Page 16 of The Demon Kept Me

"Tell me if it's too much," he rasps, positioning his thick, dripping length against my weeping entrance.

"Don't you dare stop," I sob.

He eases in by agonizing fractions. The sheer girth of him requires total patience; his thick head parts my lips, stretching my walls until they burn. He stops whenever I gasp, his forehead pressed to mine, murmuring filthy, ruined praise into my mouth until my body finally yields, swallowing his massive shaft to the very base. I am completely filled, stretched so wide I can feel the heavy throb of his pulse inside my core.

Neither of us moves. He holds there, buried to the hilt, his enormous frame trembling with the effort of restraint, the glowing runes on his skin pulsing brighter with every ragged breath he drags in. I feel impossibly full, split open around him, and when I shift my hips to take him even deeper the sound that tears out of his chest is more beast than man, and I feel his claws flex against the mattress on either side of my head, sinking into the bedding rather than my skin—that careful, deliberate control even now, even undone.

Then, he drives. Long, slow, devastatingly deep thrusts that bottom out hard. He doesn't use his hands; he keeps his arms locked, using pure, heavy hip-weight to grind into me, pulling me up to meet every heavy plunge. I am burning up from the inside out, completely undone by the raw, relentless mass of him moving inside me, every stroke dragging out slow and sinking back.

His tail sweeps up my thigh and curls there, the warm heavy weight of it pressing me open wider, holding me exactly where he wants me. His mouth finds my throat, and I feel the careful graze of his fangs against my pulse—never breaking skin, just the barest edge of danger held in perfect check—and the sheer control of it, all that terrible strength leashed to nothing but my pleasure, unstrings me completely.

"You're mine now," he growls against my skin, his pace quickening, the bedframe rattling against the wall with every heavy plunge. "Say it. I need to hear you say it, Wren."

"Yours," I sob, rolling my hips up to take him deeper, my hands finding the broad heat of his shoulders. "Only yours—Malvek—always⁠—"

The word breaks something in him. His restraint shatters and he drives into me harder, faster, each thrust punching the breath from my lungs and dragging over the exact spot inside me that makes my whole body clench. He shifts his weight to one locked arm and slides his free hand between us, the pad of one blunt finger finding my swollen clit and working it in heavy, relentless circles in time with every thrust, and the tension coils impossibly tight, unbearable, right at the breaking edge.

The tension snaps and I break a second time. My whole body seizes around him, one long clenching pulse after another, my scream swallowed by his mouth as he kisses me through it. He follows me over the edge with a guttural, primal roar, burying himself to the hilt and unleashing a heavy, scalding, endless torrent of seed deep inside my pulsing core. Every rune down his arms and chest ignites at once, a molten light spilling across the rafters before it slowly banks down to embers.

"I have nothing to give you," he says into the dark, one claw tracing idly and careful along my spine. "No home I can leave this place to walk you through. No freedom. The contract binds me here until I die, and I'll not lie to you and pretend it might loosen. If you stay, you stay in a demon's prison."

"Then it's the finest prison I've ever known." I prop myself up to look at him, at the fearsome face gone soft in the low light. "I've lived in real cages, Malvek. Ones with no bread and no boots and no one who cared whether I woke in the morning. This isn't that. This is the first place that ever felt like it was mine too."

He's quiet, and when he speaks his voice has gone rough again in a different way. "Nothing between us goes back to what it was. You understand that. I cannot — I will not — pretend afterward that this didn't happen and return to giving you rules across a table."

"Good." I settle back against him, tucking myself under the heavy warmth of his arm. "I never much liked the rules anyway."

That earns me the laugh, the real one, low and rusted and warmer than the fire, and I feel it rumble through his chest beneath my ear. Outside the frost is settling over Ashbrook and somewhere a saboteur is sharpening his patience, and tomorrow we'll have to be sharp too, careful and afraid and hunting. But that's tomorrow.

Tonight there is only the fire, and the river, and the demon who mended my boots holding me like I'm the last warm thing in a cold world — and I let myself believe, in a way that was new to me in my whole uncertain life, that I have finally come home.

13

MALVEK

Iwake before the light, the way I always have, and for the space of one breath I forget everything the contract took from me.

There is a woman asleep against my side. Wren's head rests in the hollow of my shoulder, her chestnut curls loose across the pillow, one small callused hand splayed flat over my chest as though she means to keep my heart where it is by main force. The fire's burned down to coals. The river runs low and steady beyond the walls. And for that single breath I am not an exile, not a bound thing, not the demon this village once crossed the road to avoid. I am only a creature warm beneath a blanket with someone who chose to be there.

Then the breath ends, and the rest of it comes back.

She has been under this roof for months — settled first in the spare room in the quarters above, the dusty one I gave her the day she came — but this is new, this waking with her in my own bed, in the room that was mine alone for twenty hollow years. It is only since that first night together that her things have begun migrating up here, without either of us ever quite speaking the arrangement aloud. Her spare dress hangs beside my work clothes now. The wooden comb she uses on those stubborn curls has appeared on the shelf. The room became, without ceremony, ours. Her bread rises now on the hearth I never used to light. Her humming fills the stairwell. There are two cups by the basin where there used to be one, and I find I cannot look at the second cup for too long without something in my chest going squeezing tight.

That is the trouble, and I turn it over in the dark while she sleeps.

A demon is raised on duty the way a surface child is raised on bread. Individual wanting comes second to what the race requires, always; a Volvath who puts his own heart before his obligations is no Volvath at all, but a coward wearing the shape of one. My whole exile my duty has been simple and total — keep the mill alive, because if it fails the village starves. There was a clean dignity in that. A man can endure any exile if the enduring has a purpose.

But I want things now. I want the warmth of her against my side in the grey before dawn. I want the second cup by the basin to stay there. I want, ancestors help me, a future, when a bound thing has no business wanting any such thing, and I have no idea how to hold both the duty and the wanting in the same two hands without one of them slipping.

"You're thinking too loud," Wren murmurs against my chest, not yet opening her eyes. "I can hear it. It's got a sound like gears grinding."

"Go back to sleep."

"Can't. Something enormous and grey is fretting hard enough to shake the bed." She props herself up on one elbow, hair a wreck, eyes half-lidded and warm, and looks at me with that plain steady attention that has never once been afraid of what it might find. "Tell me."

So I tell her some of it — the part about duty, the part about a demon not being built to want things for himself. I leave out how much of the wanting is her. She hears it anyway; she always does.

"Seems to me," she says, settling back against me, "that keeping this mill alive and keeping me are the same job now. You don't have to choose between the duty and the wanting. I'm standing in the middle of both." She yawns. "You Volvath make everything so complicated."