Chapter 24 #2
His arm circles my waist until I’m arched against him. He catches my hair in his fist and pulls my head back, tracing the curve of my throat with his lips, his tongue.
Reaching between us, I tug at the plaid he has wrapped around his hips until that, too, slides to the floor.
“Flora?” Chyr’s voice is a growl, a whimper.
“If I have to marry someone, give myself to someone, then I want to have this first, with someone I’m attracted to, someone I want. Is that selfish? Is it unfair to ask you to give me that?”
“Not unfair. Unwise.”
“I’m tired of thinking about every step I take, worrying all the time. Whatever happens, whoever I have to marry, I’ll try to make the best of it, but I’d like to have something to remember.”
My chest heaves as his teeth nibble at my ear.
I reach up to wrap my forearms around his neck and bring his lips back down to mine.
He untucks the fabric holding the plaid around my chest, and the wool falls to my hips, caught between our bodies.
The calloused warmth of his hands moves from my shoulders across my breasts.
His thumbs brush over my peaked nipples without stopping, without relief.
He lifts each aching breast to meet his mouth, his tongue circling, teeth scraping.
I moan, my eyes unfocused, my breath ragged.
His hands continue their burning slide past my waist. My plaid falls from my hips with a whisper, and his thumbs meet on my stomach, then slip lower until they brush the low crux where desire coils.
I’m naked, and part of me is conditioned to believe I should feel shame or fear. He looks at me with half-lidded eyes that hold both reverence and hunger, and he drops to his knee. I feel no shame, only wonder and a consuming need.
“What do you want?” he asks with that rasp and purr in his voice that is like a feather slowly rolling up my spine.
“Your body. A memory,” I say, knowing that’s only part of it.
“Are you certain?”
“Never more so.”
His gaze doesn’t leave mine again, not even when he leans in to press his lips against the hollow where my thigh meets my hip. His touch is a promise.
But I want to see him, too.
I step back to admire him. Every one of these muscles looks earned, a tool in service of his oaths. In service of who he is.
With a soft curse, he surges to his feet. He’s erect and large, and I never imagined that the shrivelled little things my brothers were so proud of could look like this.
He stoops and lifts me with an arm beneath my shoulders and another beneath my knees. He smells of sweat, the sweetness of Ever blood, and heady, musky desire.
The fire has guttered to embers, but the cold around us only makes the heat we’re creating all the sweeter.
Chyr spreads out one of the plaids and lays me down on it, kissing my shoulder, my throat, the hollow beneath my ear.
Teeth scrape my lower lip. He takes the weight of my breasts in his palms again, caressing the undersides with his thumbs, teasing, his gaze holding my suddenly unfocused eyes.
“I want to give you so much pleasure that you’ll scream my name,” he says.
His mouth comes down slowly, so slowly to my nipple, and he takes it between his lips, draws it in. My body shudders.
There’s warmth—heat. More than the heat of his breath and his tongue. I recognise the bright gold threads of his magic as they echo every suck and rasp of his mouth, spreading across my stomach and down between my legs as though he’s there as well.
I gasp, and he laughs. “You like that? I can do more.”
Then he’s everywhere, and the sensation is bliss like I never imagined feeling. My hands are wrapped around him, my nails clutching for purchase as jolts of pleasure shake through me.
“Spread your legs for me, Fierceness. Let me see you. Let me taste you.”
I pull my thighs wider, making room for him, and then he’s there with his mouth and his magic, moving even deeper inside me, until my entire body is throbbing. Magic makes slow teasing circles at my core while he dips a finger inside me carefully, then adds another.
“More,” I demand. “Please.”
He releases more magic, molten and tingling. I explode, hips bucking, back arching, mind a daze. The world narrows to our heat, to the hum of magic singing through my blood.
Chyr spreads my thighs even wider, watching me as if he’s turning me inside out, reading every twinge of my muscles, every quickened heartbeat. He brings his mouth back to mine, kisses me again.
“Are you certain this is what you want?” he murmurs against my lips. “You don’t understand what I am. I haven’t told you everything.”
I can’t begin to catalogue all that’s in his voice. Grief, shame, hope. It makes me realise how very alone he’s been. Maybe long before his friends died, before this war began. Far longer than I’ve known him. Duty, responsibility, honour—all of those are a devastation of loneliness.
And that is a place in which we both have lived.
I lift my hands and cup his face. “You asked me once if I knew what you were, as if that would make me fear you. I know that your allegiance is not the same as mine. But if we can take comfort in each other even briefly, then it doesn’t matter.”
Chyr kisses me again and eases himself inside me.
There’s a pinch, and he pauses, giving my body time to adjust. I draw him deeper until he fills me.
Then all thoughts of gentleness vanish as we surge together, our bodies and our magic melding until I can’t tell where I end and he begins.
Pleasure builds to a crest, and I fly apart, shuddering, unravelling.
Chyr convulses, his breath ragged, and he holds himself propped on his arms, looking down at me.
“You will haunt me, Fierceness. I’m afraid that you will haunt me.”
I shouldn’t like the sound of that name, but I do. I want to believe I’m fierce enough to save my people, and I want to be brave enough not to regret my mistakes. Yet how much I feel, the intensity of it, scares me as we collapse against each other.
“Is it your wine that’s behind the stories of mortals who become addicted?” I ask. “Or is there something else? Something about Siorai themselves that makes mortals feel addicted?”
He pulls me against him tighter. “Wine, compulsion, lust, love. Wishful thinking.” Then his head lifts, every hint of softness gone. “Wait. You think I’ve compelled you to want me?”
“I’m asking, that’s all. They say those who’ve been touched can never be satisfied, that they’ll do anything anyone wants of them in the hope of feeling the same pleasure.”
“And you think I would do that? To you?” His honey-gold eyes are dark, burning into me, waves of energy seeping out of him as though he’s too angry to contain it. His hand clenches into a fist, and he strikes the shifting bands of runes that circle the thick muscle of his arm.
The blow lands with a thud. The force of it ripples through the cavern. My ears pop, and the fire gutters.
“These oathbands enforce my obedience to the Compact. I swore to them because I believe in them. I don’t believe in taking advantage of someone weaker, whether the weakness is physical, magical, or otherwise.
There is nothing desirable about using force.
I won’t pretend I don’t want you, Flora—I’ve proven how much. But not like that. Never like that.”
His voice is rough, and the energy coming from him tightens my lungs. But I haven’t finished.
“Is there any other reason why humans would be attracted to—would crave—Siorai?” I ask.
His mouth twists, and there’s something lost and a little broken in his expression.
“I swear to you I have no desire to take your power or will away from you. The thought of you giving yourself to a man who wants you for what you can give him instead of loving you for who you are—It makes me want to gut every spineless male in that council of yours. No one should ever try to make you less. Or make you doubt yourself. They should be awed by every careful, calculated cogwork of your mind. You’re brave and fierce, measured and loyal and kind—beautiful enough to haunt a man’s dreams. I know what it’s like to have to live without love, and that should never be your fate. ”
His words open a sluice gate, setting free a torrent of all the things I haven’t dared to allow myself to feel.
I reach for him, my hands tangling in the silky strands of his hair and dragging his mouth down to mine.
He kisses me deeply, intently. Beyond the cave entrance, the sun breaks the horizon, changing the colours of the world, but inside, the light is even brighter. Our skin, his skin and mine, glows with a soft, amber light.
Every part of me that felt filled feels hungry again, craving him. I’m alive and awake, and whatever I was before I found Chyr in the Sacred Wood, I know that I will never be that again.
Outside, the wind quiets, and Glen Fhionain holds its breath. Briefly, the watchfires, the war, the long ride to Muilean—it all retreats, leaving nothing but heat and hunger.