His hands were steady. But that was Corvin. Always had been.
“Fuck her,” I demanded, still panting as I moved to the far end of the cell where I could still watch them, but I wouldn’t be tempted to interfere again. I wrapped both my hands around the bars behind me, forcing them to remain there.
The dragon began to roar again, and the pain in my head was as sharp as a sword’s blade slamming through my ears. I did my best to ignore it.
Corvin untied his braies and pushed them down his legs. Then he stepped out of them and stood there with his hands athis sides, his chest still, and his jaw tight. He was hard, visibly aching, his cock heavy and flushed, but his eyes hadn’t left my face, and neither had the anger within them. His expression was one that promised revenge, promised retribution. And that was when I realized I’d forced him into doing the one thing for which he’d never forgive me because it involved her.
Neither of us spoke, and the silence in the cell was the loudest thing I’d ever heard.
“Bend her over and fuck her. Now.”
The dragon hit me like a battering ram.
Not a surge. Not a pulse. A full-blown impact that drove me back a step and put my shoulders against the bars hard enough that I felt it in my teeth. My hands went to my head automatically, pressing against my temples as though I could physically contain what was happening inside my skull.
OURS,it screamed, but the word wasn’t a word any longer. It was a frequency, something that lived below language in the part of the brain that predates speech, that predates thought, that predates everything except hunger.OURS. STOP THIS. STOP THIS NOW. SHE IS—
—I’m in charge.
YOU ARE NOT IN CHARGE! YOU ARE NOTHING! WE ARE—
—I am the fucking king!
YOU ARE FLESH! WE ARE FIRE! WE WILL—
My vision doubled. The torchlight split into two and then bled back together, and I pressed the heels of my hands harder against my eyes until the pressure was the only sensation I could locate. My knees wanted to buckle, but I didn’t let them.
“Fuck her!” I growled.
The dragon’s answer came as heat, the kind that moved through blood, sinew, and made my hands shake where Ipressed them against my skull. It had never pushed this hard before. Not even the night I’d first taken it.
GET HIS HANDS OFF HER!
The creature’s voice dropped from a roar into something quieter that was somehow even more terrible. I lowered my own hands and forced my eyes open.
They were still there, because of course they were. There was nowhere to go.
Corvin had her bent at the waist in front of him, one hand braced on her hip and the other working between her thighs. His fingers moved with the particular care of a man who had decided that if this was happening, then it was happening on his terms and nobody else’s. The care of it was worse than the intimacy.
He’s preparing her.The thought arrived cold, flat, and accurate: he was working her open, making sure she could take him.
My eyes traveled down.
I’d seen Corvin naked on enough campaigns, enough mornings after enough battles to know what he was working with. But seeing it now, in this context, was something different entirely. He was large: thick, heavy, and already flushed. Watching him work his fingers inside her with that same unhurried patience made something in my chest feel like it was being pulled apart at the seams.
She had her palms flat on the stone of the cell wall, and her head was dropped forward, hair falling in a curtain around her face. Each time his fingers pressed deeper, her breath fractured audibly in the silence, and a moan released from her mouth. She was obviously enjoying it, enjoying him.
STOP HIM,the dragon demanded.STOP HIM. NOW. PULL HER AWAY. TAKE WHAT IS—
“Stop your fucking fussing,” I said, my voice coming out breathy and pained. “Slam into her.”
Corvin’s jaw tightened as he looked at me over her spine with eyes gone cold. I held his gaze until he looked away. And when he did, he positioned himself and held the head of his cock to her cunt.
Then he pressed forward slowly because he was being kind to her. That was the thing that split me. He pushed into her with the steady, controlled deliberateness of a man who gave a damn, and she—
She fucking moaned, and she moaned loudly.
The sound came out of her completely unguarded: low, long, and broken, the sound of something that had been held back finally given permission to exist, and it moved through the cell and landed somewhere inside my chest.
