He makes a low satisfied sound against my neck—quiet and proprietary and warm—and the vibration of it travels through every point of contact between us. His mouth follows the path his hands have cleared, dragging down my collarbone, across my sternum, until his lips close over one peak. I dig both hands into his shoulders and stop pretending I am still in possession of my composure. His tongue moves in a slow circle, and I feel it everywhere. He hears the change in my breathing and does it again.
By the time his hand slides between my thighs I am already gripping his shoulders to stay anchored.
He cups me first, warm and patient, and the deliberateness of it, the sheer refusal to rush, pulls a sound from my throat that I feel in my face. His fingers begin to move, first sliding between my folds and then slowly entering my body.
I understand that thorough is simply how Droza is made. He reads every sound I make and every shift of my hips with complete attention, adjusting pressure and pace, returning without hesitation to the places that make my breath break. Each stroke builds with a precision that makes it very clear he has decided this is where we are, and we are staying here until he is satisfied.
I stop trying to be quiet.
His fingers become more insistent, curling within me to stroke a spot that feels like electric pleasure sparking through my blood. It builds and builds until I can no longer contain it. I come apart for the first time in my life, splintering in bliss in his hand. It moves through me in a long wave. My face is pressed to his neck, one hand fisted in his hair. He goes still and holds me through it, his hand staying exactly where it is, and when I surface, he draws back to look at my face.
“Again,” he says.
“Droza—” I can barely get his name out evenly.
“Again.” His fingers begin to move, slow and deliberate, dragging a sharp breath from me immediately. “I have been inside stone for a century, Selah. I am not rushing this.”
He takes his time. He takes all of it. His mouth finds my throat again, and his fingers work with patient, relentless focus. I cannot locate the edges of what I am feeling, and when the second orgasm hits me, it is harder and less quiet. He makes a low sound against my hair that I feel in my spine.
By the time he settles over me, I have nothing left to pretend with.
He wraps my legs around him and lines himself up with me. He watches my face as he presses forward, holding my gaze. The heat of him is almost scorching. He is huge and the slow stretch of him pulls a sound from me I couldn’t have held back if I had tried. He stops. His forehead drops to mine. His own breathing is unsteady, and I feel through the tether how much holding still is costing him.
“Should I stop?”
“No.” I curl my hands into the solid warmth of his back, pulling him closer rather than away. “I mean it. Don’t stop.”
He sets a deep, rhythmic pace, sinking his member further into me until we are pressed against each other. Each movement sends heat spiraling outward. My pleasure and his, layered and compounding in the tether that ties us, feeds back on itself until the distinction between what I feel and what he feels stops existing entirely.
His mouth finds my throat. His hands grip my hips with complete possession, angling me precisely where he wants me, adjusting when I gasp and driving deeper.
The sound he makes when I drag my nails down his back is low and entirely unguarded.
I pull him harder, and he thrusts deeper. The careful restraint he has been holding since the moment I reached for him finally goes. What replaces it is consuming and entirely focused on me, and I give myself to it because it’s all I want anymore. He fills the whole of my senses with his warmth, his weight, the drag and press of him, the low sounds he makes against my throat that he has probably not made in a century.
I bury my face in his neck to suppress a scream as I can’t hold back the pleasure any more. My hands twisted in whatever I can reach. He follows a moment later, his whole body locking against mine, a broken sound in his throat, and I am filled with his heat.
We stay tangled together, breathing heavily. I press my fingers to the center of his chest and feel his heart hammering hard beneath my palm.
He’s more alive than anything I have ever touched. He has wrapped himself around me, one massive arm under my head. Being near him is a comfortable sleeping arrangement, but not by any conventional measure. It is the safest I have felt since before I understood what danger was.
His breathing slows.
I feel the exact moment he stops fighting it. The tether goes quiet and warm and steady, and I understand that I am the first thing Droza the Harbor Warden has trusted enough to sleep beside in nearly a century.
I count his breaths until they are even, and I let the warmth in my chest do whatever it is going to do.
8
DROZA
She moves through the inn like she belongs to it now, and I move three steps behind her like something feral and only marginally civilized.
I am aware of how it looks. I do not particularly care.
Selah crosses the common room to refill a water pitcher from the kitchen barrel, and I track her from the far wall without pretending to do anything else. She glances back once, catches me watching, and turns away without comment. The tether hums low and steady between us, warm in a way it was not before last night. I feel more settled after the watchtower, like a mechanism that had been grinding wrong for a century finally found its proper groove.
I do not intend to let her out of my sight.
