“Inside me,” she whispers. “I need more, Ravager. Harder.”
I kiss her again, her eager breath bursting into my mouth. Then I rise and pick her up. She’s no small woman—she’s a goddess, lithe and long, and I thank the stars for a profession that requires me to stay active and strong so it’s easy for me to lift her and set her lovely bottom on the surface of the lower cabinets, with her back against the shelves. I grip her thighs, wrapping those beautiful legs around my hips. She’s already one step ahead of me, reaching into the heat between us, guiding my cock inside her.
“Don’t be gentle,” she says. “Fuck me like we’re fighting to the death.”
“You’re injured,” I object, but she snarls, “Please,” through gritted teeth, her eyes burning like molten silver, and I can’t deny her.
I grab her wrists and pin them together right above her head, ramming them against the shelves so hard she gasps. Holding them there, I kiss her brutally, nipping at the sore place on her lip with my teeth until it bleeds, and her coppery salt coats my tongue.
At first I think I’ve gone too far, but when I pull back, she’s smiling, her lips wet with blood, her eyes alight with mad fire. I growl and shove my cock into her so hard the shelves shake.Again I thrust, and thrust, staring into her eyes while she stares into mine. I crush her mouth with another remorseless kiss, while she digs her fingernails into my back and my waist.
“Deeper,” she gasps out, reckless tears in her voice. “Make it hurt.”
I ram her against the shelves over and over, a jolting rhythm that must be hurting her spine—but her eyes roll up and drift closed, and I feel her come again.
“Mine,” she says brokenly, clawing me closer even as she’s coming hard on my cock. “You’re mine.”
“Fuck yes.” I kiss her mouth, her cheek, her neck. “And you’re mine.”
She tenses slightly, and then her arms, her legs, and her cunt all relax around me—not desperate, but clinging with soft confirmation. “I’m yours.”
At those words, I come inside her, shoulders heaving, cock throbbing. All the tension rushes out of my body, as if she sucked all the uncertainty and suspicion and fear right out of me. As if the magic between us is enough to create a reality where we are both safe, a future in which we are both loved.
I draw her away from the shelves and pick her up again, keeping myself sheathed inside her. I walk to the kitchen and set her down by the sink. When my cock slips out of her, cum spills onto the counter, so I have her spread herself open again so I can clean every part of her.
“You love pussy, don’t you?” she asks, watching me as I work. “Most men like the idea of it, or the feel of it, but you really love looking at it, tasting it—everything about it.”
“Yes, I do. But the obsession has reached its peak with you. Justlookat you. You have the most perfect cunt I’ve ever seen.”
“Depends on your point of view,” she says. “There are lots of different types of perfect cunts.”
“Yours is my favorite.”
“How lovely for you. Can I get down now?”
“Rude woman. Fine, go ahead.” I smack her thigh lightly, and she giggles. The merriment seems to startle her, and her face falls immediately, as if she has remembered some terrible burden that she forgot while we were fucking.
“Right,” I say slowly. “We need to get dressed so we can blow the place up.”
Soberly she nods, picking up her clothes. “Any ideas?”
“I think I might know a way to do it. But we’re going to need some pots, jars, and buckets, along with all the rope wecan find.”
16
Ravager and I have been hard at work for almost three hours, near as I can judge. Our first task was to find the sentient ooze again and work on separating blobs of it from the rest of the mass. That was the trickiest part—getting bits of the goo away from the main entity. It became much easier when we finally figured out that an iron spike, one of the last items from the Fae-Hunter’s stash, could force the mass to separate.
After that, each of us took turns carving away sections of the ooze while the other coaxed the smaller blobs into containers—pots, bags, pitchers, buckets, jars, anything we could find and close with either a lid or a drawstring. We used everycontainer available to us, until all that was left of the slime entity was a quivering, bulbous mass no bigger than my head. I held my empty pack open while Ravager forced the creature inside with pokes from the iron spike, and then I fastened the pack and tied the top shut for good measure.
Our next order of business was to create fuses out of long lengths of thin rope, heavy twine, or twisted pieces of cloth. We soaked them in leftover oil, butter, and alcohol from the kitchen and ran the lines through every part of the fortress, from the control room above to the storage rooms below, from the front to the back, from east to west. At the end of each fuse, we placed a portion of the ooze. For pots and jars, we stuck the end of the fuse inside before slamming the lid shut again. For bags or bundles full of ooze, we draped the fuse over them and doused the fabric in more oil or wine.
All the ropes, rags, and threads run back to the first-floor hallway, joining up at a point near the damaged remnant of the main staircase.
“This entire fortress is one enormous bomb.” Ravager’s tone is tinged with awe. “My greatest achievement, and no one but you and I will ever know about it.”
I want to tell him that the god-stars themselves will know what he did here today. But I can’t voice the words.
“We need to run a fuse outside,” I say. “We’ll have to get through all this rubble to the front entrance.”
