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Ard Tiarna Emrys of Breacadh an Lae, The Raven of the Dawn

The setting sun framed her body and lit her hair into a blaze of golden glory too bright to be dampened even by the grey sight. She turned when the door opened, those haunting eyes widening as she took me in.

I did not hesitate. I did not wait for her reaction. I was standing before her the moment she drew a breath. Mud smeared across her skin as I took her cheek in my palm and pressed my lips to hers. I had dreamed of this since the very moment I watched her punch Rictus to the ground. I’d longed for it like air itself. The simple pleasure of indulging in the taste of her lips upon mine erased all the notions I had about addiction. I had fallen back into the arms of the dark sister to try to overcome the grief she left in her wake. I had tried to drown the anguish and longing like I had all those years ago when I was a young Fae. What bittersweet irony to find, hundreds of years later, that I had been chasing the sensation of a woman who hadn’t even been born yet. My greedy magical soul had been screaming out for her even before she was a speck in the cosmic future.

She went stiff in my arms but did not fight me as I pressed her flush against my body, dwarfing her and capturing her between the window and the immovable mountain of my frame. She would not escape me again. I would not allow it. I needed her. I needed to protect her. I needed to keep her from the teeth of this world. Mine were the only teeth that could ever touch her.

I didn’t even care that my magic did not stir, did not pour through me like a floodgate opening to ravage the land below. My heart did that all on its own. I poured my fear, my desperation, my worry, and my love into her. She was reborn; that was magic enough for the moment. I had time to figure out the rest.

When she softened against me, it wasn’t the lax rag doll of a woman that gave up, but the tender relaxation of someone finally unwinding all their balled-up tension and stress. Her arms wound around me, her hands snaking up and beneath my armor, wriggling and wedging themselves under my tunic, seeking the simple solace of flesh against flesh.

And then she was up on her tiptoes, pressing her silk lips back into me. She kissed me exactly how I imagined her kissing me. She did not just accept my kiss; she returned all the passion and need that I poured into her, magnified with the fire of her own. Her hands pulled my hips against hers, rocking us slowly to an ancient rhythm.

There had always been a certain measured expectation when I took lovers—a plan, an actionable step-by-step dance that we carried out. But with her, that plan was shorn to shreds and tossed to the winds as she let her tongue slip free and part my lips to capture mine. I moaned at the taste of her mouth—milúll wine, crystal clean water, and the sharp crackle of faint magic.

I tried to set her down and step away, to give her a chance to breathe, but she clung to me. A small hop, and she wrapped her long legs around me, clamping her thighs around my hips. My hands found their natural place kneading the round globes of her ass, not daring to slip them under her dress. If I touched her skin, I’d be undone. I groaned deep and long into her mouth, breaking the kiss before I lost myself completely.

“Do not move, little bug, or I’ll lose all control,” I whispered against the bee-stung petal of her lower lip.

“Fuck me, Emrys,” she purred and ground against the layers of clothing between her pussy and my rock-hard length again. Her skilled fingers were already searching out the buckles holding my leather breastplate to my body.

She was panting, frenzied, just as desperate with the need for me as I was for her. My heart shattered the glass shard and soared aloft, breaking clouds as it shot through the lust-soaked sky. Those simple words. I didn’t even recognize the hole within me shaped like those words until she filled it. The fear that had lain dormant beneath the knife inside me disappeared. She still wanted me. She still needed me as much as I craved her.

I gulped down air, I hadn’t been this winded in my entire life. Not in battle. Not with other lovers. And yet every sway of her hips, every flick of her fingers as they struggled with the buckles, was squeezing my lungs and driving air from them.

Dipping my head, I rested my forehead on hers and begrudgingly wrestled one hand free of her ass to hold onto her fingers. “Slow, little bug, slow. I have all the time of eternity to love you.”

“I don’t,” she bit as her lips crashed down on mine again, and I was lost in the sea of my hunger for her.

I pressed her back into the cool pane of the window and met her fingers at the buckles, releasing them with the practiced ease of decades of sliding them on and off. I only required one side freed, and I broke our kiss to pull back and away to lift it up and off, throwing it across the room. It crashed into something, but I didn’t care to inspect it.

She looked beautiful, her eyes glassy and blown wide with desire, her thighs spread around me and her fingers wildly grabbing wads of my tunic to jerk it up and over my head. I wished I could see every color of her skin, see the way her cheeks darkened when lust fully rode her. Some color had come back but it was pale, a drowned watercolor painting at the bottom of a sun-bleached well.

I pushed her hair away from her face and pressed my lips to her forehead. “Gods, I needed this.”

“Just fuck me already,” she demanded throwing my shirt over my head.

“Slowly little bug, let me enjoy your resurrection a little longer.”

“Fuck me now, or I’m walking out that door.”

I gave her a slow grin before wrapping my arms around her and gripping her ass tight again, jerking her body against me. “Anywhere you run, I will find you. Anywhere you hide, I will root you out. I will always come for you.” I slid one hand up her side and wrapped my hand around her throat and tilted her head so I could whisper in her ear. “And every time I do, I will remind you why you don’t even want me to let you go.”

She ripped her head from my grip, biting at my palm as her hand slid into my breeches and took hold of the thick length she found there. I tilted my head back and groaned. Every muscle in my body seized as her fingers deftly slid up and down my length. Her thumb found the bead of precum at my flared head and slid it around the rim, driving me nuts.

“Don’t threaten me, Raven,” she hissed, gripping me so tight I thought I’d come right then and there. “All I want is your cock.”

I hissed as her hand milked me. I would not let her dictate this. I’d waited too long, feared I’d never see her again. I jerked her hand free of my breeches and balled it up above her head, stretching her against the window. “Is that so?”

“Yes. Now, fuck me or get out. Or don’t. I’m waiting for someone. I’m sure he’ll fuck me.”

“Needy little bug,” I groaned and bit down hard on her lip. She was trying to bait me, but I knew something she didn’t know. I knew her message had never even made it into the Fómhar Court’s territory. “Trying to make me jealous? I’ll just kill whoever walks through that door and then take my sweet time fucking you wearing nothing but their blood.”

“You’re a monster.”

“Correction. I’m your monster.” I trailed a burning line of bites that would bruise down her tender throat. “"Now shut the fuck up and let me do what monsters do best.”

“What’s that?” Her voice was barely a whisper through her strain not to moan into my ministrations.