Chapter 22
I PREPARED A NEST. IT WAS EFFECTIVE.
SARVEN
The walk to our alcove feels longer than the climb into the mountain.
Every step, I can feel the tiny shocks of pain in her body. The micro-stumbles when her knees almost buckle. Her eyelids droop, then jerk open again when she catches herself.
I want to lift her. I want to put her over my shoulder and carry her like a stolen prize, like something too precious to risk on her own unsteady legs.
But I know her now.
My fierce, stubborn dra-kir, who walked back to the edge of the spring that had tried to kill her and put her hand in that water anyway. She would rather crawl than be carried right now.
So, I shorten my stride instead, my arm a band around her waist. I take as much of her weight as she’ll give me, and pretend my own legs are the reason we are going slow.
The sounds of the main cavern fade, and the air grows cooler. Our footsteps and breathing are the only sounds.
My body should be unwinding with the quiet.
Instead, every step tightens something low in me.
The danger has passed. The clan is safe. My mate is alive, pressed against my side, smelling like heat and stone and…me.
I need to claim her. Hold her. Fill her.
My member has been half-hard since she took my hand in the cistern chamber. By the time we reach the side tunnel that leads to the alcove Kol granted, I am fully, heavily erect, my new member throbbing against the scale-tunic cover she tied around my hips.
I breathe in her scent, and it only makes the hardness worse.
Bond-scent, my instincts purr. Claimed. Chosen.
We reach the alcove and I straighten, absurd pride sparking in my chest.
The entrance is framed by smoothed stone. Inside, the nest is as I left it. Only better, because now she’s stepping into it.
Furs piled thick on the sleeping mat, layered to trap warmth. A low shelf carved from the wall, holding the bone spoon I made her and a small bowl of firebloom nectar. The firestone in the niche casts amber light over everything, softening the edges of the rock.
She stops on the threshold.
Her tired mind brushes mine, catching, pausing.
“You made this?” she projects, the thought hushed, like she’s afraid if she pushes it too loud, everything will vanish.
“I hoped,” I answer, because that is the simple truth. I hoped my glow would erupt. I hoped she would be mine. I hoped she would let me bring her here.
She steps in.
Her shoulders drop a fraction, the line of her body loosening, as if she has finally set down a weight she has been carrying for sols.
“Sit,” I murmur, guiding her toward the mat.
She doesn’t argue.
She sinks into the furs, muscles trembling with the effort. She tips back on her hands and just…breathes, watching me from under heavy lashes.
I go to the small basin in the corner. Dip a piece of ripped covering I got from Jah-kee into the cool water. My claws are shaking, but not from fear.
From too much.
Too much relief. Too much want. Too much everything.
I bring the covering back and kneel between Mih-kay-lah’s feet.
She blinks down at me, her brow furrowing in the soft firestone light. She tries to pull her leg back, just a fraction.
“What are you doing?”
“Hush,” I soothe, tightening my grip on her ankle gently so she cannot retreat.
Her foot coverings are filthy, damp with tunnel water and cave grit. Her legs are streaked with stone dust, the faint sheen of dried blood where rock cut skin.
I start there.
I unlatch the first foot covering slowly, easing it off her foot.
It is made of very strong hide that does not smell like any creature I have ever encountered.
I set it down carefully because it is something from her water world.
Er-th. Something precious. I turn my attention back to her small foot, and slide the damp strip over the top of her foot, across her ankle, up the length of her calf.
Grit lifts away in gray streaks. The scrap leaves a cool trail behind, and I follow with my thumbs, digging slowly, carefully into tight muscle.
She hisses between her teeth, then melts, her knee dropping open a little.
“Hurt?” I send immediately, stilling.
“No,” she thinks back. “Good. Don’t stop.”
I don’t.
I move in slow passes: up the other leg, over the knobs of bone at her ankles, the bruises blooming on her shins. I massage the cramped arch of her foot until she makes a soft, involuntary sound that shoots straight to my member.
When I force my eyes to her face, her lashes are lying heavy against her cheeks. Her mouth is soft, parted slightly. She looks…so soft, like this. Fragile in a way that terrifies me.
She is alive because she is stubborn and clever and brave. But she is also alive because the mountain let her go.
The thought makes something vicious and violent uncurl in my gut.
I will never trust stone or water or anything outside my own claws to keep her safe again.
I wring out the strip in the water bowl, then move higher.
Her hands are next. I cradle one hand in both of mine and clean it slowly, rubbing the strip between each digit, tracing the little cuts at her knuckles with my thumb.
She stares at our hands, then up at my face.
“You’re very…gentle,” she blinks slowly.
“You touched me like this,” I remind her, letting the memory rise in my mind. When my body began to transform, her hands on my skin when the dust was ripping me apart from the inside. “You soothed my fire.”
“You were hurting. I couldn’t just—” she looks away almost as if she can’t face me now. “You were in pain.”
“You soothed me.” I move the strip across her hand. “Now I soothe you.”
I rinse the scrap before sliding it along the curve of her jaw, across the bruise at her temple. Then, I thumb away a streak of soot at the corner of her mouth.
She leans into my claw, eyes drifting shut again, and every instinct in me howls that I should take. Fill. Make her shake on my member until there is no room for fear left in her bones.
I tighten my claw in the scrap.
“Rest,” I project. “I will watch over you. No dreams of falling. Only my mind around yours.”
Mih-kay-lah opens her eyes.
“If I sleep now, I’ll dream of falling anyway,” she sends, and the honesty in the thought cuts me. “I’d rather overwrite it. Pick a different loop for my brain to play back.”
Her hand lifts, and she plants her palm flat in the center of my chest.
My dra-kir slams against it.
Her other hand reaches out, catching the edge of the scale covering around my hips.
“Mih-kay—”
She tugs.
The knot gives. The scrap of covering falls away with a whisper.
My member springs free, aching, heavy, the head already slick. In the firestone light, it looks even larger than before: the thick crown flaring slightly wider than the shaft, the faintly luminous ridges along the length, and at the base, the swelling bulb, denser and hotter than the rest.
For a single beat of my dra-kir, I see it through her eyes.
More. Bigger. Alien.
“Too much,” I think, looking down at it. Her mind hits me like a wave.
“Beautiful,” she thinks, and I feel her awe. “Fuck.”
Her hand wraps around me, digits barely meeting.
I choke on a groan, hips jerking helplessly into her grip.
The contact is perfection. Her palm drags over the sensitive underside, thumb skimming a ridge, and my vision blurs.
She strokes me once, from base to tip, then she releases me and reaches for her scale-tunic.
“Help,” she whispers, and the single syllable shreds whatever restraint I was still pretending to have.
My claws hook the ruined fabric. One hard, downward pull and the covering shreds. It falls away to the furs.
She is bared to the amber light.
Soft. So soft. Her chest heaves with each breath. The mounds on her chest have tight dark peaks.
Dust.
This female is mine?
I lower myself over her, forearms bracing on the furs. My weight hovers just above her smaller form, and yet the warmth of her skin blazes against my chest.
With a whimper, Mih-kay-lah tilts her chin up, and her mouth finds mine.
A deep, slow press as my tongue slides against hers. The taste of her floods my senses until I know nothing else.
I sheathe my claws, moving down her body, mapping each curve like the path down the mountain. The dip of her waist. The flare of her hip. Her abdomen trembles as my digits pass lower.
Heat greets me between her thighs.
Slickness coats my fingertips.
Dust.
Her water.
The wet sound of my touch against her folds punches a groan from my throat.
“You lived. For this.”
“Need you,” her thought spikes, a mix of fear and want that hits the mindspace.
My muscles freeze, every fiber straining against the urge to conquer. I have to be careful. I have to keep her whole.
But she pulls me down.
I slide into her, inch by burning inch.
Heat wraps around me. Tight, wet heat. Clutching heat. My ridges catch on her inner walls with each slow advance, sparking pleasure up my spine that nearly breaks my vision. She stretches around me, learning my shape, her body clenching around each ridge as it passes until I am buried to the hilt.
Inside. All the way.
We breathe together for a single, suspended heartbeat.
Then I move.
Every stroke completes a circuit, melting the boundary between us. The rhythm takes over, primal and demanding, until the change begins.
The base of my shaft swells, heavy and hard.
Instinct drowns language. With a low snarl, I drive my hips forward, grinding the swollen bulb against her tight entrance. Her body resists, then gives with a hot, wet stretch.
I push past.
We both cry out as the ring of muscle snaps shut behind the knot, sealing me inside.
Locked.
The sensation obliterates thought. She squeezes around the bulge, trapping me, holding me deep.
And she shatters.
I feel her inner walls clamp and flutter in wild spasms, milking the knot. Her cry pours into my ear and directly into my mind. Mine burns itself into the inside of my skull.
Control disintegrates.
I slam as deep as the lock allows and let go. Heat surges from my spine, jetting into her in thick, heavy pulses. Each one is trapped by the seal of our bodies, forced nowhere but deeper.
We drift in the aftershocks, limbs tangled, lungs heaving in sync.
“Safe,” forms in her mind.
The simplicity shatters me.
I curl around her, holding her like something never to be taken. “Safe,” I answer, pulling her deeper into my awareness.
I stare at the stone wall, realizing my body feels wrongly sized for this space now. Too full of rage, relief, and devotion to fit inside mere rock.
Home is not the mountain anymore.
Home is the narrow, bright band inside my skull where her mind touches mine.
Wherever that signal exists, I will follow.