Chapter 19 #2
We both groan. The sound fills the room. He's deep inside me, filling me completely, and for a moment neither of us moves. Just breathes. Just feels.
"Gods," he says through his teeth. "You are so tight. So wet. I can feel every inch of you squeezing me, and I will not last if you keep looking at me like that."
"Like what?"
"Like you own me." His hands grip my hips. "Because you do. You absolutely do."
I move. Slow rolls of my hips, using the armrests for leverage, finding the rhythm that hits every nerve. His hands tighten on my hips, guiding but not controlling, letting me set the pace.
The vines along the throne respond to my thoughts. I've learned how this works now, how the Verdance reads intent and delivers. So when I think about what I want, the vines obey. Thin, smooth tendrils slide from the base of the throne and curl between his thighs. He jolts, his eyes flying open.
"Elle, what are you…"
"Shh." The vines cup him gently, cradling and rolling with a rhythmic pressure that makes his entire body go rigid. His head slams back against the throne. His fingers dig into my hips hard enough that I'll have bruises tomorrow.
"Fuck." The word tears out of him. "That's. God, Elle. That's… "
"Good?"
"If you stop, I will burn this city to the ground."
I ride him harder. The vines work him from below while I take him from above, and the dual sensation has him wrecked.
He's gasping, cursing, saying my name like it's the only word he knows.
His hips thrust up to meet mine, and every stroke drives him deeper, hitting the spot inside me that makes stars burst behind my eyes.
Then he grabs me.
His hands lock under my thighs, and he lifts me straight up off his lap.
I yelp, grabbing the back of the throne, but he's already calling the vines.
Thicker ones slide from the armrests and wrap around my thighs, supporting my weight, holding me suspended above him at the exact height he wants.
He slides down the throne until his mouth is level with my core, and then he leans forward and buries his face between my legs.
I scream. There's no other word for it. The angle, the suspension, the sudden hot pressure of his tongue, it's overwhelming. I grip the vine supports, and my legs shake in their cradle, and he eats me like a man who has been starving for months and just found his first meal.
"You taste like heaven," he says against me, and the vibration of his voice sends a jolt through my entire body. "I could do this for hours. I could live between your thighs and die happy."
His tongue circles me, flicks, presses flat and drags. He adds his fingers, sliding two inside me while his mouth works the bundle of nerves that controls my entire nervous system. The vines hold me steady while he takes me apart with surgical precision, reading every twitch and gasp and adjusting.
The orgasm hits like a freight train. My whole body locks up, suspended in the vine cradle, and I come so hard my vision whites out. My marks blaze golden. The moss flares. Petals fall from somewhere. I don't care. I am gone.
He lowers me back into his lap before the tremors finish. Slides inside me again while I'm still clenching and oversensitive, and the feeling of him filling me while I'm mid-orgasm nearly breaks me.
"Again," he says against my throat. "I want you to come again. On me. I want to feel it."
"I can't. I just..."
"You can." He rolls his hips, slow and deep, and the friction against my still-swollen clit makes me whimper. "You can and you will, because I'm going to make you. That's what I do, Elle. I make you feel things you didn't think were possible."
He stands. He's still inside me, his hands gripping my thighs, and he carries me three steps to the desk. Maps and battle markers scatter across the floor as he sweeps the surface clear with one arm and lays me back across it.
The wood is smooth and warm beneath my spine. He looms over me, his dark hair falling forward, his silver eyes burning in the low light, his corruption marks pulsing against the gold of my own. He grips my hips and pulls me to the edge of the desk.
"I've been imagining you like this," he says, his voice so low it's nearly a growl. "Spread across my war desk. Naked. Flushed. Looking at me like I'm the only thing in the world that matters."
"You are the only thing that matters."
His jaw flexes. He pushes inside me, one long, slow stroke that fills me to the point of madness, and holds there.
"Tell me you're mine," he says.
"I'm yours."
"Tell me again." He pulls out slowly. Pushes back in harder. The desk groans beneath us.
"I'm yours, Kaelren."
"Again." Harder. Deeper. His hand finds my throat again, his thumb pressed against my pulse.
"I'm yours. I've always been yours. I was yours before I knew what that meant."
Something breaks behind his eyes. The restraint snaps, and he stops being careful. He drives into me hard enough to shove the desk back an inch, then another. I wrap my legs around his waist and meet him thrust for thrust.
The room responds. Moss blazes. Vines along the walls bloom in cascading bursts, flowers opening everywhere as the scent of a thousand blossoms fills the air.
He flips me over. My chest presses against the desk, my feet on the floor, and he's behind me, one hand on my hip and the other pressed flat between my shoulder blades, holding me down.
The new angle is deeper, sharper, and the sound I make when he pushes back inside me is not something I'd want witnesses for.
"This is what I imagined," he says behind me, his voice ragged. "You, bent over my desk, taking everything I give you. Do you know how many nights I lay awake thinking about this? About burying myself inside you and hearing you scream my name?"
"Then make me scream it."
He does. He sets a pace that is relentless and thorough and specifically designed to destroy me.
His hand slides from my hip to between my legs, his fingers finding my clit and pressing in tight, fast circles while he drives into me from behind.
The desk shakes. The floor vibrates. The entire room is alive with light and heat and the wet, desperate sounds of two people who have earned this.
"Come for me," he says. "One more time. I need to feel you come around me. I need it, Elle."
The second orgasm builds differently from the first. Slower.
Deeper. It starts in my core and spreads outward in heavy, rolling waves that make my whole body tremble.
When it breaks, I scream his name into the desk, gripping the edges, my marks blazing so bright the room fills a warm bronze glow.
He follows seconds later, slamming deep and holding there, his forehead dropping between my shoulder blades, his whole body shaking against mine.
We stay like that. Bent over a war desk covered in scattered maps, breathing hard, skin slicked with sweat. His hands move gently now, sliding up my sides, tracing the curve of my waist, pressing softly against my spine. The violence of the last few minutes gives way to something tender and quiet.
He pulls me upright and turns me to face him.
His hands come to my jaw and he holds me there, the same way he did in the alcove on our first day in the Verdance.
But his eyes are different now. Open. Unguarded.
Everything he usually hides behind silver and steel is right there on the surface, and it takes my breath away worse than anything his body just did.
"I love you," he says.
Three words. Simple. No flourish, no dark poetry, no qualifier. Just the raw, bare truth of a man who has fought across realities to stand in front of me and say it.
My eyes burn. My throat closes. I have heard a version of those words before, spoken as I was scattering across time, flung into the void as a last desperate offering.
But this is different. This is two people standing in a room, whole and breathing, looking at each other with nowhere to go and nothing to run from.
"I love you too," I say. "I have loved you since before I understood what that meant in this world. Since before the void. Since the first time you looked at me like I mattered more than anything you'd ever lost."
He kisses me. Slow and deep, with none of the urgency from before. Just warmth and weight, and the taste of someone who means it.
When he pulls back, his forehead rests against mine.
"We should probably pick up the maps," I say.
He glances at the floor. Battle markers everywhere. Maps crumpled and scattered. The desk has moved a full foot from where it started.
"Tomorrow," he says.
"The council will notice."
"Let them."
I laugh. He pulls me against his chest and wraps his arms around me, and we stand there in the ruined war room, naked and covered in petals, as the Verdance hums around us like it's satisfied with its evening's work.