40. Chapter 40 #4
I gasped. I tilted forward and kissed him ferociously.
He groaned—a sound that started in his chest and ended in my throat—and pressed me harder into the pole, devouring me right back.
We were drenched. Sweat and slick and the remnants of power still humming on our skin.
Where his body met mine there was no friction left—just heat and our drenched bodies and the obscene, perfect slide of him moving in and out of me.
I rolled my hips. Slow. A lazy, grinding circle that made his breath stutter against my mouth.
He matched the rhythm. Kissed me in the same tempo—deep, unhurried, his tongue moving the way his hips moved.
He pulled back. Slid in. Every inch deliberate. The delicious drag of him—the stretch, the fullness, the aching slide out and the devastating push back in. Again. Again. Like he was memorizing the shape of me from the inside.
I tightened around him. His teeth caught my lip. His rhythm sharpened—pressure building, his hips tilting so his base ground against my clit with every thrust. Full and deep and exactly where I needed him.
The need climbed and he answered it. Drove into me with everything he had—no armor between us, no holding back.
His full power. His full weight. Given freely because I asked for it.
His mouth found my neck. Teeth and tongue and the hot scrape of his breath as his hips slammed harder.
The angle shifted—there—and the pressure built in a tight, spiraling coil at the base of my spine.
Building. Building. My head fell back against the pole.
The sky filled my vision—whole and blazing, colors so vivid they ached.
Violet and gold and the deep, impossible blue of a world that had just remembered how to be alive.
I let it blur. Let everything blur except the place where his body met mine.
"You're mine now, Little Fox," he growled against my ear. "Are you ready to do this for eternity?"
We already have been.
The thought arrived with a certainty that wasn't entirely mine. A thousand years of reaching, finally answered.A laugh bubbled out of me—wild, unhinged—then I sank my teeth into his neck. Claiming him viciously.
He snarled. His palm cracked across my ass hard enough to jolt my hips forward onto him.
The sound I made was indecent.
He laughed. Low and dark and so satisfied I wanted to stab him a little.
"Like that, did you?" he said while nipping at my lip.
I lunged for his neck again. He caught my jaw this time though, and his hand came down on the other side of my ass. Harder. The sting bloomed hot across my skin and he drove into me at the same time. He pinned me to the pole with his hips, his cock, and the sheer devastating power of him.
I shattered.
Not like before—not the world-breaking, Fury-fueled obliteration.
This one was quieter. Deeper and more primal.
It cracked me open from the inside and everything I'd been holding poured out at once.
I came and I laughed and I cried and my whole body started shaking—tremors rolling through me that had nothing to do with the orgasm and everything to do with the fact that it was over.
His arms wrapped around me. Tight. Holding me against his chest while I fell apart.
"Shh. Shh." His mouth was in my hair. His voice cracked at the edges. "It's over now. You did it, Little Fox. It's all over now."
He kissed me tenderly. "I'm so proud of you."
When the shaking finally slowed, he pressed his lips to my temple.
"Here. Let's get you down."
He pulled out of me slowly. I hissed at the loss and my legs didn't even try to hold me up—he caught my weight, lowered me until my knees found the stone. I sagged into him. Every muscle wrung out. Every bone liquid.
His fingers found the knots at my wrists.
Worked them loose. The same hands that had tied them, undoing what we'd chosen together.
The rope fell away and my arms dropped heavy against his shoulders.
The skin beneath was raw. He lifted one wrist to his mouth and pressed his lips to the marks.
Then showered the other with the same attention.
His hands drifted down after that, to the rope still cinched around my waist and the bindings at my legs. He undid them one by one with the same measured care, his touch unhurried, reverent, as though every loosened knot was its own kind of mercy.
One by one, the griffins peeled away from the protective circle. Seven noble creatures standing sentinel around an altar that had once been a place of violation. They'd held the line. Given us the space to do what needed doing.
Above us, the sky stretched endless and whole. Blue and clear and impossibly, painfully beautiful. No wound. No tear. No hungry void reaching through from the other side.
I closed my eyes and buried my face in his neck. I breathed him in—sweat and iron, spent magic and the undeniable heat of living skin.
Alive.
The word felt foreign, a truth that hadn't quite settled into my bones.
Eryndor pulled me flush against his chest, his hold desperate, tight enough to bruise. I let him. I needed the pressure. I gripped him back just as fiercely.
We stayed like that—on the basalt where everything had almost ended, breathing each other in, refusing to let go.