44. Max
Max
The bridge ran between the two towers of the Morningstar Palace, from my father’s spire to mine. Mine, I’d learned tonight, had a name that had been waiting twenty years to be used.
The Evenspire.
The morning star and the evening star. The same star, seen at different hours. My father had named his daughter’s tower after the other face of himself and built a bridge between them, and tonight the bridge was an altar.
A single span of glass-dark gem, no railings, arcing tower to tower with nothing beneath it but the burning sea. Lava churned far below the black water, and the amber light came up to meet the bridge.
The high court stood along its length, facing each other in rows. Hundreds of demons in formal black and red, and hundreds more massed on the terrace at the far end.
My father was absent, as promised. His whole realm was not. Tens of thousands of demons gathered at the bottom of the towers.
Drakken and I strode out from the Evenspire side in our robes, barefoot on the dark stone. The only sounds were the churning sea below and my own blood and our breathing.
At the center of the bridge, we stopped. Drakken turned to face me.
He undressed me, as the rite demanded. His fingers found the robe’s single tie and drew it loose, and then he took the silk off my shoulders. The robe slid down my arms, my back, my hips, and left me bare in front of Hell’s court.
Bare except for one thing.
The Hellgold nestled in my cleavage, and when the silk fell away and the whole court saw the heirloom, the sound they made was like a tide coming in.
The First Drop slipped out through the shell as if the gold were liquid light, slithered over my collarbone and my throat and into my hair, and settled around my head as a circlet above my brow.
Crowned.
My father had crowned me with Hell’s heirloom, and I appreciated even more that he’d had the good manners not to come and watch.
Drakken shrugged off his robe, and both silks tumbled off the bridge, one pink and one black, turning over and over down the long dark toward the ocean.
I let out a small gasp as he stood naked before me. Neither of us made any attempt to hide.
We got this, he’d said. We’re the blades. We’re the shields. We hold the line.
That was what we were, in front of the entire demon high court.
I looked my fill, and I wasn’t quick about it.
He was a giant of a man, every inch of him built for war and finished by something with an eye for beauty. Shoulders wide enough to blot out the rest of the bridge behind him. A hard chest, eight ridges down his stomach, thighs that could take a dragon’s weight coming down out of the sky.
Drakken wasn’t just a man. He was a royal dragon, and the man was only the shape he wore to walk among us.
My hungry gaze followed the dark trail that led down below his navel and fixed on his massive cock, and I couldn’t look away.
It was granite hard, heavy and flushed, and jutting forward aggressively. A bead of pre-cum slid out of the slit on his crown. Drakken had a beautiful cock, and the sight of it shot heat straight down my core.
I was already wet, my flesh pulsing, the ache running all the way up into my womb.
I needed him. I needed him badly, and I struggled not to whimper. Not to beg for him to take me right now.
His eyes never left my face, studying every reaction, and whatever he found there satisfied him. An unguarded smile crossed his hard features, and I could have looked at it forever.
“You’re beautiful,” he whispered as I gazed at him. “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever laid eyes on. There’s only you for me.”
That undid me, and I confessed, “I’ll go wherever you go. If you jump off the bridge, I will follow.”
But jumping off this bridge into that churning sea would kill us both. Obviously, I wasn’t thinking clearly, but at a moment like this, who could?
Drakken let out a low chuckle, finding humor in this of all situations. Or appreciating my stupid promise.
Then he palmed my pussy, rough about it, checking for himself how wet I was. The moan slipped out of me. At the touch, at the heat and the lust in his eyes.
“So ready for me, aren’t you, Spartan girl?” he purred.
He scooped me up like I weighed nothing, and I was a big girl, nearly as tall as him. Then he laid me down on the bridge like I was the most precious thing in the realm, one hand behind my head.
The bridge was cold beneath my back, but the cold didn’t bother me while my body was burning.
Drakken lowered himself and braced over me. At the edge of my vision the court leaned in, angling for a better view. They were only background noise to us now.
I licked my lips and gazed up at him. There was only Drakken.
“You know we can’t fake this, right?” I said, though it didn’t need saying.
“I’ll show you.” Gravel and smoke. “I’ll show the land, the sky, and every breathing being how much I truly want you.”
“I didn’t know you could be romantic.” My breathing had gone ragged as the heat kept climbing.
“I aim to impress.” He winked at me. “Let me know when I’ve replaced the hunks you fantasize about from that hoard of dirty romance books.”
“I do not hoard romance books.” I tried to correct him.
“That was only one time that you caught me in the library, and those books aren’t dirty.
And I don’t fantasize…” Then all of my protests shattered.
“Oh, oh, yes,” I moaned, because his skilled fingers were now brushing the peak of my clit in slow circles.
Shit.
All that out of one small bundle of nerves.
Drakken was getting to know my body better than I did.
While he worked my clit like I was a clock under the hands of a watchmaker, his lips started to trace down from my throat, then my collarbone, then the curve of my breasts, like a general mapping enemy territory he intended to keep.
His mouth closed hot over my nipple until my back arched off the stone. A mix of gasps and moans broke out of me, loud on that otherwise silent bridge, and the court stirred.
Lower and lower he went.
His teeth grazed my hip. The hand that had been working my clit, giving me a taste of what was coming, spread my legs wider. He settled between them, a connoisseur regarding a rare vintage, ready for a taste he’d waited a long time for and in no hurry at all.
And then his mouth was on my damp cunt.
Every thought went out of me. What was left didn’t have words in it.
He tasted me like vengeance.
Like every cruel word he’d ever spent on me was a debt and this was the payback, tongue and lips and the edge of teeth, working me with a focus that bordered on fury.
My fingers found his hair. My hips bucked up, grinding against his mouth.
The pleasure wound tight and then tighter, and when his tongue pushed my plump folds apart and thrust into my narrow passage, I cried out his name.
“I like hearing you say my name like that,” he growled.
His fingers rubbed my swollen clit, his tongue fucking me harder and harder, until I came apart with a scream that went the full length of the bridge and down both towers.
Then the crowd started to break ranks.
The high court of Hell couldn’t handle the heat.
These were demons, the basest creatures. They lived for orgies and violence.
Shit was going to hit the fan.
We had to stop them before they did something that ruined the rite, but Drakken and I were too deeply entangled to move.
Then Greta’s voice went up, harsh and sharp, barking orders and threatening that heads would roll. The riot in the crowd died down, and then all was quiet again, except for the sounds of Drakken’s rough groan and my breathless moans.
I gripped his short hair harder to anchor myself. I was close again. A few more thrusts of his tongue, and I’d come undone. But then he withdrew it, leaving my damp sex to the cold air. I lifted my torso to protest, only to find the broad head of his cock nudging against my slick entrance.
For a moment he held there, braced on one forearm, his large, hard body curved over mine.
It took me less than two seconds to see what he was actually doing.
He was shielding me. Positioning himself between me and the thickest ranks of spectators, giving them his back, keeping as much of me as he could for himself.
It was futile on an open bridge in front of an audience. He tried anyway. The dragon general who shared his tenderness with no one now spent all of it trying to build me privacy out of his own body.
“I can’t hold back anymore, Max,” he rasped. “I need to fuck you now.”
“What are you waiting for, dragon?” I breathed.
With a roll of his hips, he thrust into me. I gasped at the sensation of joining. A slight burn came before the pleasure hit, spreading and washing over my entire body.
I writhed blissfully, and then a rush of wrongness slammed into me from all directions.
The geas had woken up.
Cold burned worse than fire. That was how it felt on my skin first, then from inside me, then deep in my bone marrow. The burn had punished every touch I’d had with the other heirs, and now the punishing force was tenfold.
A scream tore out of me, replacing the moans of half a second ago.
Drakken’s body locked over me. His breath went out of him in a hiss, his face twisting in pain.
Yet neither of us let go. We held on instead of breaking apart the way our survival instincts screamed at us to.
Somehow, we knew that if we separated, it would be over, and the rite would fail on the stone.
“We’re the blades, Spartan!” Drakken recited.
“We’re the shields!” I forced out a breath and recited back, cold sweat beading on my forehead as the burn intensified, cooking my insides.
“You’re mine.” He clenched his teeth and thrust deep into me, an act of defiance and primal male need.
And the burn lessened one notch.
“It wants us to let go.” I bit out the words. “The geas.”
“Fuck it. I’ll never let you go.”