyes I recognize because it has been breaking apart inside my own chest for weeks: the moment wanting becomes something heavier.
She sees it. I know she does. The understanding moves through her face before she can bury it, quiet and dangerous and almost too large for the room.
She doesn't name it. But she curls against my chest and stays there.