I released her hips to grip her thighs instead, spreading her wider, opening her up completely, driving deeper with each powerful thrust. Her hands immediately flew to my back, nails raking down my spine hard enough to draw blood, hard enough to leave marks that would last for days. The sting of it made me groan deep in my chest, made me lose what little control I'd been maintaining, and surrender completely to the primal need consuming us both.
We were both beyond gentleness now. This was raw and primal and exactly what she needed—what we both craved in this moment of desperate connection. The firelight painted her skin in amber and gold, illuminating the flush blooming across her chest, and the way her lips parted with each ragged breath, the wild, untamed desperation burning in her eyes.
I felt her body tightening around me, coiling like a spring wound to its breaking point. I shifted my grip, one hand slidingbetween our sweat-slicked bodies to where we were joined, and she keened—a sound somewhere between pleasure and pain—her whole body shuddering beneath the onslaught of sensation.
"Let go," I growled against the shell of her ear, my voice rough and barely coherent. "Give it to me. All of it. Everything."
When she finally shattered, it was with a cry that held all her anguish, all her fury and grief and helplessness, her body clenching around me in powerful waves that threatened to drag me under completely. I followed her over the edge moments later, holding her so tightly I couldn't tell where my body ended and hers began, pouring everything I had into her as white-hot pleasure obliterated thought and reason.
We collapsed together in a tangle of limbs, both gasping for air, sweat-slicked and trembling. For a long moment, neither of us moved, our hearts thundering against each other in wild rhythm, our bodies still intimately joined.
Then Jordan released a shuddering breath, and I felt some of the terrible tension finally drain from her muscles.
"Better?" I asked softly, brushing damp strands of hair from her flushed face.
She nodded against my chest, her fingers absently tracing the angry red marks she'd left on my skin. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to—"
"Don't." I caught her wandering hand, brought it to my lips, and pressed a kiss to her knuckles. "Never apologize for taking what you need from me. That's what I'm here for. What I'll always be here for."
She was quiet for a heartbeat, then another. "I love you."
"I love you." I pulled her closer, tucking her against me as her heartbeat gradually slowed to match mine. "Always."
The sky was just beginning to lighten with the first hints of dawn when we finally drifted back to sleep, tangled together in the furs, her demons quieted by exhaustion and release.
Chapter 15
Jordan
Everyone was well again and, thanks to the CDC, vaccinated against smallpox and a myriad of other diseases. The common house had been sterilized and everything we couldn't disinfect had been burned. I'd stood in the cold morning air, arms crossed against the chill, watching with the rest of the clan as the last of the contaminated items went up in flames. The acrid smoke rose into the gray sky in thick, oily plumes, carrying with it the remnants of a nightmare that had nearly destroyed this community.
But something gnawed at me, persistent as a splinter working its way deeper under skin.
Where the hell did the Orcs get smallpox in the first place?
The CDC had been working on it for weeks and were no closer to finding patient zero. There were some crazies in Franklin pitching a fit, saying the Orcs brought it up from the bowels of the earth, that it was some ancient plague from whatever hell-dimension they crawled out of.
Complete garbage.
Smallpox belonged to humanity—our disease, our curse, as distinctly human as the ability to lie or wage war over imaginary lines on a map. Viruses didn't materialize from thin air, didn't ooze through cracks in reality or bubble up from subterranean lairs like something out of a bad fantasy novel.This particular monster had been hunted to extinction decades ago, its last specimens imprisoned in exactly two places on earth. High-security laboratories where even the air was filtered, monitored, and probably given a stern talking-to before being allowed to leave.
So how the hell did it end up here? How did a dead disease find its way to an isolated Orc settlement in the ass-end of nowhere?
The question wouldn't leave me alone. It paced circles in my skull while I helped Zuhra haul cleaning supplies into the common house. The CDC techs in their moon suits had moved through the building meticulously, disinfected, collected samples and murmured into their recorders. They'd confirmed it was variola major—the genuine article, the killer strain, not some watered-down cousin or look-alike. But when it came to explaining how it got here?
Radio silence.
Either they didn't know, or someone had decided I didn't need to know.
The scrub brush bit into the floorboards as I attacked another stain, channeling my frustration into the repetitive motion. Scrub, rinse, repeat. As if elbow grease and determination could somehow scour away the memories of those horrible few weeks.
Beside me, Ryhain moved with surprising delicacy for someone who could probably bench-press a small car. Her massive hands wielded the antiseptic-soaked rag like a surgical instrument, treating each wooden bench with the reverence of a sacred ritual. The hospital-grade disinfectant Kelsey sent stung my eyes and seared my nostrils, but I welcomed the burn. It smelled like safety. Like death being driven back, one molecule at a time.
"Your friends are good people," Ryhain murmured, wringing amber-tinted liquid into the bucket between us. "To help us like this."
The understatement of the century, but she wasn't wrong. My friends had been absolute warriors.
Kelsey had transformed into a force of nature, bulldozing through bureaucracy and calling in every favor she'd accumulated over her career. The antivirals, the vaccines, the mountains of supplies—she'd made it all materialize through sheer willpower and strategic arm-twisting. People had lived because she'd refused to take no for an answer.
