But he did.
I felt it.
And he knows I felt him noticing.
His hand moves to my other hip. The unscarred one. Traces the same pattern across unmarked skin.
Comparing. Testing. Confirming what he suspects.
"Kess—"
"Don't." My voice comes out rougher than I intend. "Whatever you're about to say. Don't."
He goes still beneath me. I feel the words he wants to say pressing against the inside of his chest, feel his worry through the bond—sharp and jagged and desperate to be voiced.
Then: "Okay."
Just that. No argument. No pushing.
But the worry doesn't fade. If anything, it sharpens. And my own fear rises to meet it, both of us sitting in the wreckage of weapons and silence, both of us keeping secrets we're too afraid to share.
The knot finally starts to soften.
Twenty minutes. Maybe thirty. I lose track of time, floating in the strange intimacy of being locked together, feeling him pulse inside me, feeling each weak spurt as his body wrings out the last of his release. When he finally slips free, I feel the rush of his cum trying to follow—my cunt clenches instinctively, omega instincts trying to keep his seed in, but there's too much. It spills down my thighs, hot and thick, mixing with slick until I'm dripping onto the training mat beneath us.
He uses his ruined shirt to clean us both. Gentle hands wiping cum and slick from my thighs, from where it's leaked down to pool beneath me. Careful touches treating me like I'm something precious instead of someone who just tried to kill him with a practice sword.
Neither of us mentions the scars.
Neither of us mentions contamination.
Neither of us is brave enough to be honest.
Not yet.
13
Kess
I waketo the smell of steel and sex, my cheek pressed against rough canvas and my whole body aching like I've been thrown down a mountainside.
For a moment I don't know where I am. Stone floor beneath me—no, a training mat. Weapons racked on the walls, gleaming dully in the pale morning light that filters through high windows. The armory. Right.
I'm alone. The mat beside me still holds the impression of his body, the fabric creased where he lay, but the warmth is long gone.
My thighs are bruised, my hips feel like someone took a hammer to them, and the bite on my shoulder throbs in time with my heartbeat. The weapon rack we fucked against is still askew, two swords and a spear lying on the floor where they fell, and looking at it brings back a flash of sense-memory so vivid I have to close my eyes—his hands lifting me, the cold metal at my back, the brutal stretch of him forcing his way inside.
But something's wrong.
The light through the windows—it's only been one night. I can tell by the angle, by the particular quality of early morningsun I've learned to recognize in my weeks here, the way it paints gold stripes across the eastern wall.
One night.
My last heat lasted four days, waves of fever and need crashing over me until I lost track of where I ended and he began. Before that—the blackout heats I spent alone in the wilderness—three or four days each, as far as I could tell from the gaps in my memory, from waking bloody and sore in unfamiliar clearings.
This one hit like a wildfire and burned out just as fast.
I press my hand to my chest, feeling for the fever that should still be raging, the desperate need that should be clawing at my insides. Nothing. Just the normal warmth of my own body, the lingering satisfaction humming through my blood like an echo of pleasure. The desperate, clawing need that drove me to lock myself in the armory—gone, vanished, like a storm that blew through and left only wreckage behind.
