9. Ellie
ELLIE
Ifeel him before anything else.
The air shifting, the heat coming off skin that’s close, not touching yet, just hovering, the warmth falling on my face and chest like heat off an open oven.
The furs pressing down beside my head, where his hands—huge, each one wider than both of mine together—set down, boxing me in.
The smell sharpens. Closer. The metal edge under the musk is stronger now, hotter, a scent that coats the back of my throat and sets my pulse hammering.
Want. His want has a smell. My body knows it without being told, the way my body knew the tea was wrong—not through thought but through the place under thought where the real knowing lives. My hips shift against the furs. Not a choice. An answer.
The tea. The thing they’ve poured down my throat for thirteen years.
Three days ago I was dulled enough that a new dress was the most interesting thing in my morning.
Tonight, one evening dose skipped and the morning dose thinning and fear burning through what’s left of it, the dulling’s wearing through.
Not gone. I can feel its fingerprints on me, the soft edges it’s left on my fear, the way the terror keeps melting into something warmer.
But thinning. Enough that when his mouth finds my throat, I feel it at full volume.
His lips part against my pulse.
There’s no fumbling in the dark, no hunting for it.
He knows where my heartbeat lives. His mouth is hot, the skin of his lips rougher than a man’s, catching against the thin skin of my throat.
He breathes against me, and the breath is warm and slow, and I feel it in every nerve from my jaw to my collarbone.
His fangs sink in.
Fire. All at once, blooming out of where his teeth meet my pulse—not pain. The venom rewrites that somewhere between the wound and my head, turns what should be agony into a heat that opens outward through my whole body like something going off.
Thirteen years of the tea did not get me ready for this. Nothing could have. This is every nerve in me catching at once, a wave of fire that starts at my throat and pours down—through my chest, my belly, between my hips.
I’m wet before the venom even reaches my thighs. Soaked before he pulls his fangs free.
My back arches off the furs.
The nectar’s wearing off—or the venom’s overriding it, demanding my body answer with more than stillness.
My muscles flood back. My hands fly to his chest—the first time I’ve touched him—and the skin is warm, hard, enormous under my palms. Muscle like stone under it.
Scars I can’t see, raised seams and hollows my fingers trace without deciding to.
My hands climb. The chest keeps going. He’s so much bigger than me that my arms are all the way out before I reach his collarbones. I can’t get anywhere near his face.
The size of him lands in the dark the way it couldn’t in the moonlit gap, not through seeing but through touch, through everything my arms can’t cover, through the long stretch from his chest to his throat, through the way my whole body fits against his torso with room left over.
I’m a small thing in the hands of something vast.
His hips settle between my thighs. I feel it—the weight pressing my legs apart, the shift of his body into the cradle of mine.
His hands slide under my shift. The cloth tears, not ripped, parted, his claws following the seam like he knows exactly where cotton gives and skin begins.
The shift falls open. The air touches my bare skin and I gasp.
Cold and warm at once, the nest’s heat, his body’s heat, the cool air from somewhere above all mixing on my exposed breasts, my stomach, the inside of my thighs.
His tail wraps my left thigh. Spreads me wider.
The muscle coils and holds, each loop a careful pressure that opens me by inches, sure-handed in the dark.
His other hand spans my hip, thumb in the crease where thigh meets pelvis, fingers curving the bone, his grip firm enough that I couldn’t close my legs if I tried.
I try. The tail holds. His hand holds. My body holds, caught between the three points of his grip, spread open in the dark.
Then I feel him. The blunt head of his cock drags up the inside of my thigh, slow and searching, hot and impossibly thick, thicker than anything I have a measure for.
It nudges where I’m soft and slick and already aching.
He parts me with it. The broad head drags through my folds, spreading them wide, dragging my own wet up the length of me, and the size of it lights up every nerve it touches.
A whimper climbs out of me before I can stop it. “Ohh…”
He finds my entrance. Notches the head there, against the place my body’s gone molten, and holds. One breath. Two.
He enters me hard.
A snarl rips out of him as he drives in. “Hrrnnah.” The first sound out of him since the wall came down. No hesitation now, no slow build. The rut has him rock-hard, the shaft iron and driving, and he’s in before my body’s made any peace with the size of him.
The sound I make is not a scream. It comes from somewhere deeper, under my throat, under my lungs, the sound of a body finding out it can take more than it knew.
“Hhn… uhh…” The stretch is enormous. He fills me all the way, the head pressing so deep my vision pulses white in the dark, my walls clenching around something wider than anything the tea could have softened me for.
My hands claw his chest. My hips try to back away and his hand pins them to the furs. He drives deeper.
Nothing has ever been this far inside me.
Thirteen years and not one touch, not even my own, and now this width forcing me open around it, the rim of me burning where it stretches past anything it was ever asked to hold.
He’s so deep. Deeper than I knew a body went.
The blunt head of him drags against places that have never once been touched, presses all the way to the end of me, and there’s nowhere left to put him and still he comes, filling every inch I have and asking for more.
And under the burn, under the fear, something in me cracks and pours.
I didn’t know I could hold this much at once.
Split open, stretched, taken, terrified, and somewhere beneath all of it a low hot pull that answers him, that wants the very thing undoing me.
There’s nowhere to hide from it. The dark won’t let me. He won’t let me. My own body won’t.
“Oh god—” The words tear out of me. “Oh god, oh—”
I can’t see any of this. That’s the thing the dark does—it strips everything down to the body, to the raw fact of what’s happening inside me. There’s no watching. There’s only being.
He fills me completely, and even buried to the root he doesn’t go still.
His cock moves inside me on its own, alive in a way nothing should be, the thick length of it curling and flexing against my front wall, seeking, pressing forward to find the spots that make me clench and bearing down once it finds them.
The weight of his body settles over mine, his chest against my breasts, his breath hot at the crown of my head, because even braced on his forearms he’s so tall his mouth can only reach the top of my skull.
His tail stays wrapped around my thigh, holding me open. His hips drive into me, hard and deep and relentless. A low growl rolls out under every breath. “Grrr.”
The wet sound of him moving in me fills the nest. Every thrust shoves a noise out of my mouth that isn’t a word.
Every pull back drags a slick, obscene sound from where we’re joined.
My fingers grip the furs. My hips are rising to meet him, not a choice, my body moving toward the thing splitting it open, because the venom has rewritten every signal into more.
I’m crying.
Not from pain, the venom took the pain and made it into something else, something that lives next door to pain but burns the other direction. I’m crying because my body is answering with a hunger I have never once felt.
The tea blunted hunger. Blunted wanting. For thirteen years it kept the wanting in a locked room where it couldn’t reach me, couldn’t make me ache, couldn’t make me press my hips toward anything.
The locked room’s open. The wanting’s out. It has my body and it’s using it without asking me, my hips grinding up, my walls clenching around him with every thrust, my own wetness making sounds I can hear in the dark, slick and steady and obscene.
This is wanting at a volume the Cage never allowed. I’m drowning in it. My back arches. My heels dig into the furs. A moan comes out of me I don’t know—low, raw, dragged up from somewhere the Cage never got to. “Hnnnnh…”
His hips slam forward and the wet slap of his skin on mine fills the nest. A hard breath punches out of him on every drive.
“Hnf. Hnf.” The sound is brutal and honest. The sound of bodies meeting with no words, no theology, nothing at all between us.
He drives in again and it repeats—louder, wetter—and I clench around him so hard my thighs shake.
His cock flexes inside me. Not just thrusting, pressing, the prehensile muscle of him finding my front wall from the inside, stroking it on a rhythm all its own, separate from the rhythm of his hips. Two rhythms at once. The drive and the inside stroke.
My walls grip him, squeeze, and the squeeze pulls a groan out of him—low, guttural, from deep in his chest. “Grrh.” It vibrates down through his body into mine. I feel the groan in my nipples. In my clit. In the soles of my feet.
The sound belongs to a thing taking what it came for. What it came for is me. The groan is satisfaction. The satisfaction makes me wetter.
“Ah—” I’m gasping into the furs. My voice is high, broken, nothing like the voice I use in the Cage. “I can’t—it’s too—”