Chapter 41
Chapter forty-one
Ashara
The Fulfilment
My calves met the bed, and his body toppled over mine, pinning me beneath him.
I gasped, breathless from the crush of his weight, his chest heaving to the rhythm of my own, his hips angled into mine.
His hardness was rigid between us, relentlessly grinding against that spot that wouldn’t cease throbbing.
But his face…it was a luxury—to look upon him, able to read the desire and adoration in his eyes.
I’d become too used to metal, to mesh and chain and helms. I traced every feature, trying to lose myself in the furrow of his brow, the curve of his smile, the shadow of his dimple that flickered in the light of the tapers.
But try as I might, the ghost of Lycandor’s body was reluctant to fade.
I roved over the solid flesh above me, so much warmer than just a ghost. To the pits with guilt, shame, and remorse. Overwrought and useless, anyhow.
As our skin fused together, flush from our chests to our toes, I reasoned nothing in the world or the beyond could ever feel as right as this.
His hand glided between us, reaching down, parting me with confident, already-slick fingers.
“You are so fucking wet. Ashara, how are you this fucking wet?” He sighed into my lips, his fingers pressing into my cheeks in mock accusation.
For a heartbeat, it wasn’t him; it was Lycandor’s thumb forcing open my mouth, his deep rumble replacing Demetri’s husk in my ear.
A druid, Ashara. They’re consuming us. Diseased.
Thank the Other Demetri wasn’t blessed like Lycandor, for even I couldn’t trust my own thoughts.
Truths or lies, either way they would hurt, and I didn’t want to hurt.
Gods, I craved something good, something that felt so fucking good.
And Demetri’s fingers, swirling round the aching crest of me, felt better than good.
He dragged them to my entrance, moving back and forth, grazing my clit in long, languid swipes.
I ground on him, chasing pleasure after so much pain. He dipped them inside me.
Smiling into my mouth, he kept pace, practiced at what made me beg, though he had never dared to breach this far inside. When I panted, nails digging into his arms, I knew he’d sense I was close. So deliciously close.
I bit down on his lip, fiddling it between my teeth as he sunk his fingers into a tight, unexplored space where neither of us had ever been.
I sighed, opening wider for him. My body welcomed rather than barricaded, unfurled rather than closed.
It was as if he were deep enough to reach up and grab hold of my heart, to stroke and coax and tease it.
And it felt good. Gods, it felt good.
“It may hurt,” he warned, an echo of what he’d said on our first night in the templum. His fingers turned gentle, pulling away and taking me down from that ledge.
I cradled his face, stroking his cheeks with the pads of my thumbs, a wobbly smile rippling over my own.
“I know what it is to hurt, Demetri. The whip hurt. The death of my mother hurt. Falstaff hurt, the acolyte, the templum…it all hurt, hurt, hurt.” I kissed him once, chastely, in the centre of his swollen lips. “This? This will not hurt.”
He rubbed my waist, then my hips, in firm, flowing circles, before gripping the base of his arousal, lining its head to the open, aching part of me.
“Make the hurt stop, Demetri. Take it from me. I’m done with it. Take it. Take it all.”
And take, he did.
Sliding into me, the world ceased to exist. There was nothing, just an abyss, an emptiness, save for the two of us, fused as one on the bed. I was right. This didn’t hurt. It stretched, yes—it insisted, it claimed—but it was the farthest thing from pain I could imagine.
He took a great, shuddering breath, and I laughed. I laughed at the scoundrel, so confident that the first time he’d ravish me, he’d last the whole night, now reduced to a quivering mess after the first stroke.
I liked it, the power. I felt almighty, like upon the Blood Tree’s dais, when it all turned to ash. But I stood upon no dais; instead, I was laid on my back, lording from beneath, not above. And Demetri was no tree, but a man, reduced not to ashes, but still desperate, panting like a dog.
“Darling boy, do you need a moment?” I sighed, my voice marbled with want.
“Just one. Then you’re going to mind your tone, you smug little wretch, or I’ll fuck it right out of you.”
“Do I feel good?” I teased, tensing around him, thighs shaking, drenched in my need.
“Good?” he choked. “Darling, you feel like the dip of my heart every time I glanced you across the pews. You feel like coming home to a hearth after an age lost to a storm. You feel like what I hope the bliss of the beyond feels like: eternity, peace, godsdamned becoming. You feel like flying. So no, you don’t feel good; you feel like something the chappellums failed to inspire… divine, fucking rapture.”
He thrust inward. I soundlessly gaped, unable to form words around the motions of him filling me again, again, and again as he made good on his promise to render me silent.
I felt every dip of him, every texture and bump ripple through me, rattling the bed with our abandon.
Eyes rolling into the back of my head, I was lost to the feel of him, pushing himself into me like he never wished to leave.
“Ashara, stay with me.” Thrust. With hooded lids, I returned to him, face haloed by curls.
His strokes slowed, but deepened, and I moaned, a wild, profane sound that would have had my cheeks reddening if I hadn’t vowed to shed shame.
“If we had time,” he said as he rolled into me again, stomach taut, shining with sweat, “I’d make a mess of these sheets for turns, if not days.
” Thrust. “I’d make up for every lost breath.
” Thrust. “Every turn”—thrust—“I was not buried inside you.” Thrust.
Mouth parted, all I could do was gasp, clinging to his strained biceps as he fucked me into the linens.
“Forgive me, darling, but I have neither the self-control for all that, nor the time.” His hips stilled and I wiggled, hunting for that glorious friction, desperate for the feel of him moving within me.
“You take me so well.” He bent his neck, peering down to where we joined.
“Fuck me, Ashara. You’re perfect…we’re perfect.
We were made for each other.” Before I could raise to my elbows, desperate to see how harmoniously we slotted together, he nudged me back down, filling me to the hilt.
Breathless, I threw my head back, the thickness of him almost, almost, too much.
“I’m going to fuck you hard and fast and get you screaming before any druids ruin our fun.”
Before my stomach had time to dip, his hand reached down for my clit, rubbing it in tight circles whilst he made good on his word.
Lycandor believed my blood could tremble the earth, but there were other ways to feel the ground quake, and I swear, the very foundations of the templum shook with the colliding of our bodies.
If not the stone, then the bed. It creaked with our writhing, the wet slap of us somehow not crude, but a war drum, a protest.
Fuck the Dendralis, it thrummed.
Fuck the chappellums, and the druids, and the acolytes, and the monks.
Fuck the scripture, fuck the templum.
Warmth bloomed, not in my chest, but my core, rippling out from his fingers and a place deep, deep inside me.
“Ashara,” he groaned, slowing, “I’m a man, not the fucking Blood God, and you will be my undoing if you don’t stop clenching around me. I want you undone first.”
“Keep going, keep going,” I begged, wanting that warmth, chasing that warmth.
“You’ll be the death of me.”
With a few more artful turns of his fingers, I unseamed, a great bubbling spilling over from the point where his flesh touched mine, until it filled, top-toe full of the greatest ecstasy that rivalled my blessing.
He smirked down at me, white teeth clasping his lip—eyes hooded, brow furrowed, the bottom of one side of his mouth hanging open. I’d seen that look before, on the faces of devout Thromarrians on their knees before the chappellum’s cloister yard.
He held me tight as he spilled, groaning into my neck, stroking my arms, fisting my hair, his motions desperate and frantic. Our chests rose and fell together, like a tide drawing out. He leaned back, still inside me, still hard.
“You’ve never been more beautiful than in this instant.
” His eyes shone with the clarity of truth, though glazed and lidded with lust. Our noses touched, and we wiggled the tips of them against one another, like we used to do in the yard.
“Spread out beneath me,” he continued, “flushed, wanting, free. How could this ever be a sin, when to be inside you is deliverance?”
“Silver tongue.” I clicked, tracing the seam of said tongue with my finger since he’d stuck it out at me.
He nipped at me. “My tongue may be silver, but beyond knows your cunt’s made of gold. Fuck, I thought I was done for on the first dip inside you.”
I pulled a ringlet of his hair whilst he licked his lips, eyes skimming every inch of me.
“I can’t wait to do that again.” A kiss, slower this time, deeper, his tongue lapping at my mouth with a gentle sort of hunger. Below, the softening swell of him hardened again, plugging the essence that dripped from within me, wetting the sheets.
“But as much as I want to right now,” he murmured into my mouth. “We have a druid to tolerate and a templum to get the fuck out of.”
After the rush of heat, a small trickle of coldness crept in, just at my toes, contained for now. We were in his bed, atop his sheets, now damp with our lust. It was his shirt puddled on the floor.
A dirty taste coated my mouth, something I couldn’t swallow away.