I braced myself against the maze wall, panting, while my body convulsed with need. The tonic had been getting worse since he touched me. Every hour brought new peaks, new desperate clenching, new floods of wetness that left my pants completely ruined.
I couldn't walk without the seam dragging across my clit. Couldn't breathe without smelling traces of his scent on the air. Couldn't think about anything except the way his fingers had felt inside me, the way his cock had pressed against my entrance, the way he'd promised to give me everything when I was ready to ask properly.
What did properly mean? I'd begged. I'd said please. I'd offered myself to him in every way I knew how.
It hadn't been enough.
Maybe this was what he wanted. Maybe he got off on watching me suffer. Maybe the whole "waiting for her to choose" thing was just an excuse to torment me, to edge me until I was so broken I'd agree to anything.
The thought should have made me angry. Instead, it made me desperate. Because even if he was playing games with me,even if this was all manipulation, he was still the only one who could give me relief. The tonic had made sure of that.
The sky was changing. I'd been watching the pressure build all day, feeling the atmospheric shift that preceded something violent. The wind had picked up in the last hour, carrying dust and fragments that stung my exposed skin.
The storm. The one he'd warned me about. The one that stripped flesh from skeleton.
I walked faster. The Keep. I needed to reach the Keep before it hit.
The first boneshard caught me across the forearm.
I didn't see it coming. One moment I was walking, the next a sliver of ancient calcium had sliced through my sleeve and opened a three-inch gash in my skin. Blood welled up immediately, bright red against pale flesh.
Then the wind really hit.
I'd weathered storms on a dozen colony worlds. Had hunkered down in prefab shelters while hurricanes screamed overhead, had ridden out seismic events in reinforced bunkers. None of it prepared me for this.
The wind carried bone. Fragments of creature that had been dead for millennia, ground sharp by centuries of erosion, flying through the air like shrapnel. They hit me from all directions, slicing through fabric, opening cuts on my arms, my legs, my face. The pain was everywhere, constant, impossible to escape.
I ran.
Not toward the Keep. I couldn't see it. I couldn't see anything except white dust and flying bone, couldn't hear anything except the shriek of wind through the formations around me. I ran blind, arms raised to protect my face, blood streaming from a dozen wounds.
Another shard caught my thigh, deep enough that I stumbled. Another grazed my scalp, leaving a line of fire across my head. Blood ran into my eyes, mixed with dust, blinded me further.
I was going to die here.
I was going to be stripped to skeleton like the creatures whose remains made up this territory. Going to become part of the bone field, another set of calcium formations for some future engineer to study.
The thought should have terrified me. Instead, something bitter and broken laughed inside my chest.
At least no one was pretending it was love. At least this death was honest. At least the storm wasn't asking me to co-sign anything.
Something massive blocked the wind.
I slammed into it before I registered it was there. Hard surface, warm despite the screaming air, shaped like armor plates and dense muscle. Hands gripped my arms, steadied me, pulled me against a body that could shelter me from the storm.
Him.
I couldn't see his face through the dust. I could only feel the solidity of him, the protection of his bulk, the way his body curved around mine to block the flying bone. His arms wrapped around me, one across my back, one behind my head, pressing my face into his chest.
Safe. For this moment, I was safe.
"You're hurt."
His voice cut through the wind somehow. That grinding stone sound, right against my ear, vibrating through my skull.
"I'm fine." I wasn't fine. Blood was running down my face, my arms, my legs, dripping onto his armor and washing away in the wind. "I need to get to shelter."
"Yes."
