Chapter 9 #2
He had shed his own trousers somewhere — she didn’t remember when, she had been too far gone — and the heavy length of him hung between his thighs, thick and ready and wet at the tip.
He lined himself up at her entrance.
He stopped there.
His forehead came down to rest against hers. She could feel him trembling — the great cursed strength of him shaking like a man at the edge of a cliff — and one of his hands found hers on the furs and laced their fingers together, and the other smoothed back her sweat-damp hair from her forehead.
"Look at me," he said.
She opened her eyes.
His were green. Only green. The dragon was in there — she could feel it now, a coiled power thrumming under his skin, present at every point where their bodies touched — but for her he had pulled it back.
What looked down at her was the man. Only the man.
The man who had carried her out of the shrine.
The man who had sat in the dark for hours rather than touch her without permission.
The man who had stood in front of her as a beast and shown her every black thing about himself in the hopeless hope that she would run.
"I am yours," he said. The words were a raw, shattered confession. "I tried not to be. Tried to protect you from myself. But I am forever yours."
"I know," she whispered. Her heart ached with a love so vast it hurt. “And I am yours.”
She lifted her hips.
He sank into her with a slow, careful inevitability that was nothing like the desperate fucking in the moss behind her cottage.
This was different.
This was homecoming.
He pushed into her inch by inch, every muscle in his body locked, and she felt every ridge and vein of him as her body opened and made space for what had always been hers.
The stretch was too much and exactly enough.
When he was finally seated to the hilt, deeper than she had thought a man could be, he stopped.
He held there.
For a long moment neither of them moved.
His cock throbbed inside her — a thick, hot pulse that matched her own racing heartbeat — and the cold-dark current of his magic flowed out of him into her in a steady current and she took it, felt something deep in her own bones knit itself to him in a way she didn’t yet have language for.
She felt the dark go still inside her, found nothing to feed on, then dissolve into something warm and quiet that her own body absorbed without effort.
She was the place where it stopped.
The prophecy had been right.
A small sound of wonder escaped her.
" Mo chroí ." His voice was barely a breath. " Mo chroí, mo chuisle, mo bheatha. It is gone. I felt it. The curse is gone. I don’t know how, but your love has saved me. "
He pressed his forehead harder against hers and a single hot tear fell from his face onto her cheek, and she didn’t know which of them it had come from.
He moved over her with the long, held attention of a man who had no intention of finishing soon. Who wanted to memorize every inch of her. Who had three centuries of denial poured into every slow, deep, grinding stroke.
The firelight ran along his shoulders. Her hands tracked it. Learning the landscape of him by heart.
He whispered things into her hair. A constant stream of praise and need.
She didn’t catch all of them. Some were in the language she didn’t know, ancient and melodic.
Some, she thought, were prayers. Some were her name, repeated over and over, as if her name were the only word in his language that still meant anything.
He shifted. Changed the angle of his hips. A bolt of pure pleasure shot through her so sharp she cried out.
He did it again. Again. He found the rhythm that made her sob his name and he held it there, not letting her come, not yet, building her toward something that had no end.
His hand slid down her body. His thumb found the swollen bundle of nerves at the apex of her thighs and circled it in time with his deep, steady strokes. The pressure inside her built. An impossible, tightening coil of pleasure that was both agony and ecstasy.
She came again.
Slow. Cresting. A long wave that broke against his mouth as he kissed her through it.
He didn’t stop. He didn’t slow. He kept moving inside her, gentler now, working her through the orgasm and then immediately starting to build her toward the next one.
She felt his hand close around her throat — firm, not frightening, his thumb stroking her pulse where it leapt against his palm — and his eyes locked on hers and held her there, watching, watching her, as he drove into her over and over.
"Look at me when you come for me," he said. Voice low. Dragon-rough. "I want to see it. I want to see you."
She came on him a minute later, with his hand at her throat and his eyes burning into hers, and she didn’t look away.
She thought he might break apart watching her.
She felt his cock jerk inside her. Felt the great cursed strength of him begin to lose its rhythm. His thrusts went harder. Deeper. Less controlled. And underneath them — underneath them — she felt something new .
A heat at her hairline.
A heat at her sternum where the pendant lay glowing softly between them.
A heat along the back of her shoulders, the curve of her hips, the place where his hand still held her throat.
Fire, something inside her whispered. Dragonfire. He is going to bind you. He is going to wrap you in fire and make you his forever, and the only thing holding him back —
" No. " His voice was a torn, broken thing against her ear. "No, a chuisle , not without — not without you asking me, not without you knowing —"
She didn’t understand all of what he meant.
Her body did.
Some old, deep place inside her — the place that had known his name when she woke up, the place that had known the word Draquonir before he spoke it — understood what he was holding back.
And though her conscious mind didn’t yet have the words, her body knew that he had just refused her something for her own protection, the way he had refused her everything for her own protection from the moment they had met.
She wrapped her arms around him. She wrapped her legs around him. She pulled him deeper .
"Then come for me," she whispered against his ear. "Just come for me. The rest later. Just come ."
He came apart.
He came inside her with a sound that had all his years of grief and isolation pressed into it.
A sound she felt vibrate through her own bones.
His cock pulsed inside her, hot and endless, and she felt the rush of his release fill her up — felt the cold of his magic and the heat of his seed mingle into something new inside her body, something her ancestors might have had a word for.
She held him through it.
She held him through the shudder and the ragged breath and the long, broken aftermath when his body went heavy on hers and his face turned blindly into her neck, seeking the only refuge he had ever found.
For a long time they didn’t move.
His weight on her was immense and right. He didn’t pull out. His face stayed buried in the curve of her neck, breath ragged, and she felt — though she didn’t yet have the words to name it — that some part of him had broken open in a way that would never close again.
The pendant between them glowed faintly. Then dimmed. Then went still.
"You were supposed to run," he whispered into her throat.
"I know."
"Poppy —"
"I know, Alsander."
She turned her face into his hair. The smell of him — smoke and stone and ancient magic — filled her lungs, and she understood with a quiet, settled certainty that this was now the smell of home .
"You are not running."
"No."
"Why?"
She thought about it. About the right answer. About all the answers that were true.
"Because I love you," she said simply. "Because I have always loved you.
Because every step of my life has been walking toward you.
Because my grandmother told me on her deathbed that he would come, and he did, and he is you .
Because no one has ever looked at me the way you look at me, and I am not letting that go. Not now. Not ever."
A long silence.
His arms tightened around her.
"I am not worth that."
"You are." She kissed his temple. "You are. And I am going to spend the rest of my life proving it to you. However long that turns out to be."
He shuddered.
He turned his face into her palm, and she felt wet heat on her skin, and she didn’t say a word about it, because she understood that a man who had been strong for so long didn’t weep where anyone could see, and she would not be the one who made him do it twice.
After a long time, he raised his head.
His green eyes searched hers.
"I am going to keep you alive, a chuisle ." His voice was a low, broken vow. "I don’t know how yet. But I swear it on the blood I have given this forest. I will not lose you."
"I know."
She pulled him back down to her.
The fire burned low in its iron cradle. Outside the lair, the cursed forest stood silent. And inside it, for the first time in three centuries —
A dragon slept in someone's arms.