“Fenrik, I love you too” I gasped, the air leaving my lungs in a broken sob. “I’m close. I’m …”
“Come for me,” he growled against my throat, his voice a rough vibration that shot straight to my core. He didn’t slowdown; he drove into me with brutal force, hitting that spot again and again. “Come on my cock, Lysa. Bleed your magic into mine.”
The command snapped the tether. My inner walls clamped down on him, milking the thick ridge of his length, and the world exploded.
Gold light erupted from my skin, blinding and hot, colliding with the silver fire pouring off him. This was the first time my power felt like mine, neither clenched shut, nor borrowed from restraint, but chosen. The magic swirled around the bed, a visible vortex of power that screamedours. I screamed his name as the orgasm ripped through me, a tidal wave of pleasure that bowed my spine off the mattress. I was convulsing around him, my womb clenching in spasms.
Fenrik shouted something guttural, a roar of pure need. He buried himself to the hilt one last time, holding himself deep inside me as his own release overtook him. I felt him pulse inside me, hot, thick jets of spend flooding my womb, filling me, claiming me deep inside where no one had ever touched. The sensation of his release triggering mine all over again was overwhelming. We were drowning in it, in the heat and the wetness and the sheer animalistic force of our joining.
The room shook. Literally shook. As we rode out the aftershocks, spasms wrecking our joined bodies, the house groaned in sympathy. A purr vibrated through the floorboards, humming up through the bed frame like the stone itself wasshivering with pleasure. The air thickened, warming into a golden cocoon. We collapsed.
He was heavy on me, a dead weight of muscle and sweat, but I wouldn’t have pushed him off for the world. He hid his face in the crook of my neck, his breath coming in hitches against my damp skin. He was trembling, fine tremors.
I lay there, legs still tangled with his, feeling the slow seep of him inside me, the slick mess of our fluids cooling on my thighs. My heart hammered against his ribs, two rhythms beating in perfect sync.
I lifted a hand, my fingers trembling, glowing faintly with satisfied gold light and traced the damp valley of his spine. The walls gave a low, settling creak, like a beast curling up to sleep.
“Home,” I whispered into his sweat-damp hair, feeling his cock twitch softly inside me as he began to soften. “We are home.”
twenty-nine
Fenrik
If anyone had told me a month ago that I would be standing here, watching my estate thriving, I would have had them committed to the asylum for the magically unstable.
Through my study window, the greenhouse was a riot of activity. Six Garden Drakes, jewel-toned and utterly industrious, were meticulously pruning the overgrowth. One, a vibrant emerald creature, puffed a jet of flame to incinerate a dead branch, while another swept the ash away with a flick of its tail. They worked with a joyful coordination. Below them, through the long windows of the library, chaos reigned. Briony was sprinting past the shelves, a laughing blur of skirts, pursued by three book-dragons I recognised from the shop in town. They were playing tag with floating pages of what looked like my drier treaties on Ley-Line theory.
“They’ll tear the binding if they aren’t careful,” I said.
On my shoulder, Kirion shifted his weight. The midnight-blue wyrmling was no longer a frantic, skeletal thing of shadow and pain. He was heavy, warm, and grounding, a solid indulgence of scales and silver spine-markings. He let out a smoke-tinged huff against my ear. He agreed; the books would survive.
I rested my hand against the window frame. Beneath the floorboards, the house hummed. It was a steady, rhythmic heartbeat, cycling deep in the stone foundation. The Sentinels in the hall had returned to their alcoves, stone serpents and wolves acting as silent guardians rather than pacing threats.
Peace. It was a foreign taste, but not an unpleasant one. My thoughts, inevitably, drifted to the cause of this peace. To the woman who had walked into my nightmare and turned it into a home. Lysa.
I remembered the sheer relief of our first night, the way I had marked her, claimed her, desperate to erase the memory of every second I had spent without her. I had been terrified I would break her. Instead, she had met my beast with a hunger that matched my own, her gold magic wrapping around my silver fire until we burned the world down together.
And this morning. I had been attempting to dress, standing before the mirror as I wrestled with the buttons of my waistcoat. I needed to act the part of Lord Stormgarde, to meet with the Council regarding the new filtration protocols.
Lysa had watched me from the tangle of sheets, hair wild, her skin glowing with that satiated flush I took pride in putting there.
“You look terrifying,” she had said. “Like you’re about to sentence the mirror to death for treason.”
“I am concentrating,” I had corrected, smoothing the fabric. “Governance requires gravity.”
“Governance requires pants, which you haven’t put on yet.”
She had slipped from the bed then, naked, padding across the cold stone floor. The house had immediately warmed the stones beneath her feet, the traitorous architecture doted on her. She walked right up to me, brushing my hands away from the waistcoat.
“Lysa, I am late,” I had warned, though my pulse had already spiked, betraying me.
“The Council can wait. They’re terrified of you anyway.” She had risen on tiptoes, pressing a kiss to the scar on my throat, her fingers deftly undoing the button I had just fastened. “Besides, I need to check your heart rate. Professional curiosity.”
“My heart is fine.”
“ It’s racing,” she had countered, her hand drifting lower, her palm cool against my skin. She raised an eyebrow, that hazel gaze dancing with mischief. “Compromised. Clearly, you need treatment.”
I had lost the battle instantly. I had pinned her against the wardrobe, the ‘gravity of governance’ forgotten in favor of liftingher hips and burying myself inside her right there, while she laughed breathlessly against my mouth.
