Chapter 12 Ignus
IGNUS
Twenty minutes. She's come three times on the forge floor. She's still fighting.
"Please—" The word rips out of her. She doesn't mean to say it. I can hear the horror at her own mouth—the fury at the begging—but her body's outrun her pride. "Please—"
"Please what." I'm not steady. My rut is a wall of fire behind my eyes. The head of my cock is so swollen it catches at her cunt on every withdrawal—a secondary lock, holding me half inside her. Her body grips me, trying to pull me deeper, trying to take what I haven't given yet. "Say it."
She shakes her head. Her jaw locks. She presses her forehead to the stone. She won't say it. She won't—
I thrust. Short. Deep. The swollen head grinds against that place inside her.
The ridges pulse fire into her. She screams into the stone, her whole body seizing, and she comes so hard her arms go limp, her brown cheek pressed to the floor, her hips held up only by my hands.
When the orgasm passes she's gasping, wrecked.
She turns her head and looks at me over her shoulder with eyes that have lost focus and found it again.
"Your knot." Broken. Wrecked. Through her teeth, through the tears, through the fury that hasn't died even now. "Give me your knot or I swear to every dead god I will find a way to kill you that works."
The base of my cock begins to swell.
I stop holding it back.
For twenty minutes she's been fighting me and for twenty minutes her cunt has been doing the opposite—soft and scalding and gripping every ridge on every thrust like it's trying to hold me there, like her body figured out what it wanted before she'd finished composing her first threat.
She's soaked. Has been since the second orgasm.
Her slick is heat-bright and thick and the smell of it fills the forge and drives the rut higher every time I breathe.
She can hate me all she wants. Her body declared its position an hour ago.
So I give it what it's been asking for.
It expands fast—dense, fire-hot, pressing her walls outward in a slow, relentless stretch that leaves no room for either of us to argue about what's happening.
The feeling is—there isn't a word for it.
Nine centuries and I don't have the word.
The knot seats itself and her inner walls close around it and I'm so hard it borders on pain, the full length of my cock buried in her, the head pressed against the deepest part of her, and every nerve from the base of the knot to the tip is firing at once.
I have to lock my jaw to keep the sound in.
She cries out and her hands go flat on the stone. Her whole body locks rigid around me, thighs and inner walls gripping the knot at once, and I'm sealed inside her and she's sealed around me and she's shaking and I'm not going to move.
Good. She feels extraordinary. Scalding and tight and slick-soaked and the Bloodwork in her blood sings against my cock at a frequency I haven't felt from living skin in six hundred years—a harmony that bypasses thought entirely and lands in the base of my spine like a struck bell.
Every clench she gives me travels the full length of the shaft.
I press my thumbs into the bones of her hips and breathe through it because if I don't, the rut will have me moving again before she's recovered, and I'm not done with her yet.
This is only the first lock. We have the rest of the night.
I'm pleased. Deeply, unreservedly pleased in a way that nine centuries of practice at restraint cannot entirely flatten.
I've wanted this since the first night she put a blade to my throat and her pulse hammered against my thumb.
I've wanted it more with every day she spent in my forge doing impossible things with her hands and looking at me like she hated herself for noticing I was watching.
She's here. She's mine in the most fundamental sense the rut understands, and her body is gripping me like it has no interest in ever letting go, and her mind can spend the next three days furious about it.
That's her right. But she's not going anywhere.
For the first time in twenty minutes, the rut quiets.
Not answered. Not finished. But no longer a wall of fire behind my eyes.
Her forehead drops to the stone. The curls at the back of her neck are damp and dark with sweat.
The fighting goes out of her shoulders. She's breathing hard into the rock and her hands have stopped clawing and she isn't reaching for me and she isn't pulling away.
I hold her hips and stay very still. The fire magic pulses through the knot in slow waves and her body answers in rhythm, gripping and releasing, and I let it happen.
She asked for this. She bled for it. She's furious she needed it.
I keep my hands on her hips and don't say a word.