“Are you certain, my Aro’el?”
Oh suns, so sweet. But I didn’t want sweet.
I wanted salt. I wanted storms.
He smiled like a knife and rammed himself home.
I cried out, and he laughed, pushing deep, sliding deeper, stronger, shoving himself into me until I cried out again and again. I lifted my thighs to swallow him.
“Yes,” I snarled through clenched teeth. “Good.”
“Good?” He grinned as he struck again.
“So good!”
I pulled him deeper still. He met me readily, his hands wylde, his lunges wylder, beating like a breaker or a distant drum.I didn’t want to close my eyes. I wanted to see him, but the waves were coming. I’d waited so long, and I wanted surrender. I wanted to drown. He’d found his rhythm, and this time, I would dance. The meeting of our hips, the friction of our bellies. The soft and the hard, the rough and the smooth. He grabbed my shoulders, and we rolled, and suddenly I was over the side, my head flung back through the hole in the floor. I clutched his arms, but he had me firm, and he pounded me fast, my hair whipping over the abyss, my cries frosting with the coldness of the sea.
We rolled again, and he grinned down at me, our bodies damp and glistening in the moonslight.
“My wylde runechaser,” he panted.
Hels, he was enjoying this.
“Fog me, yes.”
“I will.”
He leaned down to kiss me, and I wrapped my legs around his waist. There was no chimeric, now. There was no rune. There was only a man and a woman in a shattered cabin on the sea. Slow and deep, and my head arched back. I closed my eyes, twisting my fist in his hair, clawing his steely shoulders as they strained and bunched. Finding the rhythm and making it burn. Rougher, harder, deeper, faster, mounting a Dreadwall of our own. Rougher, harder, deeper, faster, and I abandoned all thoughts to the feverish rhythm. Higher and further I went, lifting out of myself as the waves began to hit, and I cried out, soaring into the moonslight, over the bergs, over the volcano that spewed cinnamon, until my spine arched and the colors popped and my fingers curled as I held him to me, held him in me, and his shudders sent me all the way over the Dreadwall.
I flew like a raven. I flew with a winter hawk.
Suns, it was a good long flight.
My body bucked once, twice, three times as I came down,wringing out the last embers of pleasure like waves after a storm. I sank into the floorboards, body spent, breath ragged, surfing the eddies that rippled and rolled.
Rise and fall.
Ebb and swell.
There was a cool breeze on my cheek, and I turned my face to look at the bay. It was so very beautiful, and I drank it in. Tomorrow, everything would change.
I lay there, thinking of my previous life, before I’d seen the Ship of Spells. Fogging had always been a mercenary thing, quick and rough and satisfying enough. I was always gone before the suns, never wanting to face the longing hearts or cutting eyes of my lovers. But Forge, this was different. He was different, and I didn’t want to leave at all.
Or maybe I was the one that was different now.
He was stretched beside me, propped on one elbow, tracing the talon scars along my collarbone with a finger. They were part of the rune pattern, and they lit up under his touch.
“I gave you these,” he said.
“They’re part of my story, now,” I said.
His hair had fallen into his eyes, and I reached up to slide it to the side. Forge, it was soft, like strands of Braithian silk.
“What does Kier mean?” I asked, and he smiled down at me.
“Moon,” he said.
“And Gavriel?”
