Selah
We wait in the watchtower. One of the support beams along the far wall has split clean through, and the ladder to the upper platform is missing three rungs. The narrow window slits face the harbor road, which means we can see the torchlight moving below without being seen ourselves.
Droza is crouched near the window with his wings folded tight, and even then his shoulders nearly touch both walls. I sit on the floor with my knees drawn up and the relic tucked into my pocket. Every muscle in my body is still, convinced it should be running.
Below us, six scouts pass in a slow column. They carry spelled lanterns that cast violet light, which means they are searching for magic signatures rather than people. I watch one of them pause near the tower and hold his lantern up toward the door. They see nothing and turn back down the road.
In the dark, Droza’s gold eyes catch the faint light from below and hold it. He watches the window.
“You haven’t slept,” I say, “since you woke up. Not once.”
“No.”
I shift closer to the wall and the space between us narrows from two feet to one. The tether responds immediately, like current moving beneath still water.
“I told Corvin I could do this alone,” I say. “Before Gullhaven. I told myself I’d keep moving alone until I found somewhere far enough to stop.”
“I know.”
“I can’t anymore. I don’t feel safe when you’re not near me, and I hate that it’s true, and I’m telling you anyway because I think you already know.”
“I know,” he says again, and his voice lower, “because I feel it. When the tether goes quiet, and I know you are sleeping, it is the only time in a century that something in my chest has not felt like it was about to fracture. I stand on that roof every night and count your breaths through the wall because I cannot tolerate the alternative.” He stops. “It is not rational. I am aware.”
“It’s not rational for me either.”
I reach up and press my palm against his jaw.
He goes completely still beneath my hand. His skin is warm, warmer than stone has any right to be, and the runes carved into his jaw pulse faintly against my hand like a second heartbeat.
“Selah.” My name in his mouth sounds like both a warning and a surrender.
“I know,” I say, and I pull him down to me.
He moves carefully at first. His hands find my face first. His thumbs settle along my cheekbones, and he simply holds me there for a moment and looks. His gold eyes move over my features slowly in the dark.
His hands move to my hair, his fingers sliding into the loose coil of it and spreading it free, and then down to my shoulders, the curve of my arms. He maps me completely, without wasted motion, like he is building something he intends to rely on. Everywhere he touches lights up warm and resonant.
I press my mouth to his throat.
He goes rigid. Every muscle along his chest and shoulders locks in a single breath, and then he exhales in a sound that seems to have been stored somewhere very deep for a very long time.
I feel his pulse against my lips, faster than stone should allow, and I drag my mouth along his jaw, the scarred ridge of his collarbone, tasting the warmth of him.
His hands tighten in my hair. He draws me back up to face him, tilts my chin with his thumb.
He finally kisses me properly, and it’s the most undone I have ever seen anything.
He kisses with complete attention as if there is nothing else in the world that requires it.
When he finally pulls back, his gold eyes track over my face and find what they are looking for there.
I hold his gaze and reach for the laces at my collar.
He watches my hands for exactly two seconds before his own replace them.
He peels each layer back one at a time. His jaw tightens, and his eyes darken incrementally, gold bleeding into amber, with each layer that gives way.
When his palms finally spread flat against my bare skin, we both stop.
His hands are enormous and warm and faintly rough, rougher along the fingers where he has gripped weapons and cliffsides for a century. The contrast of them against my skin is enough to make my breath catch audibly.
The runes along his throat flare from faint gold to something closer to firelight, spreading toward his shoulders as his hands begin to move.
He strips the rest of my clothing away, unhurried and thorough. The last of the cloth falls away.
I reach for him in return.
He stays still under my hands while I work at his own clothing, though still is a relative term.
His breathing has changed, each breath deeper and less controlled than anything I have heard from him.
The runes spread further with every inch of contact, crawling down from his throat across his chest and shoulders, lighting the old scars there in faint gold.
I follow one of them with my fingertips from his collarbone to his sternum to feel the warmth radiating from it, and his sharp inhale is quiet.
He is solid in a way that exceeds muscle. Every plane of him is dense and warm and real.
“You can touch me,” I tell him.
“I am touching you.” His voice has dropped below its usual register.
“Touch me more.”
He holds my gaze for one breath. Then his mouth finds my throat and stays there, dragging slowly along my pulse.
His hands begin to move. They span my ribs, my waist, and trace upward until his palms cover my breasts.
He is unhurried about it. It should be maddening, but instead pulls a low breath from me before I can stop it.
His thumbs trace slow circles against my skin, once and then again, adjusting the pressure fractionally when my breath changes, reading the feedback through the tether and through his own hands simultaneously.
I arch into him.
He makes a low satisfied sound against my neck—quiet and proprietary and warm—and the vibration of it travels through every point of contact between us.
His mouth follows the path his hands have cleared, dragging down my collarbone, across my sternum, until his lips close over one peak.
I dig both hands into his shoulders and stop pretending I am still in possession of my composure.
His tongue moves in a slow circle, and I feel it everywhere.
He hears the change in my breathing and does it again.
By the time his hand slides between my thighs I am already gripping his shoulders to stay anchored.
He cups me first, warm and patient, and the deliberateness of it, the sheer refusal to rush, pulls a sound from my throat that I feel in my face. His fingers begin to move, first sliding between my folds and then slowly entering my body.
I understand that thorough is simply how Droza is made.
He reads every sound I make and every shift of my hips with complete attention, adjusting pressure and pace, returning without hesitation to the places that make my breath break.
Each stroke builds with a precision that makes it very clear he has decided this is where we are, and we are staying here until he is satisfied.
I stop trying to be quiet.
His fingers become more insistent, curling within me to stroke a spot that feels like electric pleasure sparking through my blood.
It builds and builds until I can no longer contain it.
I come apart for the first time in my life, splintering in bliss in his hand.
It moves through me in a long wave. My face is pressed to his neck, one hand fisted in his hair.
He goes still and holds me through it, his hand staying exactly where it is, and when I surface, he draws back to look at my face.
“Again,” he says.
“Droza—” I can barely get his name out evenly.
“Again.” His fingers begin to move, slow and deliberate, dragging a sharp breath from me immediately. “I have been inside stone for a century, Selah. I am not rushing this.”
He takes his time. He takes all of it. His mouth finds my throat again, and his fingers work with patient, relentless focus. I cannot locate the edges of what I am feeling, and when the second orgasm hits me, it is harder and less quiet. He makes a low sound against my hair that I feel in my spine.
By the time he settles over me, I have nothing left to pretend with.
He wraps my legs around him and lines himself up with me.
He watches my face as he presses forward, holding my gaze.
The heat of him is almost scorching. He is huge and the slow stretch of him pulls a sound from me I couldn’t have held back if I had tried.
He stops. His forehead drops to mine. His own breathing is unsteady, and I feel through the tether how much holding still is costing him.
“Should I stop?”
“No.” I curl my hands into the solid warmth of his back, pulling him closer rather than away. “I mean it. Don’t stop.”
He sets a deep, rhythmic pace, sinking his member further into me until we are pressed against each other.
Each movement sends heat spiraling outward.
My pleasure and his, layered and compounding in the tether that ties us, feeds back on itself until the distinction between what I feel and what he feels stops existing entirely.
His mouth finds my throat. His hands grip my hips with complete possession, angling me precisely where he wants me, adjusting when I gasp and driving deeper.
The sound he makes when I drag my nails down his back is low and entirely unguarded.
I pull him harder, and he thrusts deeper.
The careful restraint he has been holding since the moment I reached for him finally goes.
What replaces it is consuming and entirely focused on me, and I give myself to it because it’s all I want anymore.
He fills the whole of my senses with his warmth, his weight, the drag and press of him, the low sounds he makes against my throat that he has probably not made in a century.
I bury my face in his neck to suppress a scream as I can’t hold back the pleasure any more. My hands twisted in whatever I can reach. He follows a moment later, his whole body locking against mine, a broken sound in his throat, and I am filled with his heat.
We stay tangled together, breathing heavily. I press my fingers to the center of his chest and feel his heart hammering hard beneath my palm.
He’s more alive than anything I have ever touched. He has wrapped himself around me, one massive arm under my head. Being near him is a comfortable sleeping arrangement, but not by any conventional measure. It is the safest I have felt since before I understood what danger was.
His breathing slows.
I feel the exact moment he stops fighting it. The tether goes quiet and warm and steady, and I understand that I am the first thing Droza the Harbor Warden has trusted enough to sleep beside in nearly a century.
I count his breaths until they are even, and I let the warmth in my chest do whatever it is going to do.