Additional Tags: Neuvithesley, Restraint, Handcuffs, Anal Sex
Summary: Neuvillette puts Wriothesley's handcuffs to good use.
On AO3: Read More
“—thinking I should jump off the highest tower of the Palais Mermonia.”
Neuvillette snaps his eyes from Wriothesley’s hip to his face, startled. “What?”
And Wriothesley gives him a lazy smile. “You checked out of the conversation at least five minutes ago. Wanna tell me why?”
Truthfully, no, Neuvillette does not want to tell Wriothesley why. Does not want to tell Wriothesley that he’s been constructing an elaborate fantasy wherein Wriothesley is handcuffed to his headboard.
Additional Tags: Neuvithesley, Face-Sitting, Rimming, Anal Sex
Summary: Wriothesley has a few reservations about sitting on Neuvillette's face. Neuvillette dispels them.
On AO3: Read More
You can’t possibly be serious,” Wriothesley says.
Neuvillette, his face pressed into Wriothesley’s neck, his teeth dragging down Wriothesley’s skin, makes a discontented noise. “When have I ever given you cause to think I do not want what I ask for?” His hand is around Wriothesley’s dick, his thumb stroking over the slick tip, which makes it really fucking hard to think, thanks much. Wriothesley struggles to keep his head above the ocean of pleasure Neuvillette is trying to drown him in.
“But—” He groans as Neuvillette’s teeth sink into the meat of his shoulder. He doesn’t draw blood—Neuvillette is always so careful not to break skin—but that sharp bite of pain is a delicious garnish to Wriothesley’s pleasure.
Additional Tags: Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, light bondage, sex magic, dirty talk
Summary: He was power crafted into flesh. But so was she.
Aleksander impresses the importance of control on Alina. She is a quick study.
On AO3: Link
They rode side by side, leaving the Little Palace and Os Alta behind them on a crisp, chilly day in late fall. Since the day at the well, he’d invited her out a handful of times—whenever he was at the Little Palace, he seemed to find an excuse to go riding with her.
Alina turned her eyes to the sky and wished he’d find an excuse to go riding with her. She probably hadn’t made it clear she was interested in him like that. After all, she’d dropped hints to Mal for years, but he never looked twice at her.
“Your lessons are progressing well?” Aleksander asked her, breaking the silence between them.
He rode like he was born for the saddle, all straight lines and confidence. He held the reins in one gloved hand, his other resting loosely in his lap.
With a sigh, Alina slouched in her saddle. She didn’t ride well at all—even without the comparison to him, she felt as uncomfortable on a horse as she did in her classes. She belonged in both places, but she fit wrong.
“Well enough.” She looked away from him, studying the passing trees with more interest than they deserved. “I can summon the light, at least.”
“Mmm.”
The sound of his agreement caressed the length of her spine. Her back arched, her shoulders rolling back, and when she glanced at him, she found him studying her.
“What?”
His brows lifted and he gave her a faint look of amusement. “You’ll need to do more than simply summon light at the Fete.”
Since she couldn’t scowl at the great General Kirigan, she dragged her eyes away from him and back to the trees just in time for them to give way to a broad meadow.
“Sometimes,” he said, “it helps to have a goal to work toward.”
He dismounted at the edge of the meadow, leading his horse toward a nearby post.
Head canted to the side, Alina followed and dismounted as well. “Why’s there a post here?”
“Old training field,” he replied, tying his horse and then hers.
“What’s here that will give me a goal?” She surveyed the field, barely managing to disguise her disbelief.
Aleksander gave her a dry look as he stepped around her, putting the horses at their backs. “Space.” He sounded incredibly amused by this, like he knew something she didn’t.
To be fair, he certainly did.
Frowning, she followed after him. “Why do we need this much space?”
The meadow was easy as big as the massive drive leading up to the Grand Palace. A critical examination of the meadow using all the skills she’d gained as a mapmaker told her they easily had the same area as a city block.
Aleksander stopped walking forward, and she stumbled to a halt half an inch away from his back.
He glanced over his shoulder at her. “You won’t see anything from there, Miss Starkov. Come—” She hoped the heat that washed through her at that word didn’t show on her face. “—and stand at my side.”
She joined him, watching him with curiosity.
He clasped his hands together behind his back.
Their shadows overflowed their boundaries, darkness welling up around their feet, their ankles. The sight of it no longer frightened her. Instead, he awed her as he brought his hands around his body, drawing more shadows from the distant edge of the meadow.
“Do you remember what I told you on our first ride to the Little Palace?”
Frankly, it was a blessing she’d forgotten the bulk of their terrifying flight across Ravka. At first, she’d dreamed of the Drüskelle’s death regularly. Had jolted awake from nightmares of his blood splashing her face all over again or, worse, the hand axe cracking into her skull. Now, the whole thing seemed like a lifetime ago.
Unsure if she should be embarrassed that she didn’t remember, she ducked her head. “No,” she answered honestly.
“The Cut,” he said, and her eyes jumped back to him.
She remembered that.
The Cut was a technique unique to Summoners, a shaping of power that required tremendous skill and concentration.
“I’ve seen the Cut,” she said, her voice low and soft. She didn’t know what might happen to all that power if she disrupted his concentration.
“So you have.” He held his hands before him, creating a crescent of writhing darkness in the air, holding the scythe-like edge.
Her eyes widened. To casually hold the power like that… how much power did Aleksander actually possess? What was the true extent of his abilities? She knew he was old, knew that meant he had considerably more power than the average Grisha, but—
“But we can do more with our power than just kill—than just destroy,” Aleksander said, a strange quality in his voice.
Darkness fell from his fingers in inky pools as he spread his hands wide, creating a plane of shadow. One of his hands slid beneath the darkness, as though supporting a tray, the fingers of his other hand danced over the plane, sculpting it slowly into a panorama.
Alina exhaled heavily with wonder, eyes wide as Aleksander made two forms out of shadow that walked together through a glade ringed by trees.
“We can create.” She felt his eyes on hers, but she couldn’t look away from what he’d crafted. “People think the small science has to be big.” His lips quirked, as if he found a joke in the small contradiction of his description.
Darkness collapsed on itself, folding into a small sphere no larger than a marble, but she felt the tremendous weight of it. Its gravity pulled her, and she stepped closer, enchanted by a kernel of midnight.
Aleksander turned his body toward hers. “The small science is small,” he said, his voice lowering. “It needn’t be a grand thing that overwhelms.” He lifted his hand between them, and she stared at the blackness, the emptiness, the void resting on the tips of his fingers. “Where is there shadow, Miss Starkov?”
Her eyes lifted to his. There was a lesson here, and she tried to divine the answer in the darkness of his eyes.
The corner of her lip quirked up.
Your eyes didn’t seem like an answer she could give him. “The night,” she said aloud.
“Think smaller. Where else is the darkness?” His eyes were fierce.
“Beneath the forest canopy.”
“Smaller still, Miss Starkov.”
She licked her lips. “In the space between you and me.”
Something shifted, an infinitesimally small change in his expression. There was darkness there, she thought. Darkness in his eyes.
“Smaller.”
“The hearts of men.”
“How philosophical.”
Heat flushed her cheeks. “I—”
“You,” he interrupted, “are not wrong.” He spread his fingers wide, and the darkness stretched between them. “You find your piece of the science wherever you can. We are all things, Miss Starkov, that is the truth. And there is power in that.”
Lifting his other hand, he caught the strand of darkness and stretched it into a long, thin rope.
“And underpinning it all is control,” he said, his voice low and rough, his gaze fixed on hers. “The ability to exert your will on the world around you. If your power is everywhere, then you cannot be robbed of it.”
There was something important in that statement, but he gave her no time to pick through the labyrinth of his words.
“And if you can control it, you can never be overwhelmed.”
His hands turned in lazy circles, and she felt a coil of shadow against the inside of her wrist, cool as silk.
With a gasp, she lifted her hands as he drew them together, bound in a cord of darkness. She felt the pressure of another tendril of darkness against her throat, her waist, just below her knee.
Instead of feeling trapped, she felt a strange sort of liberation. If there was darkness in the hearts of men, there was also light, and his shadows were only so dark because her light shone so bright. He bound her in darkness, but she could destabilize his science with her own.
And that was power.
“Could I do this with light?” she asked him, studying her bound hands.
He caught his fingers beneath the knot of darkness, drawing her closer to him. He hadn’t hobbled her feet with his shadowy bindings, but she let herself fall against his chest.
His hand settled on her hip, holding her in place as he chuckled.
“Ah, Miss Starkov, how is it you so often surprise me?”
Since she’d arrived at the Little Palace, she’d thought of him often. At first, she’d been afraid of him. His reputation was as great and terrible as the Fold. He was solitary and given to isolation, they said, whoever they were, with exacting standards and little patience for mistakes. He was power crafted into flesh.
But so was she.
Now, when she thought of him, it wasn’t with fear. It was with respect—more respect than she’d had a moment before. And deeper, buried beneath the respect, was something else. Something hot and hungry, something full of craving.
Full of desire.
Lifting to her toes, her wrists still bound and her eyes on his, she pressed a tentative kiss against his mouth.
His eyes went wide and then drifted half closed, the hand on her hip curling into the heavy fabric of her kefta.
“Twice in as many minutes,” he murmured against her lips.
She shivered, finding the brush of his mouth against hers delicious. “I don’t think that was two minutes.”
“Are you suggesting I possess a poor sense of time?”
“Maybe.” Her lips curved in a faint smile. “Maybe you should release my hands and let me try this on you.”
His other hand found its way around the back of her neck, the tips of his fingers pushing into her hair to hold her close. The hand on her hip gripped her tighter, pulling her against the solid wall of his body.
She inhaled sharply, delighted and somewhat mystified by the sharp ache growing between her legs. She’d felt desire before, but it had always been a muted thing, easily set aside for the more pressing concerns of her own survival. Maybe she should be more concerned with her survival in this moment—he was dangerous, and to suggest he wasn’t was to believe a pretty lie—but all she wanted was to sink deeper into the feeling.
“You are Grisha.” Every word he spoke was like a kiss. Tingles spread from her lips to her jaw, along her scalp and down her spine. “Maybe you should practice your power.”
She hesitated. “Isn’t that dangerous?”
The hand on her hip curved to the small of her back. The heel of it pressed against her, urging her closer, and she was surprised to find there was still space between them, a space she quicky eliminated. Then his hand shifted lower, the tips of his fingers brushing over the swell of her ass.
Dark eyes watched her as his hand eased lower.
“Would you hold any part of yourself back from a lover?” he asked her, his voice low and rich and, Saints, she felt that sound. “Would you not use your hands to touch them?”
“Yes,” she breathed as his hand cupped her ass and tugged her flush against him. His arm kept her close, helped her maintain her balance.
“Would you not use your mouth to kiss them? To taste them?”
She swallowed hard, remembering all those times she’d imagined Aleksander’s mouth on hers. And on other parts of her.
“You’re imagining it now, aren’t you?”
She gasped as liquid darkness slipped over her arms. The bindings around her wrists stayed in place, but cool shadow drifted inside her sleeves and stroked over her skin. Tendrils of it, like so many cool fingers, dipped beneath her tunic and into her breeches.
Skin prickling with heat, she tried to tug her wrists apart.
“Where would you have me kiss you, Miss Starkov?”
“Alina,” she insisted.
“Alina,” he agreed, his voice a rough purr. “Will you dodge my question?”
She wasn’t sure she could answer his question. “I…”
He smiled and brushed his lips against her in the faintest caress.
Somehow, that devastated her more than any other sensation. She felt like she was falling even though he held her secure against his body.
“That wasn’t your original question,” she managed. “That doesn’t answer my question.”
“You worry about control.” Shadow licked along her thighs, following the curve of her ass, and she gasped, arching into him. His eyes darkened, becoming pools of midnight and desire. “That, Alina, is why we practice.”
He drew his mouth along her jaw, urging her head back and into the palm of his hand. A shuddering breath rushed out of her, tinged with a quieted moan. The heat of his breath washed over her skin, along the column of her throat, and his teeth followed.
Gasping, she yanked again at her hands. “You’re distracting me.”
“You’re not trying.”
She sucked in a sharp breath as he nudged aside the collar of her kefta and sucked on her skin. A reedy sound caught in her throat. “I could hurt you.”
“You could.” He licked the hollow of her throat. “I don’t believe you will, Alina.” He drew away from her neck, his nose following the curve of her jaw again. His lips brushed the shell of her ear, and his teeth caught the lobe. He tugged, and pleasure shot through her like lightning, ricocheting through her body.
And lightning was light and light was her power and she summoned it without thinking. Sunlight shattered the bonds on her wrists as she sank her hands into his hair and yanked him back to her mouth.
Hungry little moans spilled from her lips to his as she kissed him. His hand on her ass flexed, and she arched her back to press into his touch, which only served to have him yank her closer to him again—where she felt the beginnings of his desire against her stomach, even though the heavy layer of her kefta.
“Summon again,” he whispered against her mouth, his hand sweeping over her hip and to the front of her kefta. Fingers of flesh and darkness pulled open her belt and buttons.
She shrugged out of the heavy jacket, letting it fall to the ground as her fingers yanked at his silvery buttons. “I don’t want to.”
As he had, she kissed along the length of his jaw and then down the line of his throat, trying to imitate how he’d licked and sucked on her skin.
The sound he made when her teeth raked over his pulse made her shudder—and drew light to the tips of her fingers.
His fingers stroked down her sides, caught the white chemise tucked into her breeches, and pulled it free. Warm, human fingers caressed her over her stays alongside more cool, silky darkness, and she cried out against the skin of his throat.
“Summon for me, Alina. Show me your control.”
Control? She was supposed to be in control? Now?
Aleksander’s hands spread over her ribs, his thumbs brushing over her breasts through the fabric of her stays.
Burning tension drew through her.
Shadow sank beneath fabric. Two cool coils curled against her nipples, and she gasped.
“Banish the darkness, Alina.”
How was she supposed to find control when he purred her name like that? When he touched her like this, like no one else ever had? When she—Saints, the revelation crashed through her like a spring storm come down from Fjerda. “I don’t want to,” she gasped.
He went still against her, drawing back to peer into her face.
Heart pounding in her chest, she met his gaze, keenly aware that she was already half undressed, and if she tilted her head to the side, she’d see the tunic beneath his doublet and his skin behind that.
“What do you want?” he asked softly, quietly, as if the words might break the world.
She freed the final buckle of his doublet, danced her fingers up his chest, and loosened the laces at his throat. She licked her lips.
Beneath the confines of her skin, she burned, and fire, too, was light. She drew on that burn, on her own desire, and spooled a thread of it to the tips of her fingers. They glittered gold as she let them wander over his skin, her eyes lifting slowly to his.
Light spun off her fingers, reflecting in the darkness of his eyes. She felt it like an extension of her body, drifting over his skin.
Against her sides, his hands tightened. His pupils dilated as she watched, as her light twisted against his flesh like his shadows had against hers. One arch of light ran over his nipples beneath his clothes.
He surged against her, capturing her mouth in a devastating kiss.
Burying her fingers in his hair, she held his mouth to hers. Their tongues met, tangled, and delirious heat wound through her. More light spilled from her fingers, spinning around them both like ribbons.
Just as much as his hands, his shadows pulled at her clothes, loosening her stays, the cords of her breeches.
Cognizant that she’d be naked faster than him, her hands dropped to his shoulders and then lower. She pulled at his clothes, too, until he broke away from their kiss.
One hand cupped her jaw. His forehead rested against hers. “Where is your line?” he asked her.
Saints, she didn’t know. She’d never done this before, but she’d also never wanted someone’s mouth on her skin as much as she wanted his.
As if sensing her hesitation, he began to draw back—and she knew she didn’t want that.
So she ran her hands down his sides, his hips, his thighs as she went slowly to her knees.
His breathing turned ragged. The look in his eyes scorched her.
She knew enough about sex to know all the ways people could play with each other. She knew that all the ways she wanted his mouth on her, he could have her mouth on him.
Emboldened by the way he looked at her, she brushed her lips against the hard line of his cock through his breeches before she spread her kefta on the ground and leaned back on it. She pulled the laces on her breeches open, letting the front panel sag low on her belly, and met his gaze with trembling anticipation.
As if mesmerized, he knelt between her legs. When he leaned over her, she felt sheltered by the shadow of his form instead of caged. His hands pressed into her kefta above her shoulders, and he hovered above her.
“I want—I want to feel—what you said earlier,” she managed, feeling her cheeks heat with embarrassment. Not because she didn’t want him to touch her, to taste her, but because this was new, and she didn’t quite know what she was doing, and she worried about disappointing him.
The hot look in his gaze, the ragged cadence of his breath, all told her she probably didn’t need to worry about disappointing him.
“My mouth on you?” he asked.
She nodded.
Slowly, he lowered himself onto his forearms. His fingers threaded into her hair at her temples, and he kissed her slow and long, his mouth lingering on hers as though she were a treat to savor.
With a groan, she arched against the air, seeking the weight and comfort of his body and frustrated when she didn’t find it.
His tongue licked into her lips as he obliged her, settling against her.
She gasped into their kiss to feel him between her legs—she’d never thought too much about how she might feel the line of a man’s cock through his clothes and against her body, but, Saints, she adored it. The weight of him, the feel of him, filled her with a gnawing need.
“Is that all you want?” he asked her, each word its own kiss.
She licked her lips. Licked his lips. Gasped when that made him groan and roll his hips hard against hers.
Oh, but she liked that. Loved that. Sliding her palms down his back, she curved her hands over his ass and urged him to move like that against her again.
With a moan, her head fell back and her body arched in a sinuous line against his. More friction, more pleasure, and she lost his question in the labyrinth of fire his body created against hers.
“Alina.”
Her name on his lips only made her want more, only served to make her burn brighter.
“Alina.” He tipped her face back towards her, and she felt shadows on her legs again. The silky darkness curled around her calves, and she felt them release the buckles of her boots.
That. She needed to learn that.
“Tell me, Alina. Do you want more than my mouth on you?” The mouth in question drifted against her cheek, the whiskers of his beard a delicious rasp against her skin. “Do you want my shadows on your naked skin?”
“Yes,” she gasped, driving her fingers beneath his tunic. Grateful, she was so grateful men didn’t wear stays, because the thought of having to get through more fabric to feel his skin beneath her palms was abhorrent.
“Do you want to feel those shadows inside you?” he asked, his voice a low rumble against her ear. He timed that question with a slow, languid roll of his hips against hers so she couldn’t mistake his meaning.
And she didn’t. Her nails curled into his skin, pulling a hiss that dissolved into a wicked chuckle from him. “Yes. And—and then—”
“And then?” he prompted, when she didn’t finish.
Her teeth caught her lower lip. Talking about this seemed strange, but she liked it. It was difficult to put all these secret desires into words, but when she did, those words made her burn. Made her ache. Speaking her desires aloud only made her want them more.
“And then you.” She turned her head, her mouth stroking lightly against his cheek as he groaned and rocked against her again. “I want to feel you inside me, Aleksander.” He trembled against her, and she ached with pleasure. As much as he could unmake her like this, she had the power to do the same to him. “With your shadows around my wrists.”
She didn’t know what to make of the sound that escaped him, but then he kissed her with such a savage hunger, she realized she didn’t care. He liked the idea, and she burned for it.
Shadows and hands stripped her of her clothes. He held her back in an arch as inky darkness took her shirt; his mouth smoothed over her chest as pale hands pushed her stays off her shoulders.
He didn’t pause to draw back and stare at her. Instead, his tongue traced an ever-tightening circle around her breasts before he reached her nipple. He sucked the little nub between his lips as she cried out his name. His thumb dragged back and forth over the other as shadows pulled off and discarded her boots.
Thinking around the wet heat of his mouth proved nearly impossible, but she did manage to create thin, wavering tendrils of light. The heat from her light kept her from shivering—though she thought the heat from their bodies and desire would work just as well—and made him arch and twist against her body in the most delicious ways. Still, she couldn’t strip him naked as he’d stripped her, and she wanted to. Saints, she wanted to. Wanted to use her power the way he did.
“You’ll learn,” he murmured against her underside of her breast.
“Now you’re content with letting me take my time?”
He grinned at her, and that grin made him seem so much younger than he was. “Never.”
Shifting away from her, he settled on his knees between her legs, both of them shirtless. His gaze drifted over her body, and the heat in his eyes made her squirm.
A muscle in his jaw flexed as he muttered a coarse oath. “Watching you move—” He broke off, running his hands up her thighs. One of those hands curved inward, and now his eyes fixed on hers.
Curled knuckles brushed against her breeches.
She let out a shuddering little sigh and rocked toward his hand. “Please,” she murmured, feeling her cheeks flame.
Aleksander’s knuckles brushed against her cunt through the fabric of her pants.
Alina frowned.
He burst out laughing, leaning over her again. “That’s not the look you want to see on your lover’s face.” He kissed her, and she felt his hand shift, felt his palm cup her. The heel of his hand pressed against her pubic bone, and the frown melted into a wide-eyed look of delight. Of awe.
“That,” she gasped.
“Good?”
Her hips twisted, her body moving to push his hand to the right place. She’d touched herself, she knew what she wanted to feel, knew—
A keening moan fell from her lips, and he devoured the sound with a greedy kiss
His hand rocked against her, finding a rhythm with her, until she burned beneath him and mewls of pleasure became broken pleas for more.
“I promised you my mouth,” he reminded her as she carded her fingers in his hair to hold his lips against hers for more of those kisses.
Torn between two wants, she groaned. “Didn’t think this would be so hard,” she groused.
His brow arched.
“I want everything all at once.”
A thoughtful look crossed his face. “Stay still,” he told her, resting his forehead on hers again. His hand shifted away from her cunt, petting up and down her side as he closed his eyes.
She watched him, curious—and then she felt it. The swell of power, a cresting rise of cool shadow sliding over her belly. It shifted and rolled, shaping with his will into—
Alina jerked when a cool mouth brushed between her legs beneath the fabric of her pants.
Above her, Aleksander’s eyes opened. “Not too strange?” he asked as those cool lips kissed her thighs, her clit. As they kissed her entrance—as a cool tongue flicked against her.
She jerked again, her hips arching against his. She writhed, seeking the weight of his body between her legs and getting only the delicious torment of ephemeral shadow.
“Intoxicating.” His thumbs brushed over her lips as she twisted and arched beneath him, her eyes fluttering shut so she could focus on the feeling, the building pressure and pleasure and heat.
She dug her fingers into his shoulders, clutching him against her body as she sucked one of his thumbs between her lips. She needed something, some kind of action to help alleviate the tension inside her. Instead, grasping him close and sucking on him only made her ache more, only made her burn brighter.
“You have no idea how beautiful you look right now.” The dark timbre of his voice shook her. The cool touch of the tongue between her legs made her keen.
That shadow tongue curled around her clit and she sobbed his name.
“Fuck, Alina.”
The coarse language should have offended her. Instead, it inflamed her.
“Not enough,” he muttered, and one tongue of shadow became two.
The first continued flicking back and forth over her clit. The other thrust into her entrance, and her back bowed beneath him.
“Still not enough.”
His hand smoothed over her belly as she turned her face against his neck. Her hips worked hard against his shadows, shadows that continued to torment her when his hand slipped beneath her pants and cupped her.
The heat of his touch snapped the tension coiling inside her.
She came with a broken sob, her nails raking down his back. Pleasure overwhelmed her, but it wasn’t enough, wasn’t quite the feeling she craved. There was no weight to the mouths on her, and nothing of him was inside her.
“Please,” she gasped, trembling beneath him. “You promised.”
“I did.”
Aleksander slid down the length of her body, those shadow mouths continuing their sweet torment as more tendrils of darkness pulled her pants down her legs. She kicked them aside, and he slid his hands beneath her ass, lifting her off her kefta.
She thought she should be embarrassed when his eyes landed on her naked cunt, slick with her orgasm, but those mouths never stopped tasting her, never stopped tormenting her. It almost felt like too much.
Then his mouth, his hot, wet, hungry mouth descended on her, and she realized she’d been very fucking wrong.
Alina’s fingers dove into his hair. She heard herself beg for more as his lips closed around her clit and sucked, as shadow mouths wrapped around her nipples and tormented her entrance. One hand yanked away from his hair to drive through her own. She didn’t know what to do with herself, what part of his body or hers to touch, how to alleviate the wicked, demanding ache he created once more inside her.
And then, as his tongue flicked against her clit, painting strange patterns on her flesh that made her keen his name, ephemeral shadow became somehow solid. It pushed into her, parting slick folds to fill her, and she knew without any doubt that otkazat’sya men would never be able to give her what she’d crave with sex because she’d always want this—this slick, wicked science, this combination of magic and flesh.
He must have remembered what she’d said to him, because as her hands wandered through his hair, over his shoulders, over her own breasts, shadow coiled around them. Darkness tethered her wrists, pinning them together over her head.
With no outlet, all she could do was feel. Wet heat. Cool silk. Insistent tugs of his mouth, the hot flick of his tongue. She sobbed his name, and the darkness swirled inside her cunt, filling her with power. It dragged along tender flesh, stroking her as he withdrew it, and filled her with a raging fire when he pushed it back into her.
She came a ragged cry, her hips arching against his mouth, against the shadows that filled her.
He grasped her hips and drew himself up her body. His mouth crashed against hers in a brutal kiss. She drowned in it, in sensation, in wet and wicked heat as his fingers petted between her legs and her cunt rippled and clenched around the darkness still inside her.
“You’re delicious,” he whispered against her mouth as she writhed beneath him, twisting against the shadows tethering her arms and against his body above hers. “You still want me—”
Her eyes snapped open and met his. “If you don’t give me what I want, I will learn the Cut just to use it on you.”
That didn’t motivate him, but it did make him lick at her lips. “What do you want, Alina?”
She groaned, her heels scrabbling over the rough grass, her hips arching into his stroking fingers.
“Do you want me inside you?” The murmured words were decadent against her lips, better than any sweet she’d ever eaten. “Do you want my cock stretching your sweet cunt open?” Two fingers slid inside her, the heat of him replacing the cool darkness, and she cried out with delicious shock. How good his fingers felt, burning hot by comparison to his shadows. “Do you want me to fill you until you can’t take anymore? To grind myself against you until you’re begging for me to move?”
She had no idea how good the fantasy he painted might actually feel, but her body certainly wanted it. She felt her cunt squeeze around his fingers, an involuntary contraction that made her moan.
He shifted over her, drawing his fingers out of her. She dragged her eyes open to watch him pull back and strip off his pants. Had just enough time to see his cock, hard and flushed, before he leaned back over her. The head of it nudged against her entrance, his fingers playing once more against her cunt—as much to torment her, she was sure, as to guide his cock into her.
But he didn’t push inside. Instead, he lingered at her entrance, and the tease was unbearable.
“Please,” she gasped, arching, twisting, yanking hard against the shadows that pinned her arms above her head.
He gave her the most infuriating smile—lopsided, smug. “We came here for a lesson,” he reminded her, bending his lips to her chest. He nipped her skin at the swell of one breast, making her jump beneath him, only to soothe the sting with a long stroke of his tongue. Still his cock nudged her entrance but didn’t push into her. “Call the light, Alina.”
For the first time, summoning was easy. She burned, she ached, her skin stretched tight over the swell of glittering pleasure, and that was all her power. She drew it through her body from her hands, and it sparkled over her arms and down her chest, casting scintillating patterns on his skin.
“Collect it, shape it,” he murmured. “Show me what you’ve learned.”
Show him? The fact that she could summon while he drove her out of her mind should have been enough, but of course he’d expect more from her.
“Come now, Alina.” Fuck him for that phrasing. “Impress me.”
She shuddered beneath him, trying to separate herself from the pleasure he’d coaxed through her so far. She couldn’t, not entirely—she didn’t want to—but she found a quiet place in her mind where the pleasure was warm and soft instead of an inferno, and in that space she urged it into a shape.
Light formed into a tongue, and she ran it from the base of his cock to the tip.
He arched sharp against her with a curse, burying himself in her cunt in a single stroke, and Alina moaned his name as she arched beneath him. Full, she felt so delicious full, and though there was a slight discomfort in the first second, that faded a moment later when her cunt rippled around him.
A different sort of pleasure spread through her, and she purred.
Her eyes opened. He stared down at her, his expression the most delicious combination of aroused and surprised and delighted. A lopsided, smug smile spread across her lips, a mirror of his from earlier.
“Impress me,” she said.
With a ragged chuckle, he bent his mouth to hers. “With pleasure, solnishko.”
He drew back slowly, and she sighed with pleasure. He thrust back into her, her hips arching to meet him, and she moaned. As he found an easy pace with her, she let herself down in the sweet friction.
The bonds around her wrist stretched. Fingers twined around her own, and she held them tight as he fucked her in long, easy strokes. Each time he pushed into her, her back bowed, and her body softened more.
She lost herself in their back and forth, content to float in the warmth of their shared pleasure. But he didn’t let her for long. His lips brushed against her ear. “Once more for me,” he told her.
She recognized the warning in those words a moment later when shadow tongues licked against her clit.
Electric pleasure strung her tight. Now, she clutched at the shadow hands holding her own as silky darkness licked her, as cool fingers stroked the swollen lips of her cunt. He played with her, layering her pleasures until she gasped his name and begged for him. Only then did he replace one shadow hand with his own and the shadows between her legs with his fingers.
The heat of him ruined her, shattered her. She came with his name on her lips, and he followed her mere seconds later, his body shuddering over hers.
They lay together, panting, for a long moment. Then he drew back, the cool shadows retreating as his cock slipped out of her body. Instead of pulling away entirely, he settled at her side, giving her most of the kefta.
She turned toward him, her fingers brushing over his jaw, his lips, his shoulders. “Are all your lessons in control going to turn out like this?” she asked him.
He made a thoughtful expression.
Scooting closer, Alina pressed a kiss to his mouth. “I’ve an idea for another lesson if you don’t.”
His brow arched. “Do you?”
“I want to try binding your wrists with light.” Interest flashed in his eyes, and she smiled. “I want to push you into your chair in the war room and bind your hands to its arms. Then I want to climb onto you and ride you.”
He stared at her, the look on his face equal parts aroused and bewildered. “You—”
“I grew up near farms,” she reminded him. “And then joined the military. Believe me: I have plenty of ideas for lessons.”
“You think you can keep control long enough to keep me bound to that chair?” he asked, a wicked growl in his voice.
Her body responded to that tone with a wash of pleasure, and she found herself hungry for more of him even though they’d just finished. Part of her wondered if that was normal—and she got her answer when he rolled her beneath him.
“The minute your control breaks, solnishko, I’m going to put you on your back on that table and fuck you until your screams summon the guards at a run.”
Wrapping her arms and legs around him, Alina grinned. “Maybe I’ll make you beg for that.”
With his face buried in her neck, he laughed. “I hope you do.”
Summary: How easy it would be to sink backwards into him, to let a man made of shadows and dreams embrace her.
On AO3: Link
He followed her from the Bone Road to Os Alta, always on the edge of reality. He appeared on the roads, at the end of long hallways, on the edges of a room, a nightmare only she could ese and no one else would believe.
Alina grew used to his haunting presence. He lingered in the war room and her bedroom. She sometimes woke to find him sitting at the end of the bed, and she wondered if she wasn’t losing her mind from the pressure of everything.
Dragging her hand down her face, she rested her hands against the spines of the library books and let her head come to rest against a shelf. Eyes closed, tears burning against her eyelids, she took a shuddering breath.
Hard, this was so hard, and Mal couldn’t—wouldn’t—give her the support she needed.
She felt his presence.
He was silent when he appeared, but he took up so much space, had so much presence, that he was impossible to ignore.
“He doesn’t understand the weight. The burden.”
“A burden you’re putting on me,” she said, unmoving. Maybe if she kept her eyes closed, if she refused to see him, he could become nothing more than a dream.
He made a soft grunting sound, and she couldn’t tell if it was agreement or censure or something else entirely. How had she ever thought she understood this man?
Silence stretched between them. She was so unused to silence even as the loneliness of the Little Palace smothered her.
“It’s not a burden you need shoulder alone.” His words whispered against her ear; she felt him at her back. Warmth from his body reached through the thin fabric of her tunic, sinking beneath her skin.
For a man made of darkness, he felt so much like the sun.
Alina spun about.
His forearms hit the shelves, bracing him mere inches from her face.
Intense, dark eyes met hers. Ravenous eyes. Dark crescents marred his skin, giving him a wan, gaunt appearance. Haggard. But, Saints, he was still so beautiful. The most beautiful man she’d ever seen.
A thrill went through her, a visceral hunger rising inside her to match the greedy interest she saw in him.
She hated that thrill because she didn’t want to feel it. Shouldn’t feel it. He’d lied to her (except that he hadn’t, he’d merely mislead her, and her anger was at her own stupidity, at how she fell to his deceptions) and manipulated her. She shouldn’t want someone who had done those things.
But in the darkness, under the heavy blanket of hot summer nights, she imagined he didn’t just sit at the end of the bed. He came to sit beside her. He stroked his fingers through her hair. He bent down to brush his lips against hers, only once because he was still a gentleman, and that kiss would wake her, rouse her, and they—
“How dare you?” she hissed. “How dare you say that when you hide with your armies, preparing to strike against the country you claim you love.”
An equal fury flashed in his eyes. “I love all of Ravka, not just the parts of it that aren’t Grisha.” The fury faded, and his gaze softened. “He doesn’t understand, does he? Your tracker?”
She bristled. “Leave Mal out of this.”
“He doesn’t listen to you because he can’t understand this. Does he think you’ve abandoned him?”
The question lanced her, tearing open a fragile wound that never quite healed.
Gently, he brought the tips of his fingers to her jaw. He didn’t hold her, didn’t cradle her jaw. He simply stood there, his touch the lightest caress.
She ducked under his arms, striding away from him. He’d never done this before, never lingered or spoken to her at length. The time she’d spent with Nikolai taught her to question people’s changing behaviors, taught her to be much more suspicious.
“Would someone who truly cared about you leave you to suffer the weight of a war on your own?” he asked softly, and the softness of his words cut worse than anything ever had before.
She went still, shoulders hunched, head bowed, hands clenched into fists. She trembled, overwhelmed by too many emotions. Sorrow for whatever she and Mal had that was dying, anger that he couldn’t understand the importance of the war, of the firebird, of any of it. She’d spent her whole life waiting for him, and now that she’d found something to walk toward, now that he had to wait for her to complete a journey, he wielded that waiting like a knife against her heart.
“Can you not talk with him at all?”
“Aleksander,” she whispered. “Stop.”
He fell silent, at her back once more.
She thought he’d vanish like he had all the other times. Thought he’d disappear into the ether and leave her alone.
Instead, he brushed her hair over one shoulder, baring her neck. Just as lightly as he’d touched her face, his brushed his fingers down her arm. Back up. They lingered on the curve of her shoulder.
“Being alone is unbearable.”
She didn’t know if he meant for her or for him—or for them both.
“To stand at the head of an army is to be alone. The only one who understands is the one who stands opposite you.” His lips brushed against the naked line of her throat, and she sucked in a sharp breath.
That thrill inside her became a burn, blotting out her anger toward him, toward Mal.
“There’s comfort in another’s arms. He doesn’t come to you?”
She swallowed hard. “No.”
“Doesn’t let you rest in his arms?”
How easy it would be to sink backwards into him, to let a man made of shadows and dreams embrace her. He was a fantasy, and he offered her the illusion of empathy.
She tensed, and his hands ran down her arms, a comforting a caress.
“What’s wrong?”
“You… Mal and I… we aren’t…”
Now, she felt his surprise in the momentary pause of his hands, in the shifting of his body behind her as if he drew back.
“The boarding house in Novyi Zem?”
She shook her head and stared down the aisle of bookshelves without seeing any of them. “We’ve never more than kissed.”
“Foolish boy.” There was no arrogance in his words, just truth.
Beside a man who had lived for hundreds of years, of course Mal would seem like a child.
Again, his lips brushed against her throat, a soft caress. His hands stayed loose on her arms, and she realized he was making a deliberate choice not to hold her tight. She could step away. He would likely let her go—he’d never needed something as crass as force to convince her to come to him. She’d kissed him first, after all, and she wanted to again.
Even though a battlefield stood between them, he was the only one who saw it the way she did. Who understood it the way she did.
With a shaky breath, Alina let herself sink back. She half expected to pass through him. Instead, she found his form solid at her back. His hands closed around her arms. He still didn’t trap her in place, but now he held her with more strength. With certainty. Not the certainty of a man who’d won some kind of victory, but the certainty of a man who knew he was welcome.
He kissed her neck. His hands stroked down her arms, over her wrists. He laced their fingers together and pressed another kiss to her neck.
Heat kindled to life inside her, a soft simmer low in her belly and between her legs.
Taking a deep breath, she gathered her courage. “Would you—” Catching her lower lip in her teeth, she paused. Reconsidered her words. Felt the tension in him. When she spoke again, her words were so quiet, they were lost in the ocean of print that surrounded them. “Would you do more than kiss me?”
He lifted one of their twined hands. She watched it rise, watched him bring it to her shoulder. He turned their hands, facing her palm and curled fingers toward them both, and he kissed her knuckles. With a gentle tug, he bent her wrist back and kissed the heel of her palm. Let his teeth drag over her skin. Flicked his tongue against the sensitive skin of her wrist.
With three touches, he made her want more than any of Mal’s kisses ever had. With three touches, he made her ache.
“Go to our room, solnishko.”
Their room?
Her room. Except all she did was sleep there. She’d planned to redecorate his room, but she hadn’t.
Their room.
Their room.
A giddy excitement washed through her. Her lips turned up in a smile, and she felt him press closer in defiance of his gentle command.
“That makes you happy,” he said. “Calling it our room.”
“Maybe. Maybe I just like what you’re implying.”
His fingers squeezed around hers. A sound that might have been a chuckle rumbled against her neck. “Go,” he told her, and he released her.
She turned, but he’d finally vanished.
Nervous anticipation made her grin. Without a second thought, she hurried from the library. Tolya peeled away from the door, but she paid him no mind. Her attention was focused elsewhere, was focused on the next turn, the turn after that, the hallway that led to her room—his room—their room and the promise of what happened behind closed doors.
All the nobles thought she tumbled Mal. Half of them probably thought she was with Nikolai or Vasily when Mal wasn’t there.
So why not embrace those rumors, at least in some small way? Why not take a man to her bed who didn’t hate her for her power or her birth or her command?
At her door, she glanced back at Tolya, but he’d already made his way to the guard quarters adjacent to her room. Their room.
Alina stepped into their room, shutting the door behind her. After a moment’s pause, she locked it.
Aleksander materialized out of the darkness the moment the deadbolt slid into place. He took three steps into her space, drove his fingers into her hair, and kissed her.
He kissed her like a starving man, a dying man, a drowning man in desperate need of air he could get only from her lungs, and she surged against him. He kissed her without hesitation or fear or even artifice; there was nothing hidden in his intentions, just open desire for her, and that delighted her.
Wrapping her arms around him, she clung to him as he drew back, gazed at her mouth with ravenous intent, and then kissed her again.
Her own hunger churned in her belly, a heat that spread through her. Every limb tingled with awareness of all the places they touched—his chest against her breasts, his stomach against hers, their hips pressed together, his fingers in her hair as he turned her head to kiss her again and again.
A delighted laugh bubbled out of her, and he drew back once more, studying her.
Slowly, as if he were fighting the expression, a faint smile curved over his lips. “You smiled like this the night of the party,” he murmured, brushing his thumb against her lower lip.
“I was happy then.” She licked her lips, catching the pad of his thumb with her tongue. The look that shot across his face, a savage need she’d never seen on a man’s face before, made her body arch into his.
“Are you happy now?”
Her fingers caught his wrist as the smoldering embers between her legs grew to a delicious ache. She drew his hand down, her eyes never leaving his.
She’d kissed him first. She’d surprised him then. She wanted to surprise him now. Even though she’d never done more than kissing, she wasn’t a fool. She knew—in theory if not in practice—what people did when no one else was watching.
She pressed his hand low on her belly, his fingertips resting against her pubic bone over her pants.
His dark eyes grew even darker.
“Miss Starkov,” he murmured. The way he said her name made her gasp, made her arch against him. His fingers slipped just a bit lower, and that was a wickeder tease than what she’d given him. “Not many people surprise me.”
“I seem to be rather good at it.”
“You do.” Instead of sliding his hand even lower, he slid his hand to the small of her back and drew her with him as he stepped toward the bed.
Without his mouth on hers, with the reality of what they might do a handful of steps away, anxiety rose like a sudden wave inside her. Her fingers caught on his sleeves, grasping the fabric.
He stopped and bent his mouth to hers again. When they’d kissed before—in her room, at the party, just now—he’d been all hunger and desire. Now, he offered reassurance in the way his mouth moved against hers. And in the space of a breath, he whispered, “At your command, Miss Starkov.”
A shiver wound down her spine. She saw the moment he felt that shiver, saw the comprehension in his gaze and felt compassion in the brush of his thumb along her jaw.
“You like that.”
“Like what?”
The corner of his mouth ticked upward. “Miss Starkov,” he murmured against her lips, and she pressed against him, her kisses demanding instead of comforting.
“Aleksander,” she whispered back, almost in challenge.
He spun them around, pinning her body between his and one of the bed’s thick posts. She gasped, her fingers curling in his hair, and she kissed him again as his hands settled on her waist to hold her tight to his body.
Against her belly, she felt the press of his half-hard cock. Between her legs, she felt the wet heat of her own desire alongside an ache she couldn’t entirely understand. Was this, she wondered, what women meant when they talked about needing a man inside them? If it was, it felt incredible. She wanted to drown in this needy sensation, to bask in the warmth of it until she could no longer breathe.
His hands left her hips. His body bowed and curved around hers, the backs of his hands brushing against her breasts as he pulled at the buttons on his tunic.
Knocking his hands aside, she replaced them with her own. She wanted this; she wouldn’t let him take one moment of the experience from her.
He nipped her lip as her fingers made short work of his tunic, pushing it off his shoulders. “Demanding.”
Maybe, but this was her choice, her moment, her desire.
Before he could take her mouth in another kiss, she did something she’d dreamed of doing for months now. She licked into his mouth, curving one hand behind his head to hold him in place.
The broken, hungry sound he made as his hips rocked hard against hers made her purr with delight.
Her free hand ran down his chest, slipping beneath his undershirt.
At the brush of her fingers against his stomach, he jerked away from her mouth and let out a curse.
“Do you—you like my touch that much?” she asked, feeling strangely powerful. It was so much like that moment before the king that he’d taken her hand and she’d called the sun, but different still.
“I’ve imagined what your hands would feel like on my skin since the party, solnishko.”
Her other hand joined the first. Eyes on his, she slid her palms up his chest, and watched her touch unmake him. He shuddered, his lips parted on a silent gasp, his cock hard against her hip. And she burned, the heat of the sun licking beneath her skin as she realized a new kind of power.
Catching his shirt behind his neck, he yanked it off and tossed it aside. It joined his tunic on the floor, and his hands swept up her sides, trailing fire beneath her skin, as if he called the sunlight inside her with every caress.
“You’re overdressed,” he whispered against her mouth.
His lips ran down her throat, and she arched against him with a soft moan. Between them, his fingers freed the clasps of her own tunic. He drew back only to help her lift the shirt over her head and discard it, leaving her in her stays.
Instead of immediately taking her out of those, he bent his mouth to the swell of her breast and pressed more kisses against her skin.
She shivered beneath his touch, lifting her fingers to his hair to hold his mouth against her as he kissed and licked his way across her skin. Every touch made her burn, made her ache, made the wetness between her legs grow. Her body arched against his, and he pressed against her in turn, fitting his hips between her legs. One of her own legs lifted, wrapping around his hip, and he let out a soft, satisfied noise against her skin.
Dragging his hands down her sides as if he couldn’t get enough of touching her, he caught a bit of skin between his teeth. She sucked in a sharp gasp as he worried her skin, as he slipped his hands beneath her ass and lifted her up with a casual strength that left her reeling in the wake of a wash of heat and desire.
Now, he pinned her against the post with his hips tight against hers, the line of his cock a brand between her legs.
She shifted restlessly against him, but he seemed in no great hurry.
Two of his fingers hooked in front of her stays, pulling to create just enough room that he could urge her breast from the fabric.
Cool air kissed her nipple just before his mouth wrapped around it. A harsh gasp escaped her as wet heat pulled all the air from her lungs. She keened, her nails scratching against his scalp as her eyes fluttered shut.
His teeth dragged against her nipple, worrying it to a hard peak. When he bit down, he applied a pressure that built and built, and just when she thought the pressure might turn to pain, he released her nipple. The tingling pleasure of it made her gasp.
“Again,” she demanded.
Obliging her, he freed her other breast, sucking the hardened peak of her nipple between his lips as his hips flexed against hers.
He bathed her in sensation, holding her against the post with his body as his fingers found the laces of her stays and pulled them free. The fabric fell away from her, and he released her breast, straightening and catching her lips in another kiss.
His hands swept up her sides, and she expected him to fill his palms with her breasts. Instead, he held her tight against him, no space between their bodies as he licked into her mouth and let their tongues tangle together. The crush of his chest against her breasts felt almost as decadent as the line of his cock between her legs, and she moaned into their kiss as her fingers tugged at his hair.
“More?” he asked against her mouth.
“More,” she agreed.
Palming her ass, he smiled. She felt the curve of his lips, delighted that she could make him smile. He pulled her away from the post and, turning, fell onto the bed with her over him.
She followed him down, bending over him to press hungry kisses against his neck as his hands swept over her back.
“Boots, Miss Starkov.”
“Can’t we ignore them?” They could just get their pants out of the way and finish this without taking their shoes off. She knew that.
He slid his fingers into her hair, carding it out of her face as he urged her to look at him.
The expression he wore took her breath away. “I will have you naked in this bed, Alina,” he said, and her body reacted to that with such profound heat that she gasped. The hunger in his eyes sharpened. Saints, he was a predator who was clearly pleased to have caught his prey.
Except she wasn’t prey. She hadn’t been since that moment in the tent when he’d pierced her skin and let out the light, even though she hadn’t known it at the time. As much as he’d manipulated her at first, they were equals now. Their powers existed in a balance, and he could no more consume her completely than she could consume him.
That thrilled her. That excited her.
And his eyes reflected that same feeling.
Bracing her hands on his chest, she pushed herself back. Mindful of his body, she slipped between his legs, going to her knees at the foot of the bed.
He followed her, followed every inch of her progress, pushing himself up. When her knees hit the floor, his shaky exhalation filled the room like a physical thing.
A smile curved her lips. The way he looked at her filled her with more of that new power. With that intense, dark-eyed gaze devouring her, she felt like she could conquer the world.
Her fingers pulled free the laces on his boots, and she tugged them off his feet.
With her hands braced on his knees, she rose over him. Again, he whispered a ragged oath. His eyes raked from her waist up her stomach, over her breasts, up to her face.
“You have enchanted me, solnishko.” His hand cupped her jaw, drawing her close for a lingering kiss. “Take off your shoes.”
She did him one better.
After kicking off her own boots, as she stood at the foot of the bed with his hungry eyes fixed on hers, she smoothed her hands down her breasts. His eyes followed her hands, lingered on her nipples, and then jumped back to her hands as they caught on the fly of her pants.
His breath hitched in his chest.
She tugged the laces open.
He leaned toward her, naked want sharpening his features.
She could do anything, she realized. If he weren’t just a vision—a vision that had substance and weight for her and her alone—she could take this moment to destroy him. The most powerful man in the world was vulnerable in her room. In their room.
She could end the war.
She could kill him.
She could snuff out his power and have all the time in the world to solve the problem of the Shadow Fold without his armies bearing down on hers.
Instead, she swished her hips from one side to the other and let her pants whisper down her legs. She didn’t even hesitate—how could she when the desire in his gaze filled her with confidence and power—to let her small clothes follow.
Naked before him, just as vulnerable as he, she felt more power than she ever had in her life.
“You’re a vision,” Aleksander told her, holding out a hand to her.
She placed her hand in his and climbed onto the bed. When he tugged, she fell into his arms, and he rolled her under him, his hands sweeping down her ribs, her hips, her thighs as he settled beside her.
His lips brushed against her breast. His tongue curled around her nipple. “I want to kiss every inch of you.” He spoke the words against the underside of her breast, his fingers circling around her knee and sliding up the inside of her thigh.
A little gasp from her stopped his hand. He glanced up at her, and she let out a shuddering breath—not of fear or anxiety but of anticipation.
No one had ever touched her like this. She’d fantasized about it, first with Mal between her legs and then with him, with Aleksander. Even as she fled him from Ravka to Novyi Zem, she’d imagined what his hands might feel like on her.
Rough calluses. Warm. Strong.
“Alina?”
Licking her lips, she shifted beneath him, drawing one leg up so that she was open to him.
His breathing sped up, matching hers. His fingers stroked a featherlight caress down the back of her thigh as she caught her lip between her teeth. “Please,” she whispered.
Two of his fingers parted the lips of her cunt and caressed her from entrance to clit—and sunlight shimmered beneath her skin.
He froze. The shadows in the recesses of the room darkened, a gathering gloom that should have been a threat. Instead, desire spiked through her, a wicked snap of electric heat.
“More,” she told him, her eyes on his. “Please.”
“Why did you call the light?”
She took a moment to consider his question even though all her brain wanted was to shut off and let her body enjoy more of his touch. “I didn’t,” she finally said. “You—your touch did.”
He studied her in silence, considering her words. His fingers stayed where they were, resting against warm, wet skin just above her clit. The persistent weight of his touch built anticipation beneath her skin, and she trembled ever so slightly.
Almost experimentally, he circled one finger around her clit.
Light followed his touch, a glimmer of noon in the darkness of their room.
His eyes widened with wonder, with desire, with an avalanche of hunger. He pushed himself up the length of her body, his mouth crashing against hers in a wild kiss.
Wrapping her arms around him, she let herself drown in that kiss as her body twisted toward his.
His fingers moved against her. Long, languorous strokes that matched the drag of his tongue against hers.
He explored every inch of her, his fingers running back and forth between her legs and spreading her slick arousal over her skin. Each caress ended with his fingers flicking against her clit as his tongue flicked against hers.
When she started to moan into his mouth, he drew back. Propped on one arm above her, he watched her. Watched her face as she arched and gasped, rocking her hips into his hands in search of more. But he seemed content to play with her, to make her burn with more of that heat as his touch drew light across her flesh.
His fingers circled her entrance, and she keened for him.
One finger pressed against her, and she raked her nails down his back.
A pleased laugh rumbled out of him, and he eased one finger into her. Now, he gasped. His hips jerked against hers, and that lack of control from him thrilled her. “Tight. You’re so tight.”
He dropped his forehead against hers, and Alina let her eyes meet his. “More,” she demanded.
His finger sank inside her, and the light that he called inside her with his touch glittered beneath her belly, her chest. She felt the warmth of it as it spread through her, felt the warmth of the pleasure created by his finger slowly thrusting into her.
“Should I tell you how I’ve touched myself to the thought of having you like this?” he asked her.
A moan spilled past her lips, and her hips arched. “Yes.”
“I wondered if you’d burn with the heat of the sun.” His lips brushed against her forehead, the length of her nose, her cheek.
A keening whine caught in her throat. One of her hands fisted in the sheets beneath him, the other clutched at his shoulder. She burned—surely he felt how hot she burned.
“I never expected you to glow, too.”
His finger drew out of her, and she made a plaintive little noise. “Don’t stop.”
Two fingers ran over her entrance, and she gasped. His thumb dragged over her clit, and she shook beneath him. Slowly, he pushed those fingers into her, his cheek resting against hers. “You’re the sun itself, light and heat poured into flesh.” His fingers curled inside her, and she keened again for him. “Move with me, solnishko. Rock your hips in time with my fingers.”
His words rumbled against her ear, as much a physical caress as the fingers inside her.
“That’s it.” He drew back, and she forced her eyes open, watching him watch her.
Light shimmered beneath her skin, a prismatic array of silvers and golds that grew brighter as she grew hotter. Beyond the frame of the bed, the shadows grew darker still until she couldn’t see the ceiling, the door. Not that she cared to.
He slipped his hand beneath her head, still braced on that same arm above her, and urged her head to turn toward his. “Close your eyes, Alina.”
After a second of hesitation—she didn’t want to lose his face, the expressions he wore—she let her eyes close.
“Keep moving with me.” His thumb brushed over her clit, and her hips jumped. For a moment, she lost the rhythm of his fingers inside her, but he kept going. Kept stroking her. “You burn me.” His mouth brushed the corner of her lips. “I’d always imagined you would.” His fingers curled inside her, and she let out a strangled moan. “In winter, I’d lay before the fireplace to imagine the heat of you as I stroked my cock.”
She couldn’t quite picture it—not him naked with his cock in his hand, but the rest of it? Oh, yes, she could easily imagine him in front of the fire, that dark-eyed look of desire on his face.
“I’d wrap my hand around my cock and pretend it was yours, that you were beside me, that the heat of the flames was the heat of your body. And when I came, I’d whisper your name and imagine the crackle of the fire was your laughter.”
His fingers curled, and she keened. The fire consumed her, burning her from the inside out. She was lost in the heat except for the weight of his body at her side, the easy warmth of his fingers inside her.
“I’d wonder what your cunt would feel like around my cock.”
Her cunt clenched around his fingers, a sharp contraction that had her gasping. Tension lined her entire body. Her nails dug deeper into his shoulder, her other hand twisting the coverlet beneath them as her body strained against him, chasing a pleasure she craved more than the air in her lungs.
His lips brushed her ear. “I’m going to be inside you tonight, Miss Starkov.”
She came with a broken little cry, her back bowed. Pleasure washed through her in waves of heat. Light burned against her closed eyelids for just a moment before heavy shadow plunged them into darkness.
She was still shaking when his mouth brushed her belly. She hadn’t quite made sense of what he was doing when his tongue laved over her clit and his fingers began moving inside her again.
Her eyes flew open, and she let out a sobbing moan. Her hips arched, her back bowed again, and he laughed against her. The sound was full of pleasure, of dark satisfaction.
Tendrils of shadow whispered down her body. They curled against her breasts and played over her nipples like the bow of a violin as he sucked her clit between his lips and worked his fingers inside her.
When she tried to thrust her fingers into his hair to hold his mouth against her, silky shadows drew her hands above her head.
“Just feel,” he commanded.
The fact that she was helpless to do anything but obey made her tremble with pleasure.
The closer he worked her to orgasm, the brighter the light beneath her skin became. If not for the streaks of darkness between the light, she would have been afraid one of her guards would see the light and come running. But his shadows contained the light, twined around it until sun and night braided together.
She broke for him a second time, whimpering as her legs dragged along his sides, as she rocked against his mouth. He licked her through her orgasm, the stroking of his fingers prolonging the pleasure until she thought she might come a third time.
He worked her to that edge, and then he drew back. His fingers slowed but didn’t leave her, and he leaned over her body.
The shadows holding her arms released her, and now she did drive her fingers into his hair to pull his mouth to hers for a long, needy kiss. The sharp taste of her desire on his lips only served to reignite the desperate fire inside her and remind her of that aching, empty feeling. Even with his fingers inside her, she didn’t feel the way she wanted, needed to feel.
“Please,” she whispered, hating the feel of his pants against her legs.
“Do you need me to fuck you?” he asked, and the rough language drew a ripple of sunlight down her body and sharp heat between her legs. “Do you want me inside you?”
“You promised,” she reminded him, and her fingers dropped from his hair to his back, sweeping down his skin to wiggle beneath his pants. She grasped his ass and yanked him against her.
His groan of pleasure made her shiver with delight. “You’re better than any of my fantasies.” His tongue flicked against her lips. She sucked it into her mouth. “Wicked girl. And they call you a saint.”
Instead of cooling her ardor, that made her burn hotter. “I never wanted to be a saint.”
He drew his fingers from her cunt and caught her chin between his slick index finger and thumb. She had no idea why that made her cunt throb, but it did, and she shifted restlessly against him.
The intense look in his eyes only made her ache more. The fact that he wasn’t between her legs, guiding his cock into her left her frustrated—and desperate.
“Must I beg?” she asked.
Heat flared in his eyes—and that delicious power spread through her.
“Do I need to beg for you to take me, Aleksander?”
He drew back so fast, a cool breeze washed over her skin. She watched him yank his pants open, his eyes dragging down the shimmering length of her body. As he shoved his pants down, her eyes slid over his muscled torso to the arching line of his cock.
Need pulsed inside her. Her mouth felt suddenly dry. She’d seen animals mate, and it wasn’t easy to maintain privacy in the army. None of those things prepared her for him. Or, perhaps, didn’t prepare her for the sight of him when he’d already given her two orgasms. Soft with pleasure and hungry for more, the sight of his cock thrilled her.
He tossed his pants aside and laid himself over her. His hands framed her face as he kissed her, as she shifted beneath him to bring his cock against her slick cunt.
He gasped into their kiss, and she raked her nails down his back as she arched. His cock dragged against her clit, and the pleasure of it left her breathless.
“I want to know what you feel like inside me,” she whispered against his mouth. “And I want you to tell me if I’m as hot as you imagined.”
He swore, rolling to his back and taking her with him. His hands swept down her body with an urgency she’d never seen from him before. Long, fine-boned fingers curved over her hips, and he showed her where to settle over him.
“On your knees for me, solnishko,” he told her, his voice rough.
This was where her knowledge dried up. She’d heard soldiers brag about their conquests, so she understood there were a variety of ways two people could come together, but all that knowledge was theoretical. She followed the guidance of his hands, rising above him.
One of his hands slipped between them, and she understood what he wanted.
As his cock nudged against her, he braced his free hand against her chest, between her breasts. “Sometimes, this hurts the first time.” His voice was ragged. His hand shook. The starved hunger in his eyes made heat roll through her. “I can’t promise—”
She bent forward, her lips against his. “Fuck me, Aleksander,” she said, delighted by her own daring, by the way his eyes widened, by how the tendons in his neck suddenly stood out sharp with tension.
He arched beneath her, and his cock slid into her.
She eased down, and his cock pressed deeper, filling her, stretching her, and her head fell back as pleasure burned through her. Shimmering shafts of light spilled speckling patterns against his skin as his hand settled on her hip and drew her down his length, and the only thing she felt was the exquisite pleasure of it.
Fire. Maddening ecstasy.
“How?” she gasped, her head lolling forward. Her lips found his. “How did you only fantasize about this?”
Ragged laughter warmed her lips. His hands smoothed over her hips, a gentle pressure showing her how to move now that he was seated deep inside her. “No pain?”
Her hips rolled forward, and she moaned. His cock felt so good in her. She felt incredible. Full. Here at last was the feeling she’d been chasing since the first brush of his lips on her neck in the library.
She moved against him again, unable to answer his question when the pleasure consumed all her focus. Her eyes met his, glittering in the darkness, and she let out a soft, stuttering gasp. “Aleksander.”
“Incredible,” he murmured in reply, his hips rolling in a soft counterpoint against hers. When they came together, she felt him slide deep, felt him fill her until there was no space between them, no room for light—no room for darkness. There was only them in the center of a glittering halo of light ensconced in the solid, protective weight of his midnight.
“Again, Alina.” His words were rough, broken by the staccato rhythm of his breathing. “My name—say it again.”
She had a moment of shocking clarity. No one called him by his name. He was General Kirigan or the Darkling, but never Aleksander. Not even Baghra used his name.
Carefully, she lowered herself against him. Her breasts brushed against his chest, and that made his breath stutter. Her arms braced on either side of his head. Her hands cradled his jaw. “Aleksander,” she whispered against his lips. “Tell me how I feel, Aleksander.”
His fingers dug into her hips, but the faint pain only made the pleasure of his cock moving inside her sweeter. “Like summer.”
“Do I burn, Aleksander?”
He thrust deep into her, and pleasure seared her. Light spilled from her skin everywhere they touched, flinging glittering light into the darkness surrounding them. “Like the sun.”
“Am I as good as you imagined, Aleksander?”
The laugh that spilled from his was incredulous, and the disbelief in it flattered her. “You are so much more than hundreds of years of imagining,” he told her. “So much better than any fantasy.”
His words made her ache, made her cunt ripple and clench around him. When he groaned, arching under her to drive deeper, she whispered his name.
One of his hands stayed on her hip. The other dipped between their bodies. His fingers played against her clit as they moved against each other, losing themselves in the hard pounding of their hearts and the harsh panting of their breath.
She tucked her face against his neck as he petted her, as he stroked her, as he helped her come apart around him. The feel of her body clenching around him was indescribable. It sated some itch inside of her she’d never quite understood before; coming from her own hand felt good, but there was a visceral satisfaction in coming with him inside her.
“More?” he asked against her lips.
Her pleasure drunk brain took a long moment to comprehend that little word. “There’s more?”
He wrapped his arms around her and rolled them over. Urging her legs high on his waist, he tangled his fingers in her hair and gripped her waist hard. “Move with me, solnishko.”
When he started fucking her, it was rough and hard and fast. She lost herself in the rhythm, in the punishing pace of his thrusts. Beneath him, she twisted against the bed and arched to get him as deep into her as possible.
Just as good, this was just as good, but for completely different reasons. She dragged her hands over her body, pinching her own nipples to the sound of his hungry growls.
“Touch yourself,” he told her, and she did.
She played with her clit, her eyes fixed on his as he drove into her—at least until the light from her skin grew to be too much. Her back arched, and he surged hard against her, kissing her with a savagery she felt down to her toes.
His tongue slid into her mouth, muffling her sobbing moan of his name as she came again.
He seemed to lose his rhythm, his thrusts coming harder, until he went still against her and the shadows surged around their bodies. For a moment, the darkness was so intense she could see only the glimmer of his eyes.
Slowly, he relaxed against her. The tension eased out of him, and he rolled them both to their sides.
As her breathing steadied and both light and shadow receded, Alina found herself a little uncertain. None of the books—none of the soldiers’ stories—told her what she was supposed to do now.
“How do you feel?” he asked her, his hand settling on the curve of her waist.
She studied him in the dim light, his face mere inches from hers, and realized she didn’t know how to answer that.
“Any pain?”
“No.” That answer came immediately. Her body felt heavy, her limbs leaden. She only now felt how slick with sweat her skin was. “Lethargic, I guess.”
“Then you’ll rest well tonight,” he said, his knuckles brushing against her cheek.
“After you disappear, will we be enemies again?”
Now he looked thoughtful. His gaze fixed over her shoulder for a long moment, and then he turned back to her. His eyes drifted shut and his lips pressed full against hers, not to arouse but to offer something else. Simple intimacy, maybe.
He lifted his lips from hers, his eyes still closed. “We are what you make us.”
Additional Tags: Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Mildly Dubious Consent, Mild Spoilers
Summary: He ached, he burned, he stood back in Nibelheim in the midst of a conflagration, but this time, his skin trapped the flames. In that moment, he knew without a doubt that he would let Sephiroth do whatever he wanted.
On AO3: Link
“Let us defy destiny together.”
Sephiroth held out his hand.
Cloud stared at it. At him. Back at the hand.
Some strange, yawning hunger unfurled within him. Bizarre, nearly overwhelming need drove him to lift his hand toward Sephiroth’s. He—he didn’t want this. He didn’t want to help Sephiroth do anything, and yet—
Staticky, indistinct whispers fogged his brain. He could pick out fragments of sentences—
—union with—
Join—
—me. Embrace—
—but could make out nothing intelligible.
Beneath the words scratching inside his skull, that need churned inside him. It threaded through him like a second skeleton, its desires subsuming his own. He stood on the mental precipice of his own destruction. The only thing standing between him and the utter loss of self was empty air.
Cloud shuddered.
He didn’t want to help Sephiroth, and yet he felt his arm move.
“No,” he snarled, clasping his hand against his arm. His feet slid apart, his body turning to the side to shelter the arm reaching for Sephiroth.
Gritting his teeth, he dug his fingers into his own wrist hard enough to bruise, hard enough that he felt bones grating together. His eyes snapped up, meeting Sephiroth’s steely gaze.
Steely, but not indifferent.
Something sinister and dark lurked behind the startling green of Sephiroth’s eyes. Something hungry, as hungry as the clawing need inside of Cloud.
“Don’t deny me,” Sephiroth said, taking a step toward him.
Cloud tried to move, but the gravity of a thousand suns held him in place. He strained against the hunger inside him, against the need to reach out for the monster taking yet another step toward him.
Squeezing his eyes shut, he drew on every ounce of strength he possessed. He recalled the horrific flashes of Tifa’s anguish. He remembered Aerith’s words before they stepped into the final battle. Beneath it all, he felt his own residual terror and he used his fear to fill his bones with strength.
He let out a howl of fury and denial and pain. He tore himself away from destiny, wrenching his body backward.
And his hand settled in Sephiroth’s palm.
Cloud’s eyes flew wide open. He sucked in a sharp, horrified breath, and that breath exploded out of him with disbelief.
No.
With no air in his lungs, he couldn’t voice that horrified word.
Sephiroth’s head tipped ever so slightly to the side. “You are the last piece,” he said, his voice low and gravelly. The rough timbre of it stroked the raw, visceral hunger that chewed in Cloud’s gut, soothing the indiscernible source of it. “The last piece I need.” Sephiroth stepped closer, pulling on Cloud’s arm at the same time.
The inexorable strength in Sephiroth’s grip pulled Cloud off balance, and he stumbled forward.
Sephiroth caught him with his hand around Cloud’s throat.
Pleasure exploded beneath his skin. He ached, he burned, he stood back in Nibelheim in the midst of a conflagration, but this time, his skin trapped the flames. In that moment, he knew without a doubt that he would let Sephiroth do whatever he wanted. Shatter his trachea, smash his throat, crush the delicate bones of his neck.
And the ecstasy of his agony would be exquisite.
“Embrace me,” Sephiroth commanded.
On some primal level, Cloud understood that Sephiroth didn’t want to be held. That demand was for so much more than Cloud’s arms around him. Though he knew holding the other man wasn’t enough, it was all he knew to do. He reached for Sephiroth with both arms now, sliding them beneath the heavy fall of the other man’s jacket.
Cloud’s hands pressed against the naked skin of Sephiroth’s back, and he discovered a new, profound loathing for the gloves that kept him from touching Sephiroth’s skin.
(No, no, that wasn’t right, he didn’t want to touch Sephiroth, he didn’t want to be here, he didn’t want any of this, he wanted to find his strength, he wanted—)
He wanted to curve his hands around Sephiroth’s shoulders, but Sephiroth’s pauldrons and the tight fit of his jacket through the chest prevented Cloud’s touch.
Sephiroth’s fingers tightened on Cloud’s throat. His eyes narrowed with thinly veiled disappointment, and Cloud’s heart skipped two beats in his chest.
“I—”
“You’re not ready,” Sephiroth said, squeezing harder. Disgust colored his tone, filled in the space between his words. “Not yet.”
No. No, he was ready, he would give Sephiroth whatever he wanted, whatever needed.
(A distant part of him howled in outrage.)
“But we can make progress here.” The barest hint of a smile curled Sephiroth’s lips. “Together.”
Sweet joy coursed through Cloud. “Yes,” he breathed, his voice raspy and rough from the abuse of Sephiroth’s hand.
In a single, fluid motion, Sephiroth took Cloud to the ground. Cloud’s back hit the dirt, and he cried out more in surprise than pain, and then, as Sephiroth’s body settled against his and pinned his wrists by his shoulders, surprise evaporated, replaced by pleasure.
By horror. He was failing. Once again he was failing and once again someone else would need to save him because he was never enough on his own.
“Mmm, no, we can do better than this for you, Cloud.”
Cloud panted beneath Sephiroth, staring up at him with rapture in his gaze.
Sephiroth rolled off him, smoothly transferring Cloud’s wrists to one hand. He dragged Cloud’s smaller frame between his legs, laying Cloud’s back against his chest. Silvery hair billowed around them like contrails in the air, a thousand lines of bullets shimmering around Cloud’s face.
“Much better.”
Cloud fought the fall of his head, he really did. Against his will, it dropped backwards onto Sephiroth’s shoulder. This felt right (it felt wrong). This felt good (if felt awful). The closer he could be to Sephiroth, the less hunger he felt.
No, that wasn’t quite right. The yawning, endless hunger inside him grew increasingly satisfied, but the fiery desire simmering under his skin only burned with greater intensity. Every touch, every moment of contact, both soothed and inflamed, both eased and incited.
Caught in the spiraling dichotomy, Cloud felt small and lost. He was a mortal resting in the arms of an immortal god. Wasn’t this where he belonged? It felt right, so very right.
Sephiroth’s lips drew along Cloud’s temple, and he shuddered in his god’s embrace. Aching heat spread through him and pooled in his groin. Delicious need made his cock stir and harden, and he trembled.
“You’ve come so far for me already,” Sephiroth purred, and sweet relief washed through Cloud.
He’d been fighting against Sephiroth, raging against the creature he should worship above all others, and yet his actions merited praise. He hadn’t been making mistakes. He hadn’t ruined yet another attempt at becoming—something. Someone. At becoming more.
Sephiroth’s hand smoothed down Cloud’s chest, and Cloud’s cock hardened so fast it hurt. Blood pounded in his veins, and he arched almost violently against Sephiroth’s touch. He twisted into the heat of Sephiroth’s hand, desperately aching for more touch, more sensation, more of his god’s caresses.
“Good, Cloud.”
Sephiroth’s praise filled him with delirious pleasure. He could weep from the rightness of it.
Long fingers curved around Cloud’s wrist, lifting his hands to curl them against his chest.
“Hmm? What’s this?” Sephiroth turned Cloud’s wrist in his hand, inspecting the bracer he wore, and Cloud shivered with anticipation and eagerness to know what Sephiroth saw that was so fascinating. “Elemental materia linked to ice—and to fire.” His dark chuckle shook Cloud like a storm. His cock throbbed, his hips rolling.
Booted feet swung over Cloud’s ankles, trapping him and denying him the range of motion he needed to rock his hips again. A weak sound caught in his throat.
“Clever.”
Sephiroth’s lips touched his ear, and Cloud gasped, feeling as though someone had cast thundaga on him.
“Do you know what this allows me to do to you, Cloud?”
He’d equipped his materia like this so that Sephiroth couldn’t do things to him, he remembered that much. He remembered thumbing the elemental materia pieces before slipping them into his armor, equipping them with fire and ice because—because he remembered something else, an echo of before. The same memory as Tifa’s screams of anguish, the same memory as—
Cloud jerked violently in Sephiroth’s grasp, and this time it had nothing to do with Sephiroth’s agonizingly hot caresses.
He had to get away. He didn’t want this. He didn’t want any of this.
“I won’t—”
“You will,” Sephiroth said matter of factly, yanking Cloud’s shirt from the thick expanse of his belt. He rucked it up, pushing it high on Cloud’s chest.
Warm leather dragged over Cloud’s skin, and he’d have to be a better man not to find that sensation arousing, especially when his cock was already hard and very interested in every way that Sephiroth touched him.
“A demonstration.”
Cloud struggled against Sephiroth’s superior grip. The strength the other man wielded was impossible, even for a SOLDIER. But if SOLDIERs were gods among men, then Sephiroth was a god among SOLDIERs. No force of nature could free Cloud from his god’s grip.
“Let me go!” Cloud snarled, bucking wildly in Sephiroth’s grip. He went nowhere, of course.
A unique scent filled the air. Like mako, magic had a scent, and each spell smelled a particular way. The fire family smelled like embers and charcoal, like a hot and humid day. Lightning materia laced the air with crackling ozone before the magic formed.
Something sharp and cold filled Cloud’s nose. He smelled mountain winds and icy tundras. Frigid mornings had a distinct smell, filling the nose and biting at flesh.
Sephiroth cast blizzard against Cloud’s skin, dragging his thumb along Cloud’s nipple.
Sensation ricocheted down his spine. Fuck, Sephiroth cast blizzard but it felt like thunder, and Cloud gasped, arching into that touch.
A second later, he felt the sweet burn of fire. Sephiroth’s hand dragged across his chest, pulling flame over his skin. Cloud writhed beneath that touch, trapped by Sephiroth’s strength and forced to feel. It hurt, yes, but with his elemental materia absorbing the damage, it felt unspeakably good, too.
“Stop,” Cloud breathed, the protest faint. It rang hollow, even to him, because he didn’t want Sephiroth to stop. No, he wanted the lingering stroke of Sephiroth’s hand again. Wanted to feel ice against his skin in place of the heat.
“Mmm.” For a moment, Sephiroth sounded like he was actually considering Cloud’s request. “No.”
Shock rippled through him as Sephiroth unfastened his belt. He tossed the thick piece of leather aside, his fingers pulling at the fly of Cloud’s pants. “Progress,” he purred in Cloud’s ear, “is made step by slow, exquisite step. I will perfect you, Cloud.”
Cloud trembled as Sephiroth’s hand pushed beneath his pants. He sucked in a hard breath as Sephiroth’s palm ran over the length of his hand cock through his underwear. And he swore, his head falling back, when Sephiroth dragged blizzard-touched fingers over his skin.
Caught between Sephiroth’s chest and his hands, trapped by Sephiroth’s legs laying over his, Cloud could do nothing but feel. And the things he felt—
His head hit Sephiroth’s shoulder. Broken, aching moans spilled past his lips as Sephiroth’s hand closed around his cock. Body-warm leather slid over his skin, the texture a delicious counterpoint to the licks of ice.
One cold thumb dragged over the head of Cloud’s cock, smearing a drop of precum over his skin. Sephiroth’s warm palm dragged down his length, touch hard and firm and rough enough to pulled another moan from him.
And then Sephiroth’s hands weren’t cold, they were burning hot.
Cloud cried out, twisting in Sephiroth’s grasp. The sudden change shocked him, but it diminished none of the pleasure of Sephiroth’s touch. Instead, the heat made him burn more, made electric pleasure dance down his spine.
“Good,” Sephiroth purred, and though Cloud hated that praise, he ached for more of it. His cock twitched in Sephiroth’s hand, and the other man let out a low, dark chuckle against his ear that did as much to twist Cloud up inside as the hand on his length.
A squeeze beneath the head of his cock made stars explode across his vision. A rough stroke made him gasp and groan. A twist of Sephiroth’s wrist and a long drag up his length pulled a sound from Cloud that was almost embarrassing—but it made him feel like he was flying, or falling, or both, and the only Sephiroth’s embrace kept him stable.
“Imagine being this wrapped up in me all the time.” Sephiroth’s lips brushed against Cloud’s ear, and need twisted in Cloud’s gut. He panted, eyes staring into the distance without focus. “Imagine no barriers between us—ever.”
He shouldn’t want that. He knew he shouldn’t want that, but, fuck, he craved it. The very thought of it soothed the violent hunger in his gut at the same time it twisted passion’s knife deeper between his ribs.
He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think.
Sephiroth surged forward in a smooth roll. He pushed Cloud’s shoulders to the rocky ground, but Cloud found no complaint in the bite of stone against his cheek, his chest, his knees. The sharp pricks provided a decadent counterpoint to the rough stroke of Sephiroth’s hand on his cock, making the pleasure better. Harsher. Harder.
He groaned.
“Let go, Cloud,” Sephiroth purred, laying himself across Cloud’s back.
Silver moonlight spun into strands of hair billowed and fell about them in twisting coils. Each silky caress against his skin added another layer to the ecstasy Sephiroth painted against his skin.
Squeezing his eyes shut, Cloud rocked hard into Sephiroth’s fist.
Close now, so close. He moved with the other man, hating himself for his own weakness, but desperately needing the release Sephiroth could give him. He chased it with everything in him. The changes between fire and ice didn’t register, didn’t shock him; when Sephiroth switched between one spell and the other, all it did was add more to the sensation, building up until—
Sephiroth’s hand dragged rough down Cloud’s length and applied slow, steady pressure around the base of his cock.
A choking sob burst past his lips as Sephiroth’s rough grip forestalled orgasm but brought with it an utterly overwhelming wave of pleasure. For a moment, Cloud couldn’t think. Couldn’t breathe. He didn’t know where he was. Didn’t know who he was. Only Sephiroth’s hand on his cock defined him. Only the weight of him at Cloud’s back sketched in the lines of reality.
“Mutual pursuit of the same goal,” Sephiroth said, almost casually, as he released Cloud’s wrists, “is what brings us closer. When we want the same thing, then you’ll be ready for the final reunion. Don’t you want that?”
Did he? Shit, he didn’t know. He didn’t think he should want that, but he didn’t not want it, either.
“Please,” he gasped, hating himself for the weakness. He didn’t really know if he was asking for more or for clarification, but he also didn’t care which it was. Anything Sephiroth gave him now would be better than nothing.
A hand wrapped in leather stroked down Cloud’s side. Sephiroth’s jacket hung around them both, shadowing their bodies and trapping their shared heat. Cloud trembled as Sephiroth’s hand smoothed over his hip, his thigh. He groaned as Sephiroth curved his palm over his ass.
“Pleading, Cloud?” Sephiroth rasped out a chuckle against his ear, dark like midnight and just as dangerous. “Give me more of your pleas.”
Sephiroth’s hand disappeared, and Cloud let out a bereft moan. He couldn’t understand how he’d displeased his god so much that he needed to be punished by the loss of touch.
But then Sephiroth’s hand returned, bare, with no leather glove between their skin.
Cloud shuddered.
Rough fingers ran along the curve of his ass, dipping inward to stroke along his thigh. At the same time, Sephiroth resumed lazily stroking Cloud’s cock, as if he had nothing better to do with his time.
Mutual pursuit of the same goal, Sephiroth had said.
Another shudder ran down his spine.
Sephiroth’s fingers slipped between Cloud’s cheeks in a single, long glide. The callused tips of his fingers ran like pulled silk over Cloud’s entrance, and he let out a shocked gasp, bucking hard into Sephiroth’s fist. The hard drag of leather along his cock was almost too much, and he jerked back to avoid too much of it, inadvertently pushing Sephiroth’s fingers against his entrance.
That stimulation horrified him. Aroused him. Pleasure sparked under his skin like fireworks, and Cloud whined, pressing his forehead against a particularly rough-edged stone. That, too, only magnified the storm of feeling tangling up his body.
He didn’t really know what he felt anymore, just that he wanted more of it.
“Good.” The wicked, crooning drawl of Sephiroth’s voice raked pleasure down Cloud’s spine. Sephiroth had never emoted much—except the rage, Cloud remember the rage, the fury, the hatred, the disdain—but now, he spoke with so much pleasure in his voice. So much anticipation.
One finger pressed harder, pushing into him.
Cloud stiffened and tried to scramble away.
Sephiroth’s fist closed hard around his cock, and the weight of him pinned Cloud in place, but, gods, the combination of pleasure and pain was delicious. Cloud let out a sobbing moan, thrusting hard into Sephiroth’s hand once more.
“That’s it,” Sephiroth murmured, and one finger pressed just barely into Cloud’s body.
The intrusion was foreign, frightening for the alien sensation, but beneath the strange pressure was a delicious feeling of anticipation that made Cloud vibrate. He panted, his hips working slowly into Sephiroth’s hand. The slow push-pull, each retreat pushing Sephiroth’s finger further into him, felt like a drug.
“More, Cloud?”
Cloud’s only answer to that was a strangled moan. He couldn’t manage more.
“We’ll do what we can do.” Sephiroth’s finger drew back as his teeth caught Cloud’s ear. He didn’t tug gently or playfully. But Sephiroth had neither been gentle nor playful. He was a vengeful god; he always had been. Cloud would never expect tenderness from this man, but that was fine. He didn’t want tenderness.
Sephiroth bit down, applying more and more pressure over time, until Cloud’s vision fogged over with speckles and his breath caught in his throat. Only two points of sensation mattered: the visceral ache of Sephiroth’s teeth in his ear and the wicked drag of leather against Cloud’s cock.
Abruptly, Sephiroth released his ear. Cloud groaned, shaking. He heard a quiet hum and then a wet pop. Immediately following that, Sephiroth’s finger, slick with spit, pressed against Cloud’s ass again.
One goal. The same goal.
At first, Cloud thought that shared goal was pleasure. As Sephiroth worked his finger into Cloud’s body, he realized the truth.
This wasn’t about pleasure.
This was about destruction. This was about his destruction, and he didn’t care. Sephiroth wasn’t cruel. He wasn’t tender. He was systematic and brutal.
He worked his finger deeper, stroking, teasing, cajoling with relentless pleasure as he stroked Cloud off. When Cloud got too close to orgasm, Sephiroth’s fist closed hard around his length. The shock of pain knocked him back, but never far. Each time Sephiroth began playing ice and fire over him, he took Cloud one step closer to the edge of a devastating kind of bliss Cloud had started to crave.
Nothing else mattered. Nothing. Not the planet, not Tifa’s past anguish or Aerith’s present hopes. The future lost all its meaning, and the past meant something only because it had propelled him into this present.
Sephiroth destroyed him. That questing finger found something inside Cloud’s body that made him break.
He sobbed the next time Sephiroth denied him an orgasm. Tears burned in his eyes, as much for the same of wanting as wanting itself, and he twisted violently both into and away from Sephiroth’s every touch.
“Burn for me,” Sephiroth demanded, and Cloud did.
Sephiroth cast fire against his skin, and it lit him with blazing light. The materia on his bracer absorbed the damage but did nothing to prevent the flames. They scorched him, devoured him, and his materia prevented what should have been an inevitable demise.
When Sephiroth bit his neck hard enough to make him bleed, Cloud begged for more. When Sephiroth slipped a second finger into him and the stretch became a burning pain that should have been uncomfortable, Cloud pleaded for release.
Words ceased to have meaning. His existence started and stopped with Sephiroth’s hands on his body.
Devastating pleasure crested inside him, bubbled up, spilled over. He came so hard it hurt, too. Everything hurt, but the hurt was so good, so sweet. It swept through him like a tidal wave across the whole of the planet, swamping him, overwhelming him. And then flame followed wave, and what remained of his battered self burned away. He was nothing in the face of Sephiroth’s fire, consumed by it.
In the ashes of ecstasy, he trembled against rocky ground. His cock throbbed with spent pleasure. His body shook. He felt cold and hot and then cold again, barely able to breathe.
“Seven seconds till the end.” Sephiroth murmured the words against Cloud’s ear, and all that pleasure evaporated like so much fog on a cloudless day. “Time enough for you. Perhaps.” He spoke with a wandering tone, a thoughtful tone. “But what will you do with it?” Another dark chuckle. “Let’s see.”
And then Sephiroth was gone, Cloud was alone.
Alone in skin that didn’t fit quite right, with a mind that didn’t feel quite right, wearing clothes that didn’t match him and standing beside friends who no longer occupied quite the same place in his life. He swallowed hard.
Summary: Rain drives Aerith and Cloud into a chilly shelter on the road home from the church.
On AO3: Link
She’d felt the resonance. First, on the plate in Sector 8. Then, when he crashed through the roof and landed in the midst of her flowers.
Aerith knew better. She knew better than to want men whose eyes were the color of the sky, and she knew she only wanted this one because of the faint harmonies within him. He was bound up with Zack. She could close her eyes and—
She knew better.
But hearts were foolish things.
She followed Cloud Strife across the rooftops, peppering him with questions and dodging his own.
“Maybe,” she said with a laugh, “he thought I could be the greatest SOLDIER yet.”
Cloud let out a sigh of exasperation. “Forget it.”
Such a prickly creature. She half expected him to casually shove her off the rooftops just to be rid of her. But, no, he warned her as they came up to the thin pipe.
Was he as brave as he acted?
She wasn’t. As she pressed herself against the side of shanty home, her heart pounded in her chest. The ground was a long way away. If a SOLDIER fell, he might be fine, but her? It would hurt like a bitch.
“I… actually… haven’t traveled by rooftop before,” she said slowly as they ducked through a low overhang. Shredded awnings hung from the ceiling, creeping like spiderwebs against her naked arms.
Aerith shuddered.
“Be surprised if you had.”
She rubbed her hands over her arms, trying to erase the tickling feeling from her skin, and turned her eyes upward to a dusty, rickety ceiling. Was he capable of more than five words at a time? He was lucky he was so handsome.
But his sour attitude didn’t bring her down.
She watched him slide down a ladder, grinning over the edge of it. “It’s honestly kind of exciting.” She swung her legs around and slid down after he’d cleared it, her skirt floofing up.
He jerked away, scowling into the distance.
Red stained his cheeks, and Aerith’s grin turned mischievous and pleased.
“Well. First time and all.” He scratched at his chin, refusing to meet her eyes.
Aerith leaned toward him, her hands laced behind her back. “First times are very exciting. Aren’t they?” she asked, letting some of that desire seep into her voice.
His flush deepened. Blue-green eyes met hers and then darted away. He cleared his throat. Rocked back on his heels. “We should keep going.” Stepping around her, he resumed a much brisker pace than before.
Aerith trotted after him, pleased with herself. Little was as fun as making stoic men like him blush.
Quickly, though, he outpaced her. He leaped over the rooftops with ease, leaving her on the far side of a large jump.
Heart pounding so loud she felt her pulse in her ears, she peered over the edge.
With a strangled little sound, she jerked back. It was a long way down, even with all the progress they’d made.
When she glanced up, he was halfway around the corner of the next building. “Wait!” she called, clutching her hands to her chest. He wouldn’t abandon her. She knew that. For all his bluster and too-cool attitude, he wasn’t cruel. “Give me a moment, would you?”
He paused, looking over his shoulder at her. They stood too far apart for her to read his expression, but he turned back. He came back.
“Come on,” he said, holding out his hand to her.
Swallowing down her nerves, she took a step back and then flung herself forward.
The tip of her boot caught on the corrugated iron rooftop, and she pitched wildly forward, crying out with alarm. Her heart jumped into her throat, her stomach twisting into a sudden, vicious knot.
And then his hands, wrapped in warm leather, closed around her wrists. With inhuman strength, he pulled her against him, and Aerith collapsed into his arms. Safe. Warm. So warm. He smelled like sweat and dirt and the crackle of ozone, and she wanted to press her face against his neck and just breathe him in for hours.
One hand rested lightly on his chest. The other smoothed over his shoulder. “Thanks,” she said softly, smiling up at him.
He stared down at her, still faintly red.
“Maybe next time, you don’t run off on your own?”
He chuckled, the corners of his mouth quirking up. “Those the words of a SOLDIER candidate?”
Oh, he had an adorable grin. And he teased her. He rose to her bait and gave as good as he got.
“So petty,” she huffed, but she kept smiling, too. Her arms twined around the back of his neck, and she leaned closer. Her lips brushed his ear, and his body tensed against hers. “Lucky for you, I like that.”
She drew back, sliding her body along his before pulling away, and left him standing behind her with a poleaxed expression. She also liked that, but he didn’t need to know that.
The sky grew darker, the plate’s shadow deeper.
Aerith paused on a rooftop, holding onto a half-rotted wooden pillar behind her. Tipping her head back, she peered at the sky above them. “Looks like rain.” As if to confirm her suspicions, thunder rolled on the plate’s horizon.
She glanced at Cloud. “We might want to find a place to wait out the storm.”
He frowned. “Won’t the plate—”
“Nope,” she said with good cheer.
People new to the ground often thought they were safe from storms. Not true. The slums covered by plates got the worst of it. Dirty rain water slipped between the gaps in a plate’s structure. The runoff dropped groundside long after the rain stopped plate side, dragging sludge and refuse from the plate above to the slums below.
“The plate makes storms gross. The stormwater is downright vile. We should find a place with a decent roof.”
Cloud crossed his arms, turning his frown on the nearby buildings. “So… no one lives in these buildings?” he asked hesitantly.
Aerith wondered why. Was he concerned about breaking into someone’s house or that he’d have a cute girl curling up against him when the water fell from the plate and turned everything chilly?
“Nope,” she said, sliding up to his side. He leaned back, but only a little. Only enough to meet her eyes. “No one to get mad if we make noise.”
His eyes widened.
Aerith pressed one finger to the middle of his chest. Pushed just enough to throw a normal person off balance. He, of course, didn’t move. “What’s that face for?” she asked with a laugh.
Turning, she ducked around the corner of a ramshackle building. The walls had buckled around the windows, so she passed that one by.
Behind her, she heard Cloud’s footsteps on the flimsy wood boards. “We might be able to get to the station before the rain… drips down from the plate?” He made the last bit of his statement into more of a question.
Aerith peered around his shoulder, squinting at the horizon beyond the steel sky. Heavy, dark clouds obscured the sun, painting the sky angry purples and blues. “No,” she said. “This storm is moving too quickly. And it’ll get too dark to see where we’re walking.”
She felt it in the distance. Rain pelted the cracked, dry earth outside of Midgar, those dead plains that wheezed and gasped for life.
Another peal of thunder rolled through the sky, louder this time. Lightning struck in the distance, fracturing like white veins against the clouds.
“This way.” She caught him by the wrist and tugged him after her, leading him deeper into the tangle of dilapidated homes.
The heavy clouds obscuring the setting sun cast the slums into darkness. Shadows deepened as Aerith and Cloud scoured homes in search of a roof that hadn’t split or fallen away. Eventually, he unsocketed one of his yellow materia, holding it up for light so they could see.
They’d just found an abandoned house with a serviceable roof when the first thick, black blob of runoff fell from the plate above them. Cloud stared at the dirty splotch on the pipe beneath their feet, his brows arched with surprise.
Another droplet plopped onto the pipe beside his boot, and Aerith grabbed his wrist with both hands. “You really don’t want that to fall on you,” she said, pulling him into the house.
He stumbled inside, catching himself on a large crate before he could topple over, and she gave him a flash of an apologetic smile.
Setting his sword and the yellow materia on the top of the box, he turned to the pockets in his pants. “Here,” he said, and he removed a handful more materia.
Purple, green, and yellow light filled the tiny house. A small fortune in materia cast strange shadows across the wood and corrugated iron.
Above them, fat runoff pinged against the roof, plinking out a staccato rhythm.
He frowned at the ceiling, sitting near the box.
Aerith laid her own staff on the box, unsocketing her materia, too. They’d want all the light they could get, no matter how strange the riot of color was.
“It gets really loud,” she said, lifting her voice so she could be heard over the sound of the runoff. She smoothed her skirt down her legs and sat opposite him, studying him.
Cloud winced, nodding.
She gave him a sympathetic smile. SOLDIERs had excellent senses. No doubt he found the sound irritating. She did, too, and she couldn’t hear someone drop a pin through three floors of concrete.
They sat for a moment in relative silence, listening to the rain pinging against the roof. As it began to pour down from the plate above in sheets, the air grew noticeably cooler. Aerith suppressed a shiver, wrapping her arms around her middle.
Cloud didn’t seem to notice the cold. His eyes kept skipping over her, studying the cast of the shadows over the room.
She took the opportunity to study his face. The green materia made his eyes brighter. The purple, almost magenta materia warmed his skin. And the yellow? It made his hair glow in the faint light.
Handsome. He was handsome, just like Zack. And when she stilled her mind and focused on her breathing, when she touched that warm, green place inside her heart, he felt like Zack, too. He felt like warmth and solace. He felt like safety and familiarity.
“It’s a bit cold, isn’t it?” she asked, rubbing her arms.
He made a soft sound of agreement, ducking his head to study the dusty floor.
Aerith scooted closer.
Zack was gone. She’d felt him go. There was no point in hanging onto him, but she couldn’t bring herself to let go of him. Cloud wasn’t Zack.
But hearts were foolish things. For just a moment, she wanted to feel close to him again.
Aerith laid her hand against Cloud’s upper arm.
He jumped, jerking his gaze to hers.
With a soft smile, she lifted her hand to his cheek. Her fingers feathered over his cheek. “You feel chilly.” Her thumb brushed his bottom lip. His mouth was perennially downturned, whether in a pout or a scowl she couldn’t say. But as her thumb traced the soft line of it, his lips parted, and the faintest bit of desire curled them.
She watched his eyes, feeling like she was falling off the edge of a plate and into the sky.
“It’s not that bad,” he said, but he didn’t look away.
“Maybe not to a SOLDIER,” she replied, rising to her knees at his side. Her other hand curved against his cheek. She cradled his face, and the chill in the air faded for the heat expanding like a slow-rolling thunderstorm inside her. “Help me ward of the chill, Mr. Bodyguard.”
His eyes widened for only a moment before a look of soft, simmering interest replaced surprise. “That costs extra.” His tone was playful. Kind. Inviting.
“How much?” Her fingers applied a gentle pressure, urging his head to tip backwards.
“We can negotiate a rate.” Hesitant hands settled on her hips. Slid higher.
Aerith inhaled deeply, her eyes fluttering shut as his hands ran over her waist, beneath her jacket, and up her sides. “After?”
“After,” he agreed, and she bent her head to kiss him softly.
She felt more of his hesitation, but not unwillingness, no, for his lips parted beneath hers with a gusty sigh. He tasted shy and uncertain, his lips moving always a second later than hers, but she found she didn’t mind.
He gave her the space to lick into his mouth and discover heat beneath the uncertainty, and when she teased his tongue with hers, he rewarded her with an aching little moan.
Her hands slipped from his face. One slid behind his neck, her arm curving around him as she settled against his chest. His arm wound around her, too, banding about her waist to tug her closer. Her free hand ran down his neck and along his shoulder. She traced her fingertips over his bicep, drawing idle lines against his skin.
At his wrist, her fingers curved into the edge of his gauntlet. A gentle tug pulled the armor down his wrist and over the back of his hand. He pulled in the opposite direction, and the glove fell away.
His callused fingers brushed against her elbow as she turned her face, catching his mouth from a new, better angle. Like this, her hair fell over her shoulder and cut off the light from the materia. Heavy shadow obscured his face when she opened her eyes, but not so much that she could confuse him for someone else.
She didn’t want to. She didn’t want to climb into bed with a ghost; she wanted a living, breathing man with hot skin and hotter moans.
“Hey,” she whispered when his eyes met hers.
“Hey,” he whispered back, his hands easing up her body. One bare, one still in his glove, his hands paused just beneath her breasts.
A shiver ran down Aerith’s spine, but not from cold. Desire warmed her and deafened her to the pounding rain. All she heard was the beat of her heart and the whispering exhalations of Cloud’s every breath.
She kissed him again, hungrier this time. Their mouths fit together, and she sank against him, sank into the heat of his body and the warmth of his kiss.
His hands slid up, slid over her breasts, slid to her shoulders where he pushed at her jacket. She arched her back, drawing her hands from him. The heavy denim jacket dropped to the ground behind her, and she left it there, forgotten.
Surging forward, she wrapped her arms around his neck. Her skirt climbed high on her thighs as she slipped into his lap, her legs bracketing his.
She settled against him as her fingers drove into his hair. An easy pressure with her fingers cajoled his head to turn, to tip to the side so she could slide her tongue into his mouth and devour her.
His arms came around her. She felt the brush of them against her sides as he yanked off his other glove. Then his hands were on her again, curving over her ass as he drew her hard against him.
The strength of his grasp made her moan.
“Sorry,” he gasped into their kiss.
“No.” She nipped at his lower lip. “No, it felt good. Feels good. You feel good, Cloud.”
Her hips pressed against his, desperately seeking friction and contact. Between her legs, she felt the line of his cock against her thigh. A shuddering heat rippled through her, and she rolled her body against his for the exquisite pleasure of feeling his desire.
She made quick work of his pauldron, unsnapping it from his suspenders.
It clanked to the ground. He shoved it further aside and then returned his hands to her. One hand pressed against the small of her back, urging her to move against him again. His other hand pressed between them and brushed against her belly. His fingers danced against her, making her gasp and then laugh. He tugged loose the tie around her stomach, and then his fingers lifted to the buttons.
He paused, drawing back. “This okay?”
Aerith brushed her nose alongside his. “Remember when I said there isn’t anyone in these houses?”
He watched her with wide eyes. When he spoke, he was breathless. “Yeah. I do.”
“Remember how I said no one will get mad if we make noise?”
He nodded, his fingers fiddling with the button between her breasts. Each little motion rubbed his knuckles against her skin, and the teasing promise of touch through fabric made her ache.
“Make me scream for you, Cloud.”
The button popped off. He jerked her hard against him, fitting her hips to his. Their mouths crashed together, their kisses hard and fast and good, yes, so good. She moaned against his mouth as her fingers raked down his chest and yanked at his shirt.
He shimmied, letting his suspenders fall over his shoulders, and then grabbed the back of his shirt. He pulled it over his head in a fluid motion, setting it beside them, and then he wrapped his arms around her and rolled her to her back beneath him.
She gasped, laying panting on his shirt as he dropped his mouth to her chest. Hungry, sucking kisses danced down her chest. His tongue traced the edge of her dress.
“Yes,” she breathed, arching her back for him.
She caught the heel of one boot with the toe of the other, kicking first one and then the other off her feet and out of their way.
In the mad rush to lose their clothes, she yanked open his pants, and he rucked her skirt up to her hips. He left her dress buttoned, sitting back on his heels to take in the sight of her.
The weight of his gaze made her burn. He devoured her with hungry eyes, sweeping his hands up the inside of her legs.
He bent, brushing his nose against her cunt through her panties, and Aerith gasped.
“Kiss me.” Her fingers combed through his hair, her legs falling wide to accommodate the delicious breadth of his shoulders.
She urged him closer, and his lips pressed against her.
A broken moan fell from her lips.
He tugged her panties to the side, revealing her cunt. The heat of his breath washed over her like a warm wave, leaving her delirious for more. She didn’t tug him closer, though; she let him take his time. Let him study her.
“Do you like what you see?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he breathed, and she shivered beneath him. “Like when you move like that.” He shifted closer, and his lips brushed against her slick flesh.
She moaned his name for him as fire swirled through her—and then she cried out for him as he ran his tongue up the length of her.
If he’d never done this before, it didn’t show. He tasted her with long, deliberate strokes that had her aching. And when she sank too easily into those motions, her hips rolling with each drag of his tongue, he slid two fingers inside her and ran the tip of his tongue around her clit.
No, he’d definitely done this before.
She was so grateful to whomever had come before her as Cloud’s fingers curled inside her. He started an even pace, testing to find out what she liked, and then moved faster to keep time with the rolling of her hips and the aching cries that spilled out of her.
Her fingers clenched and tugged in his hair. She arched her hips against his mouth and keened for him. Decadent tension built between her legs, a slowly increasing burn that spread through her entire body. She could float in this forever, she thought, opening her eyes to stare blankly at the wash of rainbow color no the ceiling. She could lay on the dusty floor and let Cloud fuck her with his tongue until she expired from the lingering pleasure of it.
But he didn’t give her eternity. He pressed her, he pushed her. His tongue flicked against her clit as his fingers worked inside her, and he cajoled her deeper into the consuming flames of pleasure.
She came with sobbing cry, her back arching off the floor. Her toes curled, her legs wrapping almost violently around his sides as she clutched him against her and her cunt clenched around him.
Her breath stuttered and shuddered along with her body. Sweet ecstasy prickled her skin and clouded her vision.
“Kiss me,” she begged him, her hands pressing against his shoulders to urge him up.
Cloud slipped up her body. Curving his fingers around the back of her neck, he lifted her into a kiss that tasted sharp and tart and sweet. She licked herself off his lips as she pushed her fingers into his pants to stroke the length of his cock.
He broke away to groan her name. The arm bracing his body above hers trembled.
“If you keep that up…”
She smiled at him. “Will you fall on top of me?” She squeezed his cock, and he swore. “Let me ride you, then.”
Cloud didn’t hesitate. He rolled to his back, bringing her with him. She heard the thunk of his boots hitting the ground as she pushed his pants down his hips. His hands joined hers, and then his feet dragged his pants lower.
She settled astride him. A roll of her hips caught his cock between the lips of her cunt, and Cloud made the kind of sound that nearly killed her. She adored that sound on a man’s lips.
“You’re killing me,” he groaned.
Aerith moaned, too, head falling to the side. “The best kind of death. Good thing you have tufts of phoenix down.” But items didn’t save a man from the kind of death that came with sex.
She rocked her hips against him, dragging her cunt along his length. With every roll of her hips, she rubbed her clit over him. The pleasure of it made her shudder—made him shudder. She let him soak in it as she did, working herself against him so she could burn as hot and bright as she had when he’d had his fingers in her and his mouth on her.
His hands swept up her hips. He plucked at the buttons of her dress, opening the front of it so he could fill his hands with her breasts.
She gasped, her hips moving sharply against him as her cunt clenched on nothing. Rough calluses against her skin. Delicious texture. Her nipples hardened under his touch, and with a glance at her face, he closed his fingers around the little nubs.
An aching moan spilled out of her as he pinched her nipples. A louder one filled the air when he released one nipple, surging up to close his mouth around abused flesh.
Wet heat seared her. Need blazed inside her.
She reached beneath her skirt, catching his cock in her fingers. As he sucked her nipple hard, she sank down on him, and the burning stretch of it was good, so good. She pressed her cheek against the top of his head, gripping his shoulders hard enough to bruise.
His hands stayed gentle on her hips. A light pressure showed her how he wanted her to move, and she rocked against him to the rhythm he so sweetly asked for.
The hot brand of his cock rubbed against already sensitive flesh. She groaned again, almost whimpering when he released her nipple and tipped his head back to look at her.
Sky blue eyes met hers. She fell into them, fell into the sky as he moved inside her. Wind rushed through her hair. She soared on the front of the thunderstorm as it crashed furiously over the city. The storm screamed in the face of Shinra’s hubris, and she screamed with it as Cloud’s fingers slipped beneath her dress to dance over her clit.
She came at least twice for him, her cries sounding with the thunder as he clutched her to him. And when she shuddered against him the last time, he rolled her to her back so he could fuck her the way he needed to.
A few hard thrusts left him shaking over her. His fingers slid into her hair, and he kissed her rough and hard as he spilled inside her.
They lay there for a long time.
Slowly, she began to hear the sound of runoff on the roof. Gradually, she felt the warmth of sex recede for the chill of the storm.
She smiled faintly. “Good thing there aren’t any neighbors to bother.”
Cloud huffed out a chuckle. “Not sure I’d care if there were.”
No, she wouldn’t have cared either.
Hearts were foolish things, but it felt good to feel cherished again. The neighbors could go to hell for all she cared.
Summary: Solas seduces the Inquisitor at Halamshiral, whispering her praises like a priest at worship.
On AO3: Link
Solas saw her when she entered the ballroom. He’d been there for some time, slipping through the crowds almost invisibly. And then she’d appeared in the entry, and he truly was invisible. There was no seeing anything or anyone except her.
The Inquisitor was radiant. Vivienne and Dorian had gone to war with her advisors, insisting there was no world in which her wearing a military uniform to an Orlesian ball would be acceptable. The advisors, Josephine included, had fought back, saying it was inappropriate for her to wear anything else. But the result of their compromise? It stole his breath. The sight of her had him hard and throbbing with unrealized lust in seconds. He burned as brightly as she, desperately craving his own destruction.
Her hair had been left loose, a shimmering veil of mahogany that fell to the small of her back. Rubies in gold settings, pinned in the locks of her hair, caught the candlelight like glittering flames. Instead of the short military jacket he and the others wore, she was dressed in a red tunic that fell to her thighs. It split to accommodate her full skirts, and where it split, pearlescent red and gold fabric fluttered. She still wore the sash, but beneath it her tunic was unbuttoned, revealing the swells of her breasts, and she wore rubies like fire around her neck. Epaulets to denote her rank capped her shoulders, studded with little chips of ruby.
And her mask.
Her mask was unlike anything he’d seen so far this evening. It reminded him of something out of a fantasy, something that might have come from Arlathan once oh so very long ago. It was a stylized combination of both phoenix and dragon, resplendent with red and gold feathers and scaled with more chips of rubies. Fangs of white opal dripped from the bottom of the mask, making what might have first appeared delicate and simply pretty into something vicious. Dangerous. A mask worthy of the leader of the Inquisition.
He moved carefully through the crowds of awed onlookers, approaching her from the side, wondering what she would do if he yanked her into the shadows and kissed her. Ah, but a kiss wouldn’t be enough. Not for him, and never for her. Inquisitor Trevelyan would never be satisfied with a kiss.
Smothering a groan, he fell into place at her side, giving her an elegant, elaborate bow. Too elaborate, he realized belatedly, for an elven apostate who knew nothing of court and grace.
“Solas,” she murmured in that warm, throaty tone he’d never heard her use for anyone else. Sometimes, he wondered if it was an invitation. Tonight, no matter what she meant by it, he’d take it that way. He could do nothing less.
She sucked all the air out of the room just by being in it. He wanted to suck all the air out of her lungs with his kisses, leave red welts all along her skin from his fingers and teeth, and then scour her insides with a fiery passion that left her weak. Limp. Dazed. But her eyes. Her eyes would make his sin worth it, for her eyes would be glazed with adoration that bordered on worship. She would be his creature as surely as he was hers.
“Inquisitor,” he said without betraying a hint of what dark desire roiled beneath his skin. “You are a vision.”
A wicked smile spread across her lips, one that was at once playful and self-assured, and he wondered if she would wear that smile on her knees before him. Would she wear it when he wrapped his hands in the endless length of her hair and pressed his cock between her lips? Would she wear it when he let her ride him, her hips moving in slow, sinuous rolls against his?
He was rock hard for her, desperate for her, and he was already calculating precisely how much effort it would take to get into her skirts. He was out of practice, but for her… Oh, for her he would practice the darkest arts. If she came to him wanting blood magic done, he might consider it. For her, anything. For her, the world.
For her, his soul and the very essence of his being.
“It’s all Vivienne and Dorian. I can’t dress my way out of a burlap sack.”
You would still steal my breath in a burlap sack. He could imagine her wearing one, to his surprise. Less to his surprise, he could imagine peeling her out of it, sliding rough fabric against soft skin, revealing the supple lines of her body, and she would whimper and moan and beg him to go faster as she writhed beneath him. Or perhaps she would be caught between him and a wall.
There were plenty of walls in Halamshiral that he could press her against. More than enough shadowed alcoves where he could wring her dry of pleasure while the nobility guessed and wondered but never truly knew.
“But you must carry it,” he said. “And so you do. Remarkably well.”
The compliment took her off-guard. He could see it in her eyes – the momentary flash of surprise and a bit of confusion. Then she grinned that wicked grin once more. “You’re too kind.” The grin faded. “I wish you didn’t have to be my manservant.” She spat the word as she whispered the statement, and his expression turned neutral.
Shaking his head just the slightest bit, he said, “It is no concern. The court expects it, and as long as I meet their expectations—” Already, he didn’t, and they didn’t know what to make of him. “—I can go as I please unmolested.”
“Would that I could be you,” she sighed, lifting her hand. He caught her wrist before her fingers could thread through her hair, turning her hand palm up. She watched him with curious eyes as he bent over her hand, a smile curling her lips.
“Mind your hair, Inquisitor. It would be a tragedy to ruin something so lovely,” he said, his voice low, pitched only for her. And then he pressed a kiss to the palm of her hand, as he would have in Arlathan. His tongue flicked against her skin.
He felt the change in the air. Static crackled along his skin, and she was its source. Lighting flashed in her eyes, a smell like fresh rain rising around them. Beneath it all was her scent, warm and lush, so very human, and so very aroused.
Walk away, he told himself. But he couldn’t. It was impossible. He was trapped in the pull of her gravity. She was the sun to his earth, and he turned about her in inescapable revolutions.
Releasing her hand, he leaned toward her ear. Harsh breaths, heavy and hard, fell past her lips. Each pant lifted her breasts until they strained, full and ripe, against the neckline of her tunic. “After the introductions, find me, Inquisitor.”
“To what purpose?” she asked, her voice strained. Taut.
He hazarded a glance at her face. She was looking ahead, her expression mostly concealed by her mask. “Come to me, Inquisitor, and you’ll see.” His fingers brushed her waist as he slipped behind her.
Lust coursed through him, raw and wild, demanding an outlet. His cock, painfully hard, strained against the unfortunate confines of his trousers, but he didn’t give a damn who noticed. Like the wolf hunting, his attentions were fixed primarily on his prey. Oh, he noticed the nobles whispering, he saw their eyes sweep over him, paused, and then jump to his ears. Any predator had to be aware of his surroundings. But the bulk of his focus was on her, on the quick, clever rabbit that could, at any minute, bolt into a burrow and be lost to him forever.
He doubted she would bolt.
Indeed, after the tedious introductions – he hadn’t realized Cassandra’s name was so ridiculously long, nor Cullen’s titles so impressive – he settled himself in a corner and waited for her to come to him.
She did not disappoint.
“I’ve found you, but you didn’t make it hard,” she said, brushing her fingers along her cheeks, following the line of her mask.
“I was not meant to be hard to find.” Peeling himself away from the marble, he offered her a hand. “Come with me.”
She placed her hand in his, and whispers buzzed all around them as he led her down the vestibule, past the tittering nobles. So much time had passed and yet nothing had changed. They were the same as they always were, the gossips, the liars, the schemers, the lovers. Only the dressings were different, sumptuous Orlesian silks and velvets compared to the sheer linens of Arlathan.
He tortured himself by imagining her in the garments of his people, wrapped in red cloth that covered her but hid nothing. Every step would reveal the full curve of her hips, the rounded swell of her ass, the high peaks of her breasts. Her nipples would be visible beneath the translucent garments, tempting men into the deepest, basest sins.
They rounded a corner and he yanked her into his arms and into the shadows, pressing her against the wall. She gasped, her fingers flying to his chest to brace against him, but he was not deterred.
Kisses were things meant for lovers, which they certainly were not. Kisses were overtures of heat, of passion, of tenderness. Their mouths met and it was a claiming. A dominating. He took her mouth with his with unreserved lust, devouring her startled cry as he swept his tongue past her lips. She tasted of expensive wine and heat.
It didn’t surprise him when he thought he could get drunk off her. Off the heat of her, the sweetness of her.
She pulled away from him with a quiet gasp, and flames flickered along her fingertips, a poignant threat. “What,” she hissed, “do you think you’re doing?”
He considered his answer carefully. He could lie to her, spinning his words into pretty promises meant to seduce her and cloud her judgment. He could whisper obscene things to her and wrap her in a mist of need and want and unfulfilled lust. Or he could tell her the truth. “Fucking your mouth, Inquisitor,” he said, needing her title to remind him of who she was, of the distance and space between them.
Then he swept his thumb over her lips, just a touch too thin to be considered fashionable by Orlesian standards, and the distance and space evaporated. It didn’t matter to him that she was the human leader of a political movement that would shake the very foundations of the world and that he was one of the remnants of a race choking on its dying breaths. All that mattered was that she was a woman and he was a man and he wanted her.
Craved her.
Burned for her.
Sometimes, he thought he would die if he didn’t have her. And Orlais offered so many opportunities to have her.
“Would you prefer I not?”
It was her only chance at escape, and he saw the realization flicker in her eyes. He watched her carefully, reading every nuance. Her body accepted his offer before her mind; he felt her soften, her hips shifting against his so that her belly brushed the hard line of his cock. She gasped quietly, her eyes widening.
“Is my desire such a revelation to you?” he asked, pressing closer, caging her in the shadows as a pair of giggling noblewomen passed by them.
“You don’t…” She swallowed. “I didn’t think you cared for human women.”
He pressed closer to her, pushing into the fullness of her skirts so that she couldn’t mistake his desire. His lust. His secret shame. Canting his head to the side, he leaned over her – she wasn’t a tall woman – his lips hovering a breath away from hers. “I do not.”
Her eyes were just a bit glassy, just a touch confused, and more than a little filled with want. His hands fell on her hip and the small of her back, and she arched at the touch. She looked like an offering, as though she meant to present her body to him without words.
“But I desire you.” He whispered the words against her lips and then captured her mouth with his. Her hands pressed lightly against his chest and then curled around his shoulders, her fingers digging into the fabric of his uniform. She gave in, sinking against him, whimpering softly into his mouth as he licked and nibbled and sucked at her lips, as he fucked her mouth with his tongue and laid claim to her.
He backed her further into the corner, until there was so space between her and the wall. Until there was no space between her lithe body and his. Her skirts were too much in the way, and they barely had any time to accomplish anything; she would need to be about her business soon.
But he could madden her and leave her as aching and desperate as he. He wanted her arousal dripping down her thighs, wanted her legs slick with it. Every step she took would be a fiery reminder of lust unfulfilled as she searched for gossip and blackmail, as she played the Game Orlais so loved.
Fingers slid up her side, his knuckles brushing over the swell of one breast. She gasped against his mouth, and he took the opportunity to adjust the way their mouths met, taking her deeper. Harder. His tongue tangled around hers, drawing hers into his mouth and then forcing it back as he traced one finger in smaller and smaller concentric circles around her nipple. She tensed against him, each stroke stringing her tighter. He felt the coiled tension of her body in the small of her back, in the way her lips stiffened slightly under his.
He dropped his fingers, swallowing her moan of upset.
When she tried to pull back, he chased her, caged her. He consumed her and laid claim to her, branding her body with the desire of his. Magic curled in the air around them, a subtle weaving that only the most talented would notice. Vivienne and Dorian, surely, and likely the Empress’s pet apostate. They would feel the lingering traces of the magic and know a mage had wanted to burn away their Inquisitor’s clothing.
They wouldn’t know that he wanted to fuck her senseless, that he’d have her in the middle of the ballroom floor if that was what it took. He’d done more debauched things in his long life than take a woman in broad view of everyone attending a party.
But he wouldn’t. Not her. Not this woman. He didn’t want to share her. She was his deepest, darkest secret. His lust for her was a private thing, keeping him up long into the night, forcing his hand to his cock. He’d come to fantasies of her more times than he could count, but none of them ever included sharing her. He wouldn’t. Not ever. She was his and his alone, and he would own every inch of her body and her soul.
She would give those things to him. Willingly. He would ensure it.
So he drew his magic tight about her, pressing it against her skin until she cried out softly. He swallowed the cry and forced another from her, his magic licking along her skin like gentle tongues of flame. She shuddered in his arms, her fingers curling around the back of his neck, holding him close, clinging to him.
Drawing back, he licked her lower lip, and his hand lifted, hovering over her breast. “I believe you have things to be about, Inquisitor.”
Panting, she stared at him. “I do,” she murmured.
He expected her to push against him, to force him away. Instead, she stunned him and knocked him off balance by stroking the length of his ear, lightning crackling along her fingertip. Heat speared him, made his cock twitch with need as pleasure sank like a fist into his lower back. He was, for a moment, overcome by the overwhelming need to yank her skirts around her hips, tear open his trousers, and thrust into her. To take her. To have her. To brand her body with his until she forgot herself and screamed her pleasure to the whole ball.
She had him against the wall a second later, her finger still stroking slowly, lazily, a steady back and forth. He felt that touch all over his body – across his lips, his chest, his cock. He groaned, unable to keep his eyes open. He wanted to sink into the pleasure of her touch, to cherish it while he could.
Half of him expected her to avoid him for the remainder of the evening.
“I’ll find you again later,” she said, and she drew away from him, leaving him trembling in the darkened corner.
He felt like a callow youth again, like a boy unsure of what to do with a woman. When, he wondered, had she turned from prey to predator?
He couldn’t help the feral grin that split his face. Didn’t try to hide it when he slipped from the shadows. A passing servant caught sight of him and nearly dropped her tray of hors d’oeuvres as she whispered a prayer to Mythal for protection.
Ignoring her, he returned to the place the Inquisitor had found him. It would be an interesting party after all. Two predators hunting each other always made for a much more engaging game.
And how she hunted.
He caught sight of Leliana at one point, looking awed by the way the Inquisitor handled them. “I need you to slip into the servant’s quarters,” she told him and Cassandra and Cole, “whilst I fend off a duc. I will join you.”
She fought in her gown, and she was resplendent, like the mages of old. Power whipped her hair through the air, lighting her face that her beauty became terrifying. Cole whispered softly of Solas’s thoughts – Eyes flashing, so much power, radiant, lambent, incandescent, she tastes of fire and storms and the Fade – and Solas did not care.
“Thank you,” she said softly to him as she fished an elven amulet from a drawer in a storeroom, “for freezing that last archer. It wouldn’t do for me to return to the ball with an arrow sticking out of my chest.”
He turned so that neither Cole nor Cassandra could see them and ran his finger along the neckline of her tunic, dipping the tip between her breasts. “Marring perfection is unacceptable.”
She bumped her hip against his, her skirt hiding her hand as she feathered her fingers over the hard line of his cock. “Wouldn’t Bull love to know you find this arousing.”
“You,” he murmured. “You, untouched in that dress, slaying your enemies like a goddess. That arouses me.”
She wasn’t wearing her mask, and so her face, painted gold and red with feral makeup, betrayed her emotions. Interest. Curiosity. Excitement. A touch of fear that flavored all the others. Sharpening them, he imagined.
Bending his head toward her, he touched the amulet in her hand. “This is elven,” he said, loud enough for the others to hear, so they wouldn’t wonder. Quieter, he asked, in Elvish, “Are you wet for me? Does your cunt burn and clench with your need?”
Her lips parted, her tongue darting out to wet them. “What did you say?”
He gave her a languid, sensual smile and turned away, letting her wonder. Letting the question fester. She hated unanswered questions, his Inquisitor, and leaving it that way would ensure she returned to him.
Briala almost ruined it by catching her with new questions. He watched, strained, thinking how easy it would be for the Inquisitor to dismiss him out of hand, to pretend like none of this had happened as Briala offered her new mysteries to unravel.
“Your elven manservant?” Briala asked with a wry arch of her brow just as the Inquisitor turned to go.
She canted her head to one side. “I beg your pardon.” It was a statement, not a question, a subtle threat that Briala would be wise to heed.
“The courtiers wonder who caught your eye. They saw you vanish into a shadowed corner, but they don’t know who with. I do.” Briala’s grin was almost manic, edged with the knowledge of their wickedness. “An elven apostate and one of the world’s most powerful women? Watch yourself, Inquisitor. That’s a dangerous combination.”
She returned to him anyway.
He took her into the gardens, into another dark and shadowed corner. “How quiet can you be?” he asked, his fingers fisting in her skirts.
“Solas,” she breathed, eyes wide. “Solas, you can’t.”
“There is little I—” He almost said there was little he couldn’t do, but realized that betrayed too much. “—wouldn’t do for you.” The pause was so slight he was sure it would go unnoticed, especially because she was a woman primed for sex. Her body begged for it in the way she turned toward him, leaned into him, sank against him.
“Not a word. Not a sound,” he said, and he pressed himself into the corner and pulled her against him, yanking her skirts up in the front so he could slip his hand between her legs.
Instead of simple linen smalls, he encountered silk. It slid under his fingers like water, soaked from her desire, and she bit her lip.
“Are they red?” he asked, dragging his hand up her thigh, curious to see if they were in the Orlesian fashion.
She shook her head. “Black.”
They were so very Orlesian it nearly destroyed him. A single thread arched over her hips. It met another and slipped between the full globes of her ass, leaving her skin bare. More than anything, he wanted to rip off her skirts, turn her around, and see the full glory of her body in such salacious under things. He’d take her with them on, the fabric pushed the side, her body pressed against a wall or bent over one of those chaise lounges that littered the palace. He’d take her in those and her delicate slippers, her bodice gaping so her breasts spilled out, and—
He dragged his mind from fantasy to reality, appalled he could get caught up in dreams when she was in his arms, wet and hot and wanting.
“Remember,” he murmured, curling her hand around her neck and drawing her close. “Not a sound.”
His fingers slipped into her smalls and he cupped the scalding heat of her. Soft curls brushed against his palm. He’d always found body hair, of which elves had little, to be revolting, but her curls were slick with her want, and the obvious evidence of her arousal aroused him.
She gasped, and he crushed her mouth to his to muffle the quiet moans she seemed incapable of suppressing. Not that he minded. Every noise she made caused heat to coil in his body, stringing tight muscles barely used.
She shivered and trembled as he parted her slick folds with two fingers. She keened when his nails flicked lightly over her clit. He circled the little nub until one of her hands curled in his tunic and the other clutched at the back of his head, her nails scraping against his scalp.
His tongue swept into his mouth as he traced her entrance, swallowing her cry of delight. Her hips rocked against his, and satisfaction shot through him like an arrow. Having her in his arms, pleasuring her like this, was almost as good as being inside her. Almost as pleasing. Almost.
One finger slipped into her, pressing deep, and her hips jerked against his. “I will have you,” he murmured to her in Elvish, his lips never leaving hers. Her cunt tightened around him, and he laughed softly. Darkly. She clenched around him again. “You like the sound of my voice,” he said in her own tongue.
“Whatever you’re saying, don’t stop,” she whispered, and so he continued. He whispered the most obscene things into her mouth as he slipped a second finger into her, as he stroked the soft walls of her cunt until she trembled and sagged against his chest. Her nails dug into the back of his head, but the pain was nothing compared to the heat of her. She burned him, sent fire roaring through him, made it hard to think.
“Molten fire,” he crooned in Elvish, curling his fingers inside her as his thumb brushed over her clit, tracing Elvish letters into her flesh. Each of the long forgotten glyphs of his people’s alphabet was its own spell, and she gasped with each sensation that rippled through her. A pleased smile curled his lips as he drew her closer and closer to the edge. “So tight and wet. I will have you, and you will be mine.”
She keened against his mouth, her tongue touching his lip. He kissed her, sucking her tongue into his mouth, and as his teeth nipped at her, she came undone in his arms. Her hips rocked into his hand in jerky, erratic motions, her cunt bearing down on his fingers as if to pull him deep and keep him there.
Just the thought of her cunt squeezing his cock like that was nearly enough to undo him.
When she stilled, he pulled his fingers from her, wiping them almost dry on her thighs. “So you remember,” he said in her tongue. Then he brought his fingers to his mouth, licking them clean as she stared. Her taste was exquisite. Heavier, headier, richer than an elvhen woman’s, alien and strange but no less delightful.
“You,” she breathed, the hand curled in his tunic releasing fabric to trail down his chest. Her fingers brushed over his cock, cupping him. “I want to—”
“Have you seen the Inquisitor?” an Orlesian man said somewhere behind them. He wasn’t close. Over the Inquisitor’s shoulder, Solas saw him speaking with a gaggle of women, all giggling.
“Like moths to flame,” he said, removing her hand from him though it pained him.
“Let them find us,” she said, twisting free and rubbing her palm down his length.
He hissed, letting his eyes fall shut, wondering how, again, she’d managed to best him. He knew she wasn’t inexperienced, but there was no possible way her experience outstripped his. Yet again she was mastering him, defeating him, cajoling him to dance to the tune she sang. How he wanted to.
“No,” he insisted. He shifted away from her, her wrinkled skirts falling around her ankles, hiding her strong legs and ridiculous slippers. “Go.”
She went.
He watched her, taken entirely by the sway of her hips as she walked. The Orlesians were smart enough to know the stride of a woman pleased. He wondered what they would make of it. Let them see. Let them wonder who the Inquisitor desired enough to tryst with under their very noses.
Not much later, he drifted into the ballroom to find her dancing with Florianne. She danced, he realized, the way she would have sex. Her every motion was soft and sure, alluring and intriguing. Her hips swung in blatant invitation, her fingers lingering, her eyes hot behind her mask. Florianne licked her lips far too many times during their dance; she was not unaffected. Around him, he heard the nobles whisper.
“She was in the gardens with a lover.”
“Imagine those hips in bed.”
“Such power and grace in her form. Such elegance.”
“Who could possibly intrigue her enough for a dalliance?”
Visceral satisfaction made his lips curl.
When they made their way through the royal wing, she was still in her gown, and he was on her heels the entire time. His fingers brushed over her back, her hips, her arms at every opportunity. He deliberately touched his fingers to his mouth when she looked at him, delighting in the way her pupils dilated and her breath hitched.
But she was not passive. She flicked magic at him, pressed her will against his own like a full-bodied caress. When he crouched to loot a body, her fingers drifted over his ears casually, as if the touch was accidental. She gave him wicked, promising smiles, and it was all he could do not to drag her into a closet and fuck her. Half of him wondered if that was her game, if she was trying to get him to snap. She would be disappointed. His self-control, frayed as it was, was still monumental in comparison to hers.
And then they discovered a man bound naked to Celene’s bed. Cassandra was disgusted, Cole confused, but the Inquisitor. Her reaction sent heat licking through his veins. Her eyes widened with surprise and then narrowed – with interest.
Solas slipped behind her, whispering, “Would you let me bind you thus?”
“No,” she breathed.
“No? Would you prefer me bound?”
She glanced at him through thick lashes. “Perhaps.”
He would let her, he realized. He would let her bind her, would be content to be her plaything. The thought of it made him ache. “I think,” he said slowly, softly, “you wouldn’t mind being bound, helpless, unable to do anything but take what I give you.” She inhaled sharply. “We could agree to take turns.”
“You mean this to go beyond tonight?”
He didn’t answer her. Not right away. They ensured the man’s willing testimony and proceeded to the courtyard where, to no one’s surprise, Florianne attempted to kill them. The Inquisitor fought magnificently, a vengeful warrior goddess in her flaming dress and flashing rubies, and when the fight was ended, he paused by her side to murmur, “I mean to have you until you cannot think of sex without thinking of me as well, Inquisitor.”
She moaned. Clapped her hand to her mouth.
Just outside the door to the ballroom, he paused, pretending to study a book left on the ground. “A moment, Inquisitor,” he said, glancing at Cassandra as she hovered in the doorway. “A question of magic, Seeker. We will be mere moments.”
Cassandra’s eyes narrowed with suspicion, rightly so, but she left them.
He was on her in a second, pressing her to the wall, curling his fingers around her neck and her chin to tip back her head for a demanding kiss that was all teeth and tongue. Her hands went unerringly to his trousers, tugging at the placard until it fell free. She pulled his cock from his pants, stroking the length of it with fingertips callused by years of working with a staff and quill, and he snarled softly into her mouth.
“I have to have you,” she whispered, turning her face to pepper kisses along his jaw to his ear. “You’ve teased me too much. I can’t bear it.” Her voice sounded weak. It wavered when she spoke.
Good. He wanted her wavering, whimpering, needy and desperate. He wanted her to be blind to anything except desire, to the point where she would give him whatever he asked for whenever he asked for it. He was a man obsessed, and nothing would ease his obsession except for her. He was also a liar, and he knew that to be a lie. He would want her for the rest of his life, long after her human years took her to her grave.
“I should make you wait,” he said as she stroked him, as her fingers slipped around the head of his cock and teased a drop of precum from his tip.
“Don’t.” There was a steely warning in her voice, and he remembered all those times, millennia ago, that women had made demands of him and he’d denied them. Not just to be contrary, no, though there was pleasure in that, but to ratchet their lust higher. To make them burn brighter.
He rocked himself into her hand, a wordless murmur of pleasure escaping him as he slid against her soft palm. “You have to deal with Florianne. She could make her move as I fucked you, Inquisitor. She could slay Celene while I was buried inside you and you screamed for me.”
She was panting, her eyes wild. “I don’t care.”
“You do.”
Her fingers tightened around him, dragging up his length before dropping down to cup his balls. He bit back an Elvish curse, dropping his forehead against hers. “I do,” she agreed finally, at last, and her fingers withdrew from his cock. “Are you as hard for me as I am wet for you?”
“Undoubtedly.”
“Then I shall make this quick.”
His lips curled. “I intend to savor you, Inquisitor.”
Her fingers left his cock. Touched his lips. “My name,” she murmured, and she whispered it to him like it was a precious secret. He returned it, giving it an Elvish accent, and she shivered in his arms. “I have to go.”
“Then go,” he said, making no move to stop her.
She hesitated again before slipping from his arms.
A few minutes later, after righting his trousers, he passed through the door as well, catching the tail end of her confrontation with Florianne. He prowled the edges of the ballroom as she went onto a balcony with Gaspard, Celene, and Briala. Only Celene and Briala returned. He wondered why. Wondered if she saw parallels between the Empress and her lover and her with him. A needless, unnecessary, foolish parallel. Celene and Briala had a chance for a happy ending. She and he had only the moments they stole. There would be no happy ending for them.
They made their pretty speeches, and then she drifted away, moving easily around the ballroom toward him. Cullen intercepted her.
Solas watched the Commander of the Inquisition’s forces lean toward her, watched his fingers curl at his sides, watched the way his shoulders tightened with tension. He was half in love with her, Solas realized, and he felt a moment’s sadness for all three of them. For himself for craving that which had destroyed his people, for her for wanting a creature that she could never tame, and for Cullen for desiring a woman who would be ruined for other lovers by morning. It was unfair in every way.
The dark, twisted parts of him howled with remorseless glee.
Briala slipped up to his side. “It will not end well for you,” she said softly. “She will never acknowledge you. You will never be more to her than a pleasant diversion she hides from everyone else.”
Solas lifted both brows, lacing his fingers behind his back. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.”
“Every wall has many eyes,” Briala said. “We saw you with her.”
“Ah.”
Briala’s eyes flashed behind her mask. He wondered if she was seeking to draw some sort of reaction from him, some kind of inflammatory response to her goading. She would not succeed. Compared to him, she was a child at games of manipulation. “And if she does acknowledge you, which would be foolish, all her enemies will become yours, too.”
A quiet sound of amusement escaped him. “You misunderstand,” he said, being deliberately oblique.
“Then it wasn’t you with your hand up her skirts in the gardens? It wasn’t you who she was fondling before she swept in here with her opinions on how Orlais should manage itself?” Briala all but spat the words, but the venom did not surprise him.
With an easy shrug, he turned away from her. “If it was, it’s none of your business.”
“She will destroy you.”
At that, Solas actually laughed, and the sound was laced with malice and bitterness and several millennia of loathing. Momentarily stunned by the sound, Briala shifted a step back. “You are mistaken,” he told her, and when he looked at her, he allowed her to see just slightly past the banal mask he wore.
He was diminished, yes. Much of his power had withered during his sleep, an atrophied muscle that needed to be slowly and carefully restored. But the core of who he was, the wild and capricious god who bestowed poisoned favors on the worthy, that was not changed. And that was what he allowed her to see.
“You see much but understand little,” he said. “There is a vast chasm between knowledge and wisdom. They are not interchangeable.” He ended the conversation there, stepping away from her and making his way from the ballroom. As he went, he caught the Inquisitor’s gaze.
Her eyes glittered behind her mask.
She found him not five minutes later on a secluded balcony overlooking one of the many gardens. “Solas.”
“Do you hear the music?” he asked, catching her about the waist and spinning her into an old, elvhen dance that fit the beat of the human music. She stumbled, but he compensated, sweeping her into a slow glide. “Dancing,” he said, bending his head toward hers. She stared at him from behind that fierce, dangerous mask of hers. “Dancing is so much like sex.”
His leg slipped between her thighs, and his cock strained against his pants for her. The moment she’d stepped onto the balcony, he’d been hard for her. He knew how this would end.
Had they been in Arlathan, dancing at one of Sylaise’s fetes, his thigh would have pressed against her cunt, and his hand on the small of her back would have held her in place. As it was, her skirts got in the way, a thick cushion between them. But her lips parted on a gasp anyway, her pupils dilating with desire.
“Sleek,” he murmured, his lips brushing hers. “Sensual.” He turned her slowly, lacing their fingers together. His thumb brushed over her palm and she shivered. The hand on the small of her back drew her closer, and he fitted their hips together as closely as he could with her full skirts. Not even her skirts could disguise his arching arousal.
“No one dances like this,” she protested softly, but she shifted against him. Rubbed over him.
He swayed with her in time to the music, moving her until her back was to the balustrade, and then he pinned her there. “I’ve seen dances like this in the Fade.” Not untrue. “Let me share with you a secret.”
Her fingers, curled around his, tightened. Her hand on his shoulder shifted so that her fingers could stroke the back of his neck.
“If you want to bed someone, you don’t take them to bed.” He brushed his mouth against hers with each word, drinking in the sight of her lust.
“You take them to a balcony?” she asked, and she flicked her tongue over his lower lip.
He laughed, low and dark, releasing her hand to settle both of his on her waist. He trapped her between his body and the balustrade, holding her there with his hips. “You take them dancing. You seduce them in the dance. Slowly, carefully. You pour sensual carnality into your every movement. Your touches linger. You let your eyes burn. And then, at the end of the evening, when they are breathless and drunk on their desire for you, you take them.”
“To bed?”
“Wherever they’ll let you have them.” He lifted his hands to her face, carefully removing her mask. Setting it aside, he kept his eyes fixed on hers. Her makeup was still intact, and she looked like a goddess incarnate. Gold and red framed her eyes like wings, making the striking color of her irises vibrant. He smiled. It was not a kind smile. “You, for instance, will let me take you here. On this balcony.”
A protest rose on her lips and he smothered it with a kiss. That protest became a moan, and she wrapped her arms around his neck, pressing herself full against him.
His fingers went to her tunic, making quick work of the buttons as his tongue toyed with hers, tantalizing and teasing until she was rocking against him in jerky, needy motions. Her breasts spilled from her tunic, heavy and full, and he cupped them in greedy hands. She was so much more lush than any elvhen woman, so much more richly proportioned. It should have nauseated him. Instead, her body was an obscene torment, one that haunted his every moment, waking or sleeping.
She arched into his touch, pressing her breasts into his palms, and he laughed into the kiss, exultant. Triumphant.
Drawing back, brushing his thumbs over her nipples, he looked down at her. At her flushed cheeks, at the freckles splattered like paint over her skin. He glanced briefly at the garden below them. Pockets of people were there, listening to a minstrel sing.
“Turn around,” he commanded her, dropping his hands to her waist.
For a moment, she stared at him. Then she shook her head slightly. “Solas—”
“Turn around,” he said again, and he lifted one hand from her hip, the one that blocked her exit. She could do up her buttons and leave if she wanted. It was her last escape. If she didn’t go now, he wouldn’t be able to let her go.
She turned.
A growl reverberated in his chest, low and dark and full of need, and he lifted her skirts, bearing her ass as she leaned her hands against the balustrade. “Perfect,” he said, his voice thick and raspy as he ran his hands over the lush swell of her ass. “You are perfect.”
She pressed back, rubbing herself against the hard line of his cock through his trousers, and a little moan escaped her.
“Not a sound,” he reminded her gently as he slipped his fingers between her legs, past wet curls, delving two into her cunt without preamble. He clapped the other hand over her mouth just in time to cover her reedy wail, and he pressed his lips to her neck to smother his laughter. “Wet. So wet.” He couldn’t believe how wet she was and how her slick arousal strung him tighter, made him hotter. He practically burned for her. Could feel flames licking through his veins, smoldering at the tips of his fingers.
He held his fingers inside her, held her, and soaked in the feel of her. The heat of her. Against him, she whimpered and keened, her hips rocking and twisting as she sought some kind of solace from his touch. He denied her, moving with her. It was like an old dance, one he hadn’t expected to remember.
But he did remember it, and he remembered it well. “You have unraveled me,” he murmured against her skin, speaking the words in Elvish because he couldn’t stand the thought of her knowing how well she owned him. “You have broken me.” His teeth caught her earlobe as he curled his fingers inside her, as he brushed his thumb over her clit.
She sobbed against his hand, and he laughed again, unable to stop the sound from slipping past his lips.
“You are a delight.” The words were lyrical, beautiful, all soft consonants and rounded vowels, and though she could not know what they meant, her body rippled and clenched around him as if she did. As if she understood on a fundamental level that he whispered her praises like a priest at worship.
He twisted his fingers inside her as his tongue traced the rounded shell of her ear. He thought it might curb his passion, to remind himself that she was human. Instead, it shredded what remained of his control. The things that made her human were precisely the things he craved, like an addict craved a hit of his next drug even though he knew that next hit could be the one that ended him.
He stroked and petted, caressed and teased until she was writhing beneath him. He delighted in the familiar steps of their dance, drawing her in a spiral closer and closer to the edge of mind-shattering pleasure. “Will you come for me?” he asked in her human tongue. Her tongue flicked against his palm and he hissed, pressing his cock against her ass and hating the fabric that separated them. “Will you shatter for me?”
She was close, teetering on the edge, and he pushed her just a little more. A tremor ran through her, her cunt tightening around his fingers.
“Not yet,” he said, and he dragged his fingers from her body. She gasped, moaned, shook her head against his hand. When he withdrew his hand from her mouth, she started to say something. He pressed the fingers slick with her arousal between her lips instead. “Suck,” he commanded.
She obeyed, and her tongue on him nearly ended him. Later, he promised himself, he’d have her on her knees. He would strip her of everything except her necklace and the rubies in her hair, and he’d have her suck his cock before the fire so that the rubies caught the flames and burned. She was quick and clever with her tongue. Obscene.
Unable to bear being outside her, he tore at his trousers with his free hand, pulling fabric aside until he could guide his cock into her. He pushed her smalls out of his way and slid into her as he pulled his fingers from her mouth.
Her cunt squeezed him, hot and tight and so slick there was no resistance. He slid into her easily, pressing all the way inside her, and she gasped his name, her head thrown back and her silky hair spilling over her back like a waterfall.
He couldn’t stop himself from twining her hair around his fist. With his other hand, he cupped one of her breasts. “Brace yourself,” he told her, “and don’t make a sound.” His tongue flicked over her ear. “Imagine what the court would say if they actually saw you with your manservant.”
He thrust hard into her and she choked on a cry, swallowing it as she arched her back and pressed back into him. Holding her hair and her breast, he had little leverage. She had to do most of the work, and he exulted in watching her fuck him. Watching her take him. She was eager and greedy, pressing her ass to his belly and then grinding herself on his cock. Then she would take him in short, quick strokes followed by longer, deeper ones. Those he liked those the best.
The sight of his cock slick with her juices was heady, drawing fire through his veins to pool in his groin in a molten blaze.
Yanking on her hair, he bowed her back, arched her neck. His lips touched her forehead as she gasped, as she whimpered, as she moaned and keened his name. “They’ll hear,” he reminded her, and she bit her lip but she didn’t stop making those incredible sounds.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d bedded a woman so earnestly vocal. Every one of those sounds went straight through him, and he throbbed inside of her as she clenched around him, her muscles trembling.
“You’re close, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” she whispered, her eyes shut, her lips parted. She ground herself against him, lifting one hand from the rail.
He caught her in an instant, slapping her hand back down. “No.”
She moaned, and the sound was loud enough that a pair of nobles below them both jumped, looking around in surprise. “Please, Solas. Please, I need—”
“To come?” He nuzzled against the back of her ear. “They heard you.” Her body squeezed him at the words, and he snarled softly. “You like that they heard. Do you want them to catch us?”
A reedy wail broke from her, and scandalized gasps rose from the garden below them as people began lifting their heads.
She might want to be found, but he did not. He didn’t want to share her. Pulling out of her, he spun her, all but slamming her against the wall and into the shadows. Without hesitation, she yanked her skirts out of the way, wrapping a leg around his hips and rubbing herself against him.
“Inside me,” she whimpered, “I need you back inside me.” His cock slid against her entrance, and he hissed, needing to be back inside her almost as badly as she wanted him there.
“Impatient.” He reached between them, guiding himself back into her.
There was nothing easy about how he took her then. He was brutal, demanding, and he was sure her hips and ass would be bruised in the morning. He didn’t care. One hand grasped her waist, the other urged her other leg to wrap around him, too. He was stronger than he looked. Supporting her wouldn’t be difficult, not when she was so slight.
He thrust into her without mercy or even much grace. The dance didn’t call for either. They were past the point of elegant overtures. Now it was just passion and need that built like a storm of fire and lightning inside him, that made the air around them crackle. He could smell rain – her magic – and heavy spice – his own.
She grasped at his shoulders, arching her back to take him deeper, and he took her harder, answering her unspoken pleas as senseless whimpers and murmurs spilled from her mouth.
Another time, he would have played with her. Kept her like this for as long as his body could hold out against the pleasure. He would have made her come until she lost her sense of self, until he had to piece her mind back together, rebuilding her from shattering pleasure.
Instead, he dipped his fingers to her clit, stroking her, petting her, tracing ancient Elvish words across her flesh. Words of ownership. Words of desire. “Come for me,” he murmured, pressing his mouth to hers. He swallowed her moaned reply, flicked his fingers over her clit.
Her cunt clenched around him, but she wasn’t there yet.
He pulled his mouth from hers, pressing his lips to her ear, and whispered, “Scream your pleasure. Let them hear you.”
He traced a glyph for fire over her clit, and she did scream. Her cry of pleasure was loud and wordless, piercing the air with such clarity that no one in the gardens would doubt someone was fucking her with exceptional skill. He was exceptional. So was she.
She came for him, her body rippling and undulating, a siren call of pleasure he couldn’t ignore. Another time, he promised himself as he lost the rhythm, as ecstasy stole the last, shredded remains of his control. He thrust into her again, then a second, more harried time. On the third, he shuddered and came, too, his body breaking under the pleasure of hers.
Heat burned through him, pouring from him into her in the form of his seed, filling her. It delighted him to think she’d spend the rest of her evening with his come dripping down her thighs, drying on her legs, reminding her of what she’d done. And the burn of release was a sweet relief. He’d spent most of the evening uncomfortably hard for her. At last, with passion realized, the tension of it left him.
But not entirely. Now he would be consumed with the thoughts of his seed on her thighs. He wanted to drag her to her suite, throw her to the floor or onto her bed, tear off her skirts, and press his mouth between her legs to taste himself on her.
Instead, he pulled out of her slowly, carefully, and her legs lowered to the ground. “I don’t know that I can walk,” she admitted with a laugh.
“You’ll have to.” He stepped away from her, tucking his soft cock back into his pants. He looked up, watching her as she worked the buttons on her tunic. “Wait,” he said softly.
She froze.
He leaned toward her, bracing one hand on the wall over her shoulder. He knocked her hands away from her buttons, letting the fabric of her tunic fall away from her skin, and he fastened his mouth to the swell of one breast. He sucked her skin until she moaned, until her fingers ghosted over his ears and his skull. His teeth bit into her soft flesh, marking her, bruising her, and then he drew back, satisfied with his work.
When she refastened the buttons, the edge of the love bite was still visible, red and swollen against the milky color of her skin.
“Did you have to?” she asked, brushing a finger over it.
Satisfaction curled within him. “Yes,” he said, catching her chin in two fingers. “You have more dancing to do?”
Her lips twisted in a grimace. “Unfortunately.”
“You enjoy dancing,” he purred, stepping close enough to her to tease. “Do you not?”
She licked her lips and said nothing. Her face gave her away.
Turning, he plucked her mask from the balustrade and helped her tie it about her head. He set her to rights, knowing that his essence stained her thighs and would until she bathed. “Leave the door to your bedroom unlocked, Inquisitor,” he said softly. “I believe you’ll want to dance with me again before the dawn.”
Summary: A noble attempting to curry favor with the Inquisition gives Inquisitor Lavellan a unicorn. It gets in the way. A lot.
On AO3: Link
“But what is it?” the Inquisitor asked, ears flicking with annoyance as she peered at the massive white beast stomping around her courtyard, nickering nastily at everyone who wasn’t Cole. It was quite pretty, with a flowing mane and tail that shimmered like starlight. Its hooves and horn glimmered gold in the brilliant light of early afternoon.
“A gift,” Josephine said, a bit too cheerfully. “From a noble who seeks to curry your favor. It is a rare, almost mythical unicorn.”
The Inquisitor peered at it. “It doesn’t have a sword through its face like the other one.”
“Because this is a natural unicorn,” Josephine said with infinite patience.
The Inquisitor’s right ear twitched, her expression flattening. “You said mythical.”
“I said almost mythical.”
“And this from you,” Varric interjected, leaning against a wooden post and giving the Inquisitor one of those shit-eating grins. Her ears twitched again. “The woman who does at least ten impossible things before breakfast.”
She pulled her lips back and gave him a snarl. Any normal person would have seen that expression and pissed themselves, but Varric just laughed like this was all good fun. It was infuriating how she was supposed to be the most deadly person in Thedas – though, probably, the Hero of Ferelden was more so – but none of her companions seemed to treat her with the respect deadly people deserved. Actually, now that she thought about it, no one did. It was always Inquisitor, fetch this thing or Inquisitor, take this other thing to the place with the people or even Inquisitor, my wife is dying and my son knows how to cure her so please go to him but, oh, no, he won’t come back with the potion or even given you the recipe he’ll just give you the potion to bring back to me necessitating you making future trips to bolster the Inquisition’s reputation. Not that she had strong feelings about this.
“Also this unicorn is not dead.”
“Fluffy,” the Inquisitor said with sharp enunciating, “is not dead. She is respirationally challenged. More importantly, why doesn’t this one like anyone except Cole?”
Solas, who had been hovering at the edge of the courtyard with a studious expression on his face, swung toward her at the question. “Lore surrounding unicorns posits they prefer the company of virgins and will defend a virgin quite violently.”
The Inquisitor went still. Her mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. “Oh,” she finally managed.
“Indeed.” Solas slipped closer to her. “Given the unicorn’s nature, it might be best to have—”
He broke off as the unicorn, with a whiny loud enough to burst eardrums, rounded on them and charged. He threw himself to the side, snapping a barrier into place around himself, Josie, the Inquisitor, and Varric, and stumbled. He righted himself only with Josie’s help.
“Oh,” the Inquisitor said as the unicorn paced in a circle around her. She felt heat rising to her cheeks. It wasn’t that she was ashamed of being a virgin. That didn’t bother her at all. It was just that a four-legged beast with a spike growing out its head was telling everyone in Skyhold that she’d never gotten laid.
Twenty-four years old, leading one of the most powerful political forces in the world, surrounded by men and women who pretty much oozed sex appeal, and she’d never had sex.
This was her life.
She dragged a hand down her face as Varric made a noise of pure delight. “Inquisitor, he seems to like you.”
“I’m going to kill you,” she muttered.
The unicorn’s muzzle rubbed against her face. It lipped her ear. With a shriek, she bolted away from it.
“He really seems to like you!” Varric called after her as she tore across the courtyard, the unicorn prancing happily after her.
She tried hiding in the great hall. She tried hiding in the tavern. She climbed the ladder to Cullen’s Blighted bedroom and crawled under his bed – much to his sputtering horror – and the damn thing somehow managed to follow her everywhere. When she decided to go out on missions, it was waiting in the stables, somehow saddled, looking at her with huge, watery eyes that seemed to say Ride me, beautiful virgin, and she’d go red to her ears.
Passing judgments was next to impossible. The Tevinter shem who had led the Wardens astray had taken one look at the unicorn standing proudly beside her throne and dissolved into giggles. Ser Ruth, who had turned herself in around the same time the Tevinter mage was brought before her, took one look at the unicorn and started choking. Ostensibly on laughter, but the Inquisitor hoped the woman swallowed her tongue.
“You can’t follow me everywhere,” she told the damn beast as it followed her across one of the ramparts. She and Cole kept putting him in the stables. He kept escaping. Somehow.
Vivienne thought he was possessed, and Bull tended to agree, but everything was demons and despair with those two anyway.
“You need to let me do my job.” He stared at her with watery eyes. She attempted to remain unmoved. “You need a name, too.”
He pranced, hopping from hoof to hoof as if he understood. In the back of her head, she heard Solas intoning, Unicorns are widely believed to be incredibly intelligent creatures. Do your best to be polite. That horn isn’t for show.
“Pokey?” she suggested.
The unicorn gave her a look that pretty clearly said, You’re shitting me.
“Fine, fair, I agree, it was a bad idea.” She was bad at naming things, though. The other day, she’d scraped together enough lambswool to make a new set of robes for Solas, and when asked by Dagna and Harritt to give the coat some kind of identifier, she’d just said, “Sheep’s Clothing.” They’d looked at her like she’d grown two heads before declaring it Resisting Magical Something or Another.
She had told Solas about the incident. He hadn’t approved, though she couldn’t fathom why.
Tugging on one of her braids, she gave the unicorn an assessing look. “You kind of look like a Bob to me.”
He blinked at her and that blink somehow managed to convey his dripping disdain.
“Not Pokey. Not Bob.” She chewed on her lower lip, and the unicorn made a sound that might have been horsey delight. It disturbed her. Deeply. She stopped chewing on her lip. “We could go with something noble. Charger?” He shook his head. Or ruffled his mane. Or something. She took it to be a no. “Dasher? Dancer? Prancer?” She paused. “Now that’s just ridiculous. You’re not making this easy, you know.”
He shuffled up to her and rubbed his nose against her shoulder. She, meanwhile, eyed the exceptionally sharp tip of his horn as it bobbed next to her face. Tentatively, she stroked the unicorn’s neck. “What about Hanal’ghilan? You’re not a halla, but it’s a noble name.”
He whickered and caught her ear with his lips. With an indignant shriek, she tore across the parapets.
In a rare moment of unicorn-free time later that afternoon, she slipped into Solas’s room to study the murals he was painting. And possibly to snuggle up to him and make him incredibly uncomfortable. There was something to be said for flustering him, and it was so delightfully easy that even a virgin could do it.
In her defense, she wasn’t much of a virgin. The unicorn might count her as one, but she’d done more than her fair share of playing poke and tickle with some of the other youths in her clan. She’d just never gone far enough to jeopardize her position.
“Solas,” she greeted cheerfully.
His head snapped up, his eyes darting all around her. Then he relaxed. “I see you’re without your stalwart protector.”
She slipped up to him. He wasn’t painting, was standing beside his table with a book in one hand. His fingers, long and lithe and delightfully wicked, were splayed across the pages of a book that lay open on the table before him.
Dancing her fingers up his tunic, she drew closer to him. “Stolen moments are so rare,” she purred, watching with delight as his eyes widened slightly.
“Inquisitor, I—”
“You?” she asked, rising onto her toes to brush her lips against his. It wasn’t even close to a kiss, but it was enough to get her a little tingly and a lot interested in actual kissing. She wanted real kisses, the fiery, passionate, he-shoves-his-hands-in-her-hair kinds of kisses. Kisses that involved tongue, but not Fade tongue. Fade tongue only got a girl so far.
He swallowed and made a strangled sort of noise in the back of his throat. “I don’t think…”
“Oh, but you do,” she murmured. “Entirely too much.” She canted her head to the side, sliding one arm about his neck. His book tumbled to the ground as his arm went around her waist, tugging her flush against him.
Their mouths were so close, his eyes so intent and filled with burning, desperate wanting.
From above them came a mighty crash.
“Confounded creature!” Dorian shouted. He followed that shout with many more, none of them understandable, all of them Tevene.
Solas all but shoved her away from him, throwing himself at the scaffolding to the side of the room as she heaved a heavy, beleaguered sigh and Hanal’ghilan tore into the room looking like a demon. He snorted, chest heaving, head lowered, and charged straight at Solas.
His horn missed Solas’s butt – and what a tight, sexy butt it was, she thought as he scrambled up the ladder – by inches.
Hanal’ghilan skidded to a stop between her and Solas, scratching the stone floor fiercely with his hooves. He huffed, dragging one hoof over the stone as if readying to charge, and she sighed heavily. “We need to discuss personal boundaries,” she said to him, patting him on the back.
It took her and Cole promising Hana’ghilan the best oats and a stupid amount of sugar cubes to get him to leave Solas’s rotunda. It took even longer to get the unicorn back to the stables, where the Inquisitor assured him up and down that she wouldn’t go anywhere near Solas ever again and he needn’t worry about her losing her virginity in the near to immediate future. He snorted, clearly not believing her, which was pretty much the right response because that night, Solas barged into her dreams with all the subtly of a charging druffalo.
He caught her face in his hands and kissed her, and she threw her arms around his neck, wrapping her legs around his waist and forcing him to hold her. They stumbled until her back pressed against a wall, and his tongue was in her mouth, tasting her, and it was so good.
Except for the part where it wasn’t real.
“I’m going to kill that creature,” Solas growled against her mouth, working his hands under her tunic to cup her breasts. That was also good. It was better than good. Heat lanced through her, and she dragged his mouth back to hers for more kisses.
She’d done a lot of kissing in twenty four years. Well, to be fair, it wasn’t as though she’d popped out of the womb and started kissing people. Maybe it was more like twelve years, unless she counted that time she kissed Theron when she was six. It hadn’t been a good kiss. She decided not to count it.
“I’m going to kill you,” she growled back, tugging at his clothes, wondering why he bothered with them in the Fade at all.
Probably because they never got much further than kissing shirtless. He always balked at that point.
“What have I done?” he asked as he caught her lower lip in his teeth, tugging gently.
She responded by grinding her hips against his, making him gasp with pleasure and shock and, really, he should be used to her doing this like this by now. “Nothing, hahren,” she replied in a throaty murmur, and he pressed closer to her, his eyes flickering with lust. “And that’s the problem.”
She heard something crash. It was a splintery sound. Rather like what wood might sound like when it shattered. She went stiff in his arms, and he noticed immediately. “Vhenan?” he asked, drawing his hands down her sides.
“Oh, by the Dread Wolf’s hairy ball—” The Fade dream fractured as a very large something pounded up her stairs and neighed loud enough to wake the dead. She bolted upright from her nest on the floor – she still wasn’t used to the concept of shem beds – and hurled her pillow at Hanal’ghilan’s face.
It hit his horn and stuck.
As he shook his head wildly, trying to dislodge the pillow, she threw another one. “It was a dream!” she shouted, hurling a third pillow. “It was just a dream, I was dreaming, and how did you even get in here?”
In the end, her pillow went flying off Hanal’ghilan’s horn and straight out her open window. It soared over her balcony and disappeared into the snowy mountains. Hanal’ghilan had the good sense to bow his head and give her those sad, watery eyes that were almost as guilt-inducing as puppy eyes.
“I’m still mad at you,” she groused as she patted a spot next to her pile of blankets. Hanal’ghilan happily settled there, and, after a moment, she dropped a pillow on his side and curled up against him. It wasn’t so different from sleeping with a halla.
The next morning, she stumbled into the tavern for breakfast with Hanal’ghilan on her heels, and Varric, who was always obscenely cheerful at all hours, saluted her with a mug of that wonderfully bitter, disgustingly perfect drink the shems called coffee. She made grabby hands at it and he surrendered it to her. “Looks like you’ve still got your unicorn chastity belt,” he said and she dragged her hands down her face, pushing the coffee aside and leaning across the table.
“All I want,” she hissed, “is to kiss him.”
“Who, the unicorn or Chuckles?” Varric asked, waving a serving girl over for another cup of coffee.
She pinned Varric with a glare that could probably melt silverite. At the very least, it should have seared the flesh off his bones.
Varric, however, was immune to such looks. She knew this. She still tried to employ them. They always failed. “My hahren—”
“That’s what the kids are calling it these days?” He rubbed his chin. “I’ll have to remember that.”
“That,” she sputtered, “is a term of respect for an elder and not some – some—” She broke off, still sputtering.
“Some salacious pet name?” he supplied.
Dorian dropped into the seat next to her. Aside from Cole, Dorian was the only man Hanal’ghilan let touch her. “Who are we giving salacious pet names to? Can I be next?”
She dropped her head to the table with an audible thunk. “It’s bad enough everyone knows I’ve never had sex with anyone,” she complained into the wood.
“And all you want is for Solas to throw you down and have his wicked way with you, but you have one very large, very white, very horny problem,” Dorian said with far too much cheer for the time of morning.
There was a beat of silence. Then he and Varric broke into laughter so loud it probably reached the Creator’s in the Beyond. She wanted to claw their faces off, but that wasn’t what civilized Inquisitors did.
The door to the tavern banged open, and she turned her head to see a very surly Solas in the doorway. He stopped there. Saw Hanal’ghilan. Hanal’ghilan saw him.
Some kind of energy snapped between the two of them, Hanal’ghilan pawing at the hardwood floor as she hissed at him to behave. Solas spun about on his heel and left. With a cheerful whicker of pleasure, Hanal’ghilan nuzzled against her shoulder.
“I’m going to die a virgin,” she groaned.
“Was this even an issue before our friend showed up?” Dorian asked. He had tried to pronounce Hanal’ghilan’s name once. She had told him if he ever tried again, she would burn all his silky robes and force him to wear cotton. The horror on his face had been priceless.
“No,” she moaned, reaching blindly for her coffee.
One of them, Creators bless them, pushed the mug into her hands. She picked her face off the table and hunkered over the steaming mug, taking small sips of the still too hot drink. It was black and bitter – as bleak as her sex life. She pointed to the mug. “This coffee is my sex life.”
“Hot and steamy?” Varric asked.
“Bitter and black and awful.”
“I thought you liked coffee,” Varric said.
“I don’t. I hate it.” She drank it anyway. “It’s just a good kick in the ass in the morning so I’m awake enough to wrangle all of you. Like whiny little halla who don’t want to go in their pens.”
“We have pens now?” Dorian asked. “That’s rather deviant, Inquisitor.”
“I hate you,” she muttered, throwing back the rest of the coffee in a single gulp.
She began to plan. She went to Cole, because Cole was the only one in Skyhold other than her, apparently, who was a virgin. It was awful. It was terrible. Because of Hanal’ghilan, she knew more about the sex lives of everyone in the Inquisition that she ever wanted or needed to know. The reverse, of course, was also true, and the only one who didn’t seem to care was Cole. Everyone else teased her mercilessly.
“Still have your white shadow,” Leliana had said idly in the War Room two days ago while Hanal’ghilan had lowered his horn at Cullen and proceeded to push the Commander around the room – the Inquisitor had not wanted to consider why.
Just yesterday, Sera had gone on at some length to Blackwall about being elbow deep in circumstances. And had asked the Inquisitor how her circumstances were. They’d both howled with laughter. The Inquisitor had wanted to die.
Or to stick them with something pointy.
Hanal’ghilan was off harassing someone else, so she was planning. With Cole. Planning with Cole was more like trying to herd cats than halla. He kept wandering off in his mind, and she kept having to refocus him. She understood the drifting; they were in the tavern, and there were lots of thoughts constantly brushing up on him. “We should have gone to one of the empty towers,” she said after two hours of getting nothing done.
“I can lead him away for a while,” Cole said abruptly. “We can make crowns of flowers and give them to you when it’s done.”
Her head hit the table with an audible thunk. “Couldn’t we have come to this conclusion at least an hour and a half ago, Cole?”
“Maybe,” he said. He tilted his head to the side. “But you weren’t ready then. You are now. Don’t worry, Solas burns, too. Heated, hot, heavy hands on his—”
Squeaking, she flailed, shushing him. “That’s private, Cole!”
“But he thinks it so loud.” Cole blinked at her with those huge eyes of his. “So do you. You think about him pushing, pressing, pinning. Holding you down and—”
She sputtered, pressing her face into her hands. “Private,” she groaned. When her face stopped flaming, she lowered her hands. “Let’s do it, then. You lead him away. Do the flower thing. And I…”
“Will have and be had,” Cole supplied.
“Yes, that,” she agreed.
So Cole left, and she watched him go to the stables. She watched him lead Hanal’ghilan to the gates. She watched him lead the unicorn out. And then she ran for Solas.
He was pouring over some book she was sure was very interesting, but it couldn’t be more interesting than him bending her over something and—well. She really didn’t know where to go from there, she’d just heard Dorian talk about being bent over things. Presumably, it worked the same way as everything else, but she just didn’t know.
“Hahren,” she said breathlessly, stumbling to a halt just in front of him.
He looked up at her with interest, but not interest.
“Forgive me, but I—”
“Cole took Hanal’ghilan out of Skyhold,” she said, and there was the interest she was looking for. She held out her hand. “Come with me?”
Creators, it suddenly occurred to her that he might say no. That he might gently rebuff her. He had hinted, on more than one occasion, that she was too young for him, that it was inappropriate for him as her hahren to act on any feelings for her. She would strangle him, she decided, if he told her no.
He shot to his feet, taking her hand. “You deserve better than what is sure to be a quick tumble,” he said as she all but dragged him out of the rotunda and hauled him across the great hall.
Behind them, Varric called out, “Unicorn chastity belt, Inquisitor!”
“I’m going to stick you on a spit and roast you, Varric,” she shouted back just before she pushed open her door.
She and Solas tumbled through the door and scrambled as quickly as possible around the tower to the actual door to her room. Then they were through it, and his hands were in her hair, dragging her mouth to his as he pressed her against the side of the stairwell and kissed her. Creators, it was a kiss. His nails scraped against her scalp as his tongue swept into her mouth. It was real and visceral and it flooded her with heat.
“Bed,” he said against her mouth, and he started to draw away.
“The wall is fine,” she protested, pulling him back.
His teeth found her lip, biting and tugging, and she whimpered softly before pressing another hot kiss to his mouth. “Not for your first time,” he said.
“Solas, you could fuck me in the dirt in the woods, and it would be fine,” she snapped, thrusting her hand into his breeches to find him achingly hard.
He swore, cleverly and creatively in Elvish, as she closed her fist around him and stroked. Creators, he was big. She’d stroked boys in her clan until they spilled in her hand, but they were boys and Solas was a man, and the idea of having this part of him inside of her was turning her brain to goo. Her smalls were a mess. She was a mess.
“Fuck me here, hahren,” she breathed, squeezing his cock. He gasped, his breath fanning across her lips. “Up against the wall, just like this.” She rubbed her thumb over his tip, rolling her hips against his thigh.
“Vhenan,” he said, strangled.
“The more you protest, the more time you waste,” she pointed out, taking his hand and guiding it between her legs.
He hissed, pressing the heel of his palm against her clit, rubbing her through the fabric of her trousers, and her mind went blank. She rocked against him, grinding herself on him in a rhythm that practically had her soaking through the fabric. Words escaped her. All she could do was gasp and moan, mewling for more as she worked herself over his hand, hers still stroking him.
Yanking his hand back, he deftly unlaced her trousers. Pushed them down her hips. They caught on her boots, but that didn’t deter them. He stepped between her legs, and she lifted them, trapped as they were, around his hips. His fingers pressed against her wet cunt, one sliding easily into her, and he groaned. “I should do more for you,” he said.
“Fuck me,” she demanded, sliding the fingers of her free hand behind his head. She urged him closer, feigning a kiss, then went straight for his ear. Her lips closed around the delicately pointed tip and he snapped.
He tore at the laces of his breeches, knocking her hand aside in his efforts to free himself. She kept sucking him, pulling broken groans from him with every drag of her tongue along the shell of his ear. And then his cock was free of his pants, and he was pressing it into her, and she had to release his ear so she could let her head fall back against the stone.
“Yes, yes, yes,” she hissed, clawing at his shoulders as he worked himself inside her.
He murmured something in Elvish she couldn’t understand – he was always doing that, speaking far more of their language than any elvhen had a right to – and then he was all the way inside her. “Vhenan.” He sounded strangled.
She brought his lips to hers. “Doesn’t hurt,” she told him. “Shouldn’t it hurt?”
“Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t,” he ground out, and she ground against him, rocking her hips over his. They both gasped at the same time.
“Lucky me,” she said on a soft exhale. “Now, won’t you shut up and fuck me?”
He did. Creators, he did. He wasn’t tender or gentle. He was demanding, taking what he wanted with brisk thrusts that had her moaning his name every time he pushed into her. One hand curved around her ass to support her, to give her more leverage, while the other worked between their bodies to stroke her clit.
That was a revelation. Having a man inside her as he played with her? She could hardly breathe for how good it felt. Some demented part of her thought it felt so good in part because it was petty revenge on an obnoxious unicorn, too.
Then she was lost to thought, drowning in the feel of him. He made her cry out, made her quiver and shake in his arms, until finally, finally, her body clenched around his cock. It was the strangest, most delightful sensation she’d ever experienced, the orgasm somehow more intense for having him inside her. She swore – something about the Dread Wolf’s balls – and Solas swore – something about Mythal’s tits – and then he was coming, too, with jerky, abbreviated thrusts and a look of ecstasy on his face.
They slumped against each other, gasping.
“Vhenan,” he began, but she cut him off with bright, wicked laughter, peppering his face with kisses.
“Finally,” she crowed, laughing, kissing him, wrapping her arms tight around his shoulders and just hugging him. “Finally, finally, finally!” She pulled back, eyes widening with delight. “You know what this means?”
“I’m damned for all eternity for despoiling you?” he asked mildly.
She knew her expression was demented from the way his brows rose slowly. “That Blighted unicorn is going to hate me now!”
An hour or so later, Hanal’ghilan came screaming into the great hall, flowers braided into his mane. He slid to a halt before the Inquisitor’s throne, where she sat idly drinking coffee. He approached slowly, his nostrils flaring, and then recoiled from her. There was, interestingly enough, no condemnation in his eyes. Just quiet acceptance. He trotted away.
“I almost feel bad,” she said, taking a noisy sip of her coffee, as Solas drifted through the great hall toward her, a predatory look in his eyes.
At her side, Varric said, “Do you really?”
“Mmm. A little. A very little.” She sighed happily. “My sex life is still like my coffee, though.”
“Bitter and black?”
She gave him a wicked smile. “Hot and steamy.”
“More than I needed to know, Inquisitor,” he said, and he fled as Solas gained the dais.
“I believe I owe you hours of leisurely lovemaking, vhenan,” he said.
She tossed back the rest of her coffee and set the mug aside. “Let’s see if you can keep up, old man.” He did. But so did she, and it was wonderful.
Summary: Fen'Harel sweeps across the nations like vengeance, and all that will stop him is Ellana Lavellan as his wife.
On AO3: Link
He had razed Halamshiral and built in its place a palace of crystal spires that speared the heavens with their glory. Sunlight glittering off balustrades and parapets and reflecting off towers and arches blinded the devout and the apathetic alike. It was a castle meant to inspire wonder and awe, and it did those things well. It also inspired fear. Bone-deep, icy fear that clawed at the spine and twisted the stomach, and as Ellana stepped from her carriage and regarded the magnificent work of his magic, she felt that fear.
That terror.
Magic had built this castle. The magic of the ancients, once lost and now resurrected. By the man she’d called Solas. The man who was Fen’Harel.
That one name was enough to bring out a host of feelings in her, and fear was the least of them. Her emotions roiled inside of her, a confusing mass of sensation that left her dizzy and weak, and she hated feeling weak. If only she had time to sort through her thoughts.
Time.
He tantalized her with promises of time, coming to her in dreams as he swept across Thedas with his armies. If she would just give in to him, if she would come to him, if she would love him once again, he would give her immortality. He held her in her dreams, possessed of a strength she hadn’t seen in him before, and he’d stroked her hips, her back, her breasts. “Come to me, vhenan’ara, give yourself to me, and I will give you immortality and freedom and a heritage of pride.”
She’d spat in his face. “Look what pride has wrought,” she had snarled, and that dream had dissolved.
But he was nothing if not persistent. Night after night, he had slipped into her dreams, sometimes to whisper promises, sometimes to tease her body to the point of madness, and sometimes to gloat over all he’d done. How Fen’Harel had brought nations to their knees, causing mighty Tevinter to crumble and proud Ferelden to fracture. Orlais, he promised, was next. Unless…
Unless.
Ellana lifted her chin, set her expression into one of stony indifference. She refused to be cowed by his glory, even if she had, at last, agreed to his terms. Her hand in return for peace. She was bartering her body and soul for all of Thedas.
And some dark, awful part of her delighted in it. Her body thrilled to the knowledge that he wanted her so desperately that he would stop his tireless march in exchange for her. The death would stop because she was giving herself over to him. A god desired her beyond all other things.
She took a shuddering breath, horrified at the ache between her legs. It was Fen’Harel who wanted her, the architect of her people’s destruction and, now, the vehicle for their salvation.
Closing her eyes, she took a minute to compose herself.
She was alone, without any of her companions to offer council. She hadn’t dared bring them when she finally gave into his summons. She knew what they thought of him. Half of them wanted to crush him and were still dedicated to resisting him at every turn. The other half simply despised him.
“God or no god,” Vivienne had said with fury lacing her tone, “I will not bow to him.”
A hand touched her elbow, reminding her that she wasn’t truly alone. She allowed herself a moment of fantasy, that the hand belonged to Cassandra. Cassandra would murmur a line from the Chant, tell her she was strong, tell her she was making the right choice. But it wasn’t Cassandra’s hand. The hand’s owner was the only person Ellana’s honor guard.
Once the Hero of Ferelden, now Fen’Harel’s general.
Exerting a subtle pressure, General Mahariel urged her forward. Opening her eyes, forward she went.
In their traveling together, the General hadn’t spoken a single word to her. There were stories that spoke of the Hero as a quiet soul, so Ellana hadn’t expected great amounts of conversations. Maybe a few traded pleasantries. Instead, she hadn’t even received a hello.
Mahariel guided her into the great palace. Its insides were as grand as its outsides, all glittering and glimmering and, quite frankly, breathtaking. Overwhelming. The vaulted ceilings were so high she half expected to see clouds gathered at their peaks. Instead, the ceilings were painted to look like the sky, and starlight glittered in their far reaches.
Magic crackled over her skin. Even a warrior like her could feel it. It pressed all around her, a static force. It tickled her naked arms, ghosted up her legs, curled against her thighs. She stopped walking abruptly, taking long, slow breaths to steady herself. The magic felt like his. She knew well what it felt like when he touched her with the Fade, when he bent the Veil around her to caress her and leave her gasping. How many times had he done that to her in dreams? How many times had he sat, just watching, as he brought her to quaking orgasms with nothing more than the force of his will.
She swallowed a whimper, and still Mahariel said nothing.
So she straightened her back. She took a deep breath, inhaling sharply through her nose and ignoring the spice of his magic on the air. Lacing her fingers before her – ostensibly to appear composed, but truthfully to hide their shaking – she strode forward to meet her destiny.
Destiny, it turned out, was even more breathtaking than she could have imagined. Some part of her expected his throne room to be gaudy to better show off his power. It was not. It was simple, understated, made of white marble threaded through with rich veins of emerald. Golden mosaics on the walls were inspired by those they’d seen in the Temple of Mythal but were clearly crafted by Orlesian hands. They depicted scenes of elven liberation and magic. They depicted him, in his glory. But nothing about the mosaics was tacky. Nothing about any of it was tacky.
All around the throne room, conversations died. The words simply dried up, turning to ash that floated away on a cold wind. Just like her freedom. But this was the duty of a Keeper, and Ellana had no illusions about who and what she was. She was no mage, but she was Thedas’s Keeper now, and Keepers stood between the Dread Wolf and their people. She stood between him and Thedas.
As her eyes swept over the people, her heart broke. There was Tevinter’s once might Archon, now a trembling, broken man. There were rings of scars all over his body, as though someone had tried to flay him. Across from him, the King and Queen of Ferelden. They watched her with hollow eyes. Accusing eyes. If you had done this sooner, they seemed to say, our people would not have suffered and died.
She had failed.
Worst of all was the sight of Celene. Because when Ellana saw Celene, she realized that Orlais was not the last bastion of a dying world. Orlais had fallen long ago, and Celene… Celene was a shell of herself. Gone was the mighty, assured Empress. In her place stood a woman who wore the trappings of royalty without any of the power.
Briala stood beside his throne in the position of a favored retainer, and Ellana had a moment of clarity. Briala had been the first.
Finally, Ellana’s gaze shifted to him. Once Solas, now Fen’Harel, and her breath caught in her throat. He had turned from a missive held in Briala’s hands, straightening slowly. His every motion was grace given physical form. Power dripped from him, distorting the air around him. Gone was the unassuming apostate. The man on the ironwood throne, wearing cloth of gold and a cloak of midnight, crowned with flame, was a god.
His expression didn’t change from one of mild interest as he rose.
All around her, the court went to its knees. Ellana’s eyes darted from face to face, finding rage and hatred on some and devout reverence on others.
“Welcome home, my queen,” he said, striding down the dais. He stopped when he stood an arm’s length from her and extended his hand.
For Thedas, she reminded herself, but she was unable to keep her face as blank as his. He regarded her with the same kind of curiosity one reserved for ants. She felt her expression twist into one of pain.
She hated him. She loved him. She craved him. She despised him.
For Thedas.
She put her hand in his.
His eyes softened with heat and longing, and he drew her close. With barely any space between them, his magic curled around her like a palpable force. It swept over her skin, caressing her cheeks, her throat, the daring neckline of her gown. He’d give her the dress. She’d worn it as a sign of her submission, but she detested it.
“Andaran atish’an, vhenan’ara,” Fen’Harel said to her in a voice so low it rumbled between them. His eyes raked over her, lingering on the swells of her breasts.
“You summoned me,” she returned, trying not to stiffen at his greeting. Trying not to melt.
His brows rose. “Ah. I see it is to be like this between us.” He lifted her hand to his mouth, brushing her knuckles across his lips. His tongue flicked against her skin and she ground her teeth together, ignoring the flood of wet heat between her legs. “It need not be, ma vhenan.”
“You made it this way,” she said tightly, “when you abandoned me only to come sweeping across Thedas, killing everyone who stood in your way.”
“An act of justice for our people.”
“Murder.” She whispered the word, sharing it with no one except him. “Murderer.”
A grin tipped up his lips, but it was not kind. “You see yourself as Thedas’s Keeper though you are not a mage. You view this as a failing. You did not fail, vhenan’ara, this was as inevitable as the changing of the tides.” His thumb brushed over her palm, drawing circles against her flesh, and she shuddered at the prickling heat he conjured beneath her skin.
“You crushing Thedas beneath your heel? Doing to the humans what they did to us?”
“No,” he said, nonplussed. He leaned forward, into her space. The magic that wreathed him curled around her breasts, stroking her nipples through the thin fabric, and she sucked in a sharp breath. She strangled a whimper in the back of her throat as the fingers of his freehand brushed over her cheek. “You coming to me.” He chuckled lightly, softly. “And, soon, for me. I have long dreamed of this day.”
Drawing away from her but not releasing her hand, leaving her trembling and all but panting, he turned to his court. “Let us celebrate,” he called. “Let us feast, for our empress has come at last.” And then, shifting close to her, he murmured, “Come, vhenan’ara.”
Fire washed through her, fierce and sudden, and his magic pressed between her legs. She would have stumbled if he hadn’t taken her arm. Gasping, she clung to him as an orgasm tore through her, sudden and impossible to hold out against.
She lifted her eyes to him, not sure if she should be starting at him with fury or lust, and she found him gazing back with barely concealed lust. “Come,” he said again, gently, and an echo of the pleasure rolled through her, making her legs tremble as he brought her to his throne.
Throughout the wedding, which was vaguely Dalish, and the feast, which was also vaguely Dalish, he toyed with her. He fed her from his own fingers, leaned close to whisper filthy promises in her ear, and used his magic to stroke and caress every inch of her body. She could barely lift her goblet of wine she shook so badly, and when he noticed, he plucked the glass from her hands.
“Allow me,” he murmured, and he lifted it to her lips.
She despised his proprietary behavior, as if he had the right to bring her food and drink. What made it worse was that, now, bound to him, he did have the right. It was his right and his right alone, and there wasn’t a single person in the throne room who would stop him.
“Why do you tremble so?” he asked her as he brushed his thumb over the corner of her lip. His long-fingered hand curled around the back of her neck. Slid between her shoulders. The gown he’d chosen had no back, so his caress fell on naked skin.
“Fuck you,” she breathed, arching away from his touch.
Something like a tongue licked her inner thigh. Fingers of magic caught the crotch of her smallclothes, pushing inside to stroke through the swollen, wet lips of her cunt.
“I plan to.” His voice was so steady. So assured. As if he wasn’t using his magic to wring pleasure from every inch of her body. In public. Where his defeated enemies watched. “Slowly, Ellana.” It was the first time he’d spoken her name. “So very slowly.” He brushed his lips over her ear. “Ellana.”
She went rigid, clenching her hands into fists in her lap. The tongue licking her thigh turned inward. Apparently cloth was no barrier for magic because the tongue swept through her folds without any hindrance, and she gasped softly, all her muscles tightening even more.
“Ellana.”
“Enough,” she spat. “I’m your wife, your empress, at least treat me with respect.”
He was silent for a moment. Then he drew away from her. His hand lingered on her back, but the magic pressing against her cunt withdrew. “You are right, Empress,” he murmured, and he lifted a fruit from her plate, offering it to her.
After a second’s hesitation, she closed her lips around his fingers. Tit for tat, she figured, tucking the fruit to one side of her mouth. Her tongue swept over the tips of his fingers. Her teeth grazed his skin. When she released his fingers to bite into the fruit, he was watching her with wolf-like intensity, his eyes hooded. “Do not tempt me,” he said softly.
The remainder of the feast passed slowly for her, dragging by in agonizingly slow measures. His hand never left her back, and instead of being a comfort it gave her a sense of dread. Soon enough, that hand would be on her hips, her breasts. Between her legs. Before he’d returned, before he’d left her, he’d teased her mercilessly in the Fade, touching her until she screamed for him. But never once had he done anything but kiss her in the physical world.
No one had done anything more than kiss her in the physical world.
It wasn’t that she hadn’t wanted to bed someone. In the Clan, there had never been time, and then once she became Inquisitor, it had always been him, and he had always been very strict about where they drew the line for physical intimacy. After him, she’d had Cullen and Blackwall both being incredibly solicitous, but she could never bring herself to do more than kiss either of them. It just seemed wrong.
And now he was leading her down a shimmering hallway into a room draped with fluttering strips of cloth, a room where the light came from the walls themselves. There were no windows, only gorgeous, vaulted arches, and though it the night was chill, warmth seeped from the very stones beneath their feet.
Neither of them, she realized with a start, were wearing shoes.
He led her to the massive bed in the center of the room. Circular, it had no head or foot, but was laden with sumptuous blankets, pillows made from silk and velvet with gilded fringe.
For Thedas, she reminded herself as he stopped beside the bed.
He released her, lifting his hands to her face. Tilting her head back, he gazed at her with a soul-shaking tenderness, his eyes soft and gentle. He was so much taller than she was, towering over her.
The wicked part of her mind whispered, For you, Ellana.
Beside him, she was so small, so vulnerable. She once thought she was physically stronger than him, but she doubted that was true. He had magical and physical strength, the wisdom of ages, and she had nothing.
“You are terrified,” he observed, and she was.
With him staring down at her, she already felt naked. Her limbs trembled, feeling weak in a way she’d never felt weak before. Even standing before Corypheus, she hadn’t felt like this. Like she was giving away part of herself. It was for the greater good, everything she did was for the greater good. Part of her would die in this room, in his arms, so that everyone else could live. So the fighting would end.
Life was a series of sacrifices. Either you sacrificed yourself or someone else, but in the end, someone had to go to the knife. All she could hope for was a quick death.
Withdrawing his hands, he stepped away from her. She watched him, swallowing hard, trembling as her stomach twisted and turned. All the food he’d fed her burned the back of her throat, but she forced it back down. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing her throw up. Then she thought maybe she should. Maybe it would turn him off her.
But she didn’t want to turn him off her. She just wanted things to go back to how they were before all of this, back to the times when he slipped into her dreams. When he—
All the breath left her. He had dropped his midnight cloak and shrugged out of his golden tunic revealing a body that could only be described as perfect. Seeing him in the Fade was one thing. In the Fade, things could be manipulated. He could manipulate them. Reality was… She licked her lips.
How was she supposed to hate him when he was everything she wanted?
“Ask me questions, ma vhenan,” he said as he settled on a padded bench. He didn’t look at her, but she didn’t feel as though he were being dismissive. Rather, as he unwound the lacing around his ankles and calves, he was offering her privacy. Or keeping his. “Let us relearn one another.”
She bit back a waspish first question. Demanding to know why he razed half of Thedas wouldn’t do either of them any favors. Instead, she asked, “How much older than me are you, then?”
He paused, his fingers hovering over his calves. Then he straightened, turning to her with a look of dry amusement. “I make many mountain ranges look young.”
“Cradle robber,” she muttered.
The most miraculous thing happened. He threw back his head and he laughed, a full, rich sound that made colors ripple through the air. She tasted those colors on her tongue, bursts of bright citrus, and felt them like silk against her naked arms and chest. Heat unfurled in her belly, a warm rush of need and want that had her panting.
“Was there ever any doubt?” he asked her when his laughter subsided.
She was still too stunned to answer.
He rose from his chair, naked except for his trousers, and he passed her, moving toward one of the walls. A mural covered it. A living mural of a great forest that stretched for miles, so real she thought she might be able to step into it. He touched it, brushing his fingers over the wall, and the scent of pine filled the room.
“Another question, perhaps,” he said, and he turned back to her, padding slowly toward her. He moved… simply. Still elegant, but not predatory. It was a man’s walk, not a god’s. It set her at ease.
“Do I call you Solas or Fen’Harel?”
“Are you asking who I am or which I prefer?”
She thought about it for a moment. “Solas was a mask you wore to bear your shame,” she said softly.
“Just so,” he agreed.
The setting sun poured scarlet and violet light across the room, across him, painting him in fire and midnight. She wanted to reach out and touch him, to see if his skin burned or froze, but she was afraid to. Afraid of what she might feel if she did. She wanted him, desperately, but he was still the Dread Wolf. She was Thedas’s Keeper. By that logic, she really should just give in to him.
“Fen’Harel,” she breathed, testing the name.
He reached out, his fingers brushing her chin. This time, when their gazes met, his was full of hunger. Desire. Heat flared in her in response, and he inhaled sharply. “Let me show you that it will not be such a burden to be my wife,” he murmured, his fingers sliding over her jaw, along the length of her ear. She shivered, allowing him to draw closer. “My Empress.”
She licked her lips, a flick of her tongue over dry skin, and he groaned softly. It was a sound of need, of weakness, of helplessness, and it made more of that delicious, electric heat crackle through her. A god wanted her. She made a god weak.
“Allow me to taste you, vhenan’ara.”
He’d moved so close that his chest brushed the tips of her breasts, a tantalizing tease. “Yes,” she whispered, hating herself for giving in. A Keeper stood against the Dread Wolf, and here she was giving in to him in the most primal and elemental way.
His mouth brushed over hers. It was hardly a kiss at all, just a simple caress. A strangled sound escaped her. She wanted to throw her arms around his neck and drag him against her. She’d never had the patience for these sorts of kisses, these light, teasing, ephemeral things. When she kissed someone, she liked fire and heat, passion and torment. She wanted his arms banded around her like iron, wanted him to crush her to his body as he pressed her to the bed, parted her legs, and—
Wrenching back, gasping, she pressed a hand to her chest, staring at him. Such a light touching of lips should not inspire such a conflagration. But more than that, the ferocious depths of her desire terrified her more than he did. She wanted him beyond reason, with all the strength of her spirit, and it made her shudder with uncertainty and fear.
“Ma vhenan, my Empress,” he said, so gently, so kindly.
“I…” She choked on the words. “You…” She’d faced dragons and darkspawn and terrors untold, and the simple act of going to bed with a man frightened her more than all of them.
Because he wasn’t just a man. He was a god, the one she had been taught to respect and fear more than any other. And he was the man – the god – that she loved. With everything she was, she loved him, and that should make this easier. That should make giving herself to him simple. But there was all the hurt, all the pain, and the deep, yawning stretch of the unknown.
“What frightens you so?” he asked softly. He hadn’t put his hands on her yet. Though he stood achingly close to her, if she stepped back, his arms wouldn’t cage her. His eyes searched her face, bright with wisdom, and then he let out a quiet sound of comprehension. Of wonder. “Virgin.” He uttered the word with no small measure of awe.
Balking, she turned away from him, even though she was acutely aware of how close they were. How every breath brushed her breasts against his chest. How their breath mingled in the space between their bodies. “It doesn’t mean anything. I wasn’t…” She choked on the words. She hadn’t been saving herself for him. Before he left, she had fully intended on him being her first, but after that she just hadn’t wanted anyone else. It hadn’t seemed right.
One of his hands cupped the back of her head, his fingers sliding into her hair. He turned her gaze back to his, and his eyes were full of banked heat. Of want. Of predatory desire. She began to tremble.
“No, no,” he murmured, settling one hand on her hip. In spite of all the lust in his gaze, his touch wasn’t heavy. It was possessive, but not caging. He would let her run if she so chose.
Of course, he would probably chase her. And like it. She knew better than to run from a predator, from a wolf, so she remained in his hold, still like a deer.
“I’m not who I have or haven’t slept with,” she finally said, her voice strangled. She fisted her hands in the gauzy fabric of her skirt, twisting it, wringing it.
His teeth flashed. A feral grin. Animalistic. Unnatural. So much more than elven. “You are mine,” he growled, and he bent his face to hers, brushing his lips against hers in another of those wispy, ephemeral kisses. His gazed fixed on her own eyes, and she released her skirts to brace her hands against his chest.
He felt like fire against her palms. Fire fierce and deadly, like the sun had taken up residence in his form.
“People don’t belong to people,” she whispered against his mouth, shocked that she was arguing with a god.
“My Empress,” he returned, his voice like gravel, rough-edged and jagged. He stepped closed, into her, and she felt the hard line of his cock against her body.
Suddenly, she was in a memory, in the Fade, with him wrapped around her, kissing her, whispering the sweetest things against the point of one ear. His heart, his love, the breath in his lungs, the light by which he saw. His hope, his joy, his relief, his succor. He rubbed against her in that memory, her legs around his waist, their clothes a flimsy barrier between them. And then she was back with him, truly with him, in his arms. His lips were hot on hers, tongue tracing the line of her mouth.
She opened for him, needing that kiss to quench the fire he stoked inside her. Her arms slid around his neck, drawing him to her, against her, and it was all too much and not enough. She thought she might sob with relief that she was holding him again. That he was holding her. That it was real.
The minute his tongue touched hers, he changed. He all but dragged her against him, wrapping one arm around the small of her back so she couldn’t escape. She felt the strength in his embrace, so much greater than any man’s had a right to be, and her body answered it with a flood of wet heat and burning need. He snarled softly into the kiss, the sound one of delight not violence, and he moved her, pushed her, crowded her until her legs hit his massive bed.
Together, wrapped around one another, they tumbled down. He twisted to take the brunt of the fall, landing on his back with her on his chest, and still he kissed her. He devoured her. His tongue swept into her mouth and consumed her with a passion that stole her breath. With him, she didn’t need to breathe. He was all the air she needed.
She was trembling when he finally drew away from the kiss, his hand still in her hair, and it wasn’t from fear or uncertainty. She wondered what he saw when he looked at her, because he looked at her like there was no one else alive in Thedas. Like it was just the two of them. Like there was no such thing as time or conflict or anything else.
“I need to see you,” he said, and though it was a god’s command it sounded like the plea of a desperate man.
It gave her strength. Not the kind of strength it took to swing a sword or lift a shield, but the strength that women held over men, a sexual power of mystery and allure. The power of pleasure promised by the hollows of her body.
Straddling him, she pushed herself up, freezing when the motion brought her into contact with his cock. There were still his trousers and her smalls between them, but that pressure, that rub, arrested her entirely. She gasped, palms flat on his chest, eyes fluttering shut. Slowly, carefully, she rocked against his cock, like she had in so many dreams, and a little moan escaped her.
“Later, ma vhenan,” he said roughly, grasping her hips and stilling her.
“Now,” she insisted, trying to move in spite of his hands and not succeeding in the slightest. He was too strong, too firm, too everything.
“Later,” he said again, rising, trapping her against his chest. “Your gown. Remove it.”
She shot him what she hoped was a venomous look as she started shrugging out of the dress. The sleeves were just caps on her arms, there was no back so there were no buttons. It was a gown for an elven queen, something he’d commissioned and sent to her. Truthfully, it seemed made for slipping into, and out of, easily.
“No.” He stilled her with gentle hands, but his expression was intense. Intent. “You have me in your power, my Empress.” He leaned close, tipping his head to the side and kissing her softly, lingering for a moment. “Kill me with it,” he breathed against her mouth.
She was panting when he drew back, a little dazed by his words. Then, slowly, she rolled her shoulder and drew one of the straps down her arm.
A quiet groan escaped him, and his eyes followed the path of the sleeve. Watched her arm pull free. Fixed on the place her scandalous décolletage started to gape and sag. His lips parted as though he were about to speak, but he didn’t. He simply turned his gaze to her other arm and waited.
There again was that feeling of power. Of control.
Emboldened by his rapt attention, she pushed lightly on his chest. “Down,” she said. He gave her an arch look, and though it pained her, she added, “Please.”
“As my Empress asks,” he murmured, and he stretched himself across the bed, still watching her fixedly. Hungrily.
Astride him still, she felt the hardness of his cock rubbing between her legs, and she had to steel herself against the faint, burgeoning pleasure of it.
Slowly, she stroked her hand over her shoulder, dragging the sleeve with it, her fingertips trailing along her skin. She gasped softly, back arching, surprised by how her own touch sent pleasure feathering through her. When she released the fabric, her bodice sagged, falling away from her breasts. They were firm and high but terribly small, and she’d always been self conscious about them.
He stared at her breasts like they were the humans’ Golden City, like they were the most beautiful things he’d ever beheld. So she lifted her arms above her head, struggling against shyness, and arched her back.
A string of Elvish she couldn’t understand flowed from his mouth, and then his mouth was on her, on her breast, sucking her deep. She cried out, stunned by the shock of pleasure that tore through her, by the sudden fire that burst in her veins. Her body curled toward his, her head bowing over his own, and she shuddered as he suckled her, as his teeth worried one hardened nub. He bit her, just hard enough to hurt, then soothed the pain with a stroke of his tongue, and she was panting, gasping, barely capable of breathing.
“Fen’Harel.” She whispered his name, and he groaned against her breast, turning to the other. His hands swept up her side, lifting her breasts for his teeth and tongue and kisses. His hips shifted under hers, and she couldn’t stop herself from grinding against him. Rubbing over him. The motions were instinctive, needy, and felt so damn good.
Reality exceeded everything he’d ever done to her in the Fade. Which, admittedly, hadn’t been much. Their clothes had never come off. He’d never seen her. Never touched her like this.
His arms came around her, and he bore her gently down to the bed. Then he rose over her, staring, taking her in. The shyness overcame her then, and she started to cross her arms over her breasts.
“No,” he said firmly, catching her wrists in his hands. “Don’t hide from me, ma vhenan, my Empress.” He paused, briefly, before adding, “If you do, I will bind you to my bed. Let me drink in your beauty. Let me feast on the sight of your body.”
Her body flushed with heat at the same time her mind suddenly screamed protests at her. This was Fen’Harel. This was the man who slaughtered his way to his throne. Who had betrayed her. Who loved her, the forgiving part of her whispered. “Who talks like that?” she said aloud, her voice embarrassingly breathless.
He arched a brow. “I do. Hmm.” He ran his palm over one of her breasts, and she arched into the touch mindlessly, already addicted to the reality of him. “Hands above your head, Empress.”
She hesitated for just a moment before obeying, lifting her arms and dropping them above her head as commanded. His eyes swept over her, over her breasts and the toned musculature of her stomach. His fingers followed his eyes, dipping into the valley between her breasts and then following those lines of muscle. “You were always magnificent,” he murmured. “You still are.”
His fingers dug into the fabric of her gown and he pulled it down her legs in a single motion, pulling her smalls with the dress, and he tossed both aside. Leaving her naked. She cried out in surprise, feeling suddenly, terribly vulnerable. But instead of leaning back to stare at her, he stretched over her, curling her against him, and he kissed her.
He kissed her for what felt like hours. The tension in her melted away, replaced by sweet fire. Her body pressed against his, molded itself to his form, and he laughed into her mouth. She whimpered in response. One of his hands curled over her naked hip, pulling her leg over his, spreading her, opening her, and it didn’t frighten her. Instead, she arched against him as he ran his tongue over her lips, into her mouth. She moved sinuously against his body, his cock trapped hard and hot between them, and she moaned softly, eagerly.
“Please,” she whispered into their kiss, the fire inside her becoming too much. Too strong.
“Ah, my sweet Empress, what need have we to rush?” he asked, but he urged her onto her back, settling between her legs. Open-mouthed kissed scalded her neck, her chest. He laved her nipples with a rough tongue, and she shivered against him, whimpering. His hands swept over her sides, curling around her hips, and he rubbed himself against her, the friction of his clothing almost unbearable against her sensitive cunt.
His tongue traced the lines of her muscles. His teeth bit the arch of her hipbone. Then he drew back. He looked at her, splayed and open before him, and there was nothing but desire in his eyes. Hot, hungry desire, and she was too fascinated by it to be ashamed of her nakedness, of her openness.
One of his knuckles brushed over the outside of her sex, stroking her, and the electric pleasure of it bowed her back. She cried out, feeling as though she’d come out of her skin, and anxiety, sharp and terrible, replaced pleasure. Her hand shot out, grabbing his wrist to stop him.
“Release me, ma vhenan,” he said so softly she nearly missed the words.
Her eyes flew to his, and she realized she was pushing him. She didn’t want to push him. Well, that was a lie. She wanted to shove back against him. Maybe grasp his cock and stroke it to repay him for that caress between her legs. She wanted more power. More control. With his every touch, he stripped control from her even as he gave her power. Power over him.
“I…” How could she tell him the intensity of this was overwhelming her? Subsuming her? She felt like she was drowning, and it was wonderful and terrible at the same time. “I can’t.”
“This is no different from the Fade,” he said, prying her hand off his wrist. He kissed the tip of each of her fingers and then set her hand aside.
“I wasn’t naked there,” she whispered breathlessly, staring at his face like he was a solid anchor.
He slipped off the bed, and she didn’t know whether to feel relieved or bereft. But then his hands were at the sash holding up his trousers, pulling the knot free. He tossed the red slash of fabric aside, and she stared as he began stepping out of his trousers. Then she turned away, but not before she saw his cock, hard between his legs.
Squeezing her eyes shut, she tried to focus on breathing. But breathing was next to impossible. She wanted him but was afraid of him, she loved him but she detested what he’d done. No, no! She was giving herself to him to save Thedas, not because she cared. Not because she wanted. Not because she desired.
She certainly didn’t want to see him naked.
What a lie that was.
She felt him settle beside her, felt his naked skin on hers. “Now we’re both naked,” he murmured. “Does that help?”
“No.”
His mouth found her ear, and she shivered as he traced the shell of it with his tongue. He took the point of it into his mouth, sucking lightly, and she whimpered. At the same time, his hand settled on her belly, and her eyes flew open as it crept lower. But curiosity kept her silent.
“I dreamed of touching you,” he murmured as he released her ear, as he kissed the tip. “Of dipping my fingers between your legs and finding you wet with your need for me.” She trembled as his fingers curled over her mound, slipping between the swollen lips of her sex. “I have often wondered what I would do to find you—” He broke off with a growl. “Wet,” he hissed, and she moaned as his fingers stroked her, teased her.
“Wonder no more,” she said breathlessly as he began a ruthless perusal of her body.
“Indeed.” He kissed her cheek, the corner of her lips. “Look at me, my Empress. Let me see your face.”
Shaking, she obeyed him as his fingers stroked her, caressed her, traversed every inch of her. He was meticulous but not dispassionate. Every time he coaxed a quiet moan or whimper from her, a restless, needy sound broke from him. His brows drew together, his lips parting. She bit hers, not to hold sound in or for any logical reason. Just because. It made him growl.
Then he slipped one finger inside her. She cried out, grabbing his shoulders hard enough to bruise, her nails digging crescents into his skin, and he snarled, dragging her against his chest. His finger curled inside her, moving hard and fast against tender, sensitive flesh, and she cried out again, her head falling back as her eyes drifted shut. All she could feel was the pleasure, the burning intensity of it, of him.
He whispered to her in Elvish as he stroked her, caressed her, as he burned her with that single finger inside her. She didn’t know the words, but she didn’t need to. She understood his intent. Either he was complimenting her or speaking filth, but she didn’t care. All she cared about was how he was touching her. It was so much more than having her own fingers inside her, so different. So surprising. He did things she’d never tried, stirring her, pressing against her, curling that finger against one spot that made her scream.
“Fen’Harel!”
He snarled against her neck, slipping another finger into her. His fingers stretched her, and there was a shocking, obscene pleasure to that. She let out a keening wail that transformed into his name and then into senseless pleas for more.
She thought he’d bring her to a swift completion.
Wrong. She was so wrong.
He tormented her, thrusting into her and building the pressure but never letting it overwhelm her. She was drowning in it, swept up in it, suffocating in it, but it was wonderful. He was wonderful, and she’d never known. She hadn’t guessed she would find this in the Dread Wolf’s arms, this pleasure, this mindless, aching need.
As he worked her body over, as she arched and twisted and begged senselessly for him to give her completion, he pressed his mouth to her ear. “Beautiful,” he whispered, voice ragged. “Indescribably beautiful. You are perfection, vhenan’ara, my Empress, my wife, and you are mine.” He snarled the word. “No one else shall ever have you. No one else will touch you, taste you, fill you. You belong to me.”
“Yes, yes,” she chanted, beyond any sense of arguing with him.
“My name, Ellana.” He all but purred her name, dragging it out with sinfully rounded vowels. Her body rippled around him, and he laughed, the sound delighted. “My name, and I will give you everything.”
Arching into his hand, trying desperately to get him to touch some nameless place inside her, she whispered, “Fen’Harel.”
His thumb brushed over her clit, his fingers curled, and she came with a shattered, broken cry. Pleasure coursed through her, burned her, scalded her. It devoured her body and left her empty and formless, a piece of clay for him to remake.
Before her orgasm died, he was between her legs, spreading them wide with his hands and dipping his head. She tried to stop him, to tell him not to, but then his tongue touched her, and she was lost. Oh, she was lost to everything except him, except his touch, except the sheer agony of him.
He consumed. He devoured. His tongue ran over every part of her sex until she was shuddering and trembling beneath him, until she was barely sensible. Every thought of resisting him was gone, replaced by the singular need to have him. To be had by him.
She reached out blindly, her back bowed as she gasped his name, and he laced his fingers with hers, his thumb tracing the scar of the Anchor on her palm. She cried out, gasping, for that simple touch made her burn brighter, hotter. He laughed against her, and the sound resonated inside her, shattering her, breaking her into a thousand little pieces as she came undone for him again and again, until she lost all sense of anything but the endless pleasure.
It was dark when he slid up her body, still holding her hand. It was midnight when he finally eased into her. “Ar lath ma, vhenan’ara,” he whispered against her mouth, and she drank in the words, unable to repeat them for her murmurs of more. More of him, more of his pleasure, more of everything he could possibly give her.
There was no pain when he was finally inside her, no discomfort. Only glorious, impossible fullness. She rolled her hips against him to test the feeling, gasping with delight at the pleasure that sparked through her. Her revelation of ecstasy made him laugh again, and his laughter delighted her. She’d never seen him so pleased, so happy. But his eyes shone as he braced himself above her and thrust slowly into her, taking his time taking her.
He brought her hand to his cheek, nuzzling against her palm, and then he kissed the green slash of light. It flickered, crackled. Then he licked the mark, and she whimpered, staring at him.
Releasing her, he bent his head to her lips, teasing her with promises of kisses but making good on none of them. She chased him as he thrust into her, his pace even and steady, until the friction of his cock in her became too much to ignore. Then she wrapped herself around him and pleaded for more, for something, for some end to their dance.
“Do you want it to end?” he asked her, his lips brushing her ear again. “I could make love to you until the sun rose over the mountains and bathed us in its light. I could make love to you until days turned to weeks, my Empress.”
She gasped, straining beneath him. Sweat slicked their bodies, and they slid together so sweetly, so perfectly, but it wasn’t enough.
“Please,” she whispered. “I want…”
“What do you want?”
She wanted to come with his cock inside her, but he was denying her that, keeping her on the edge. She wanted him as mindless as she was.
So she did the only thing that seemed logical. She bit him, digging her teeth into the unyielding flesh of his shoulder, and he howled. Her name echoed through his room, and then he was moving against her, driving into her, his hands on her hips to hold her.
Elvish words spilled from his lips, and she understood some of them, more of them than she expected. He spoke of filling her, of completing her, of branding her with his essence. He snarled softly and dragged her mouth to his, murmuring more words into their kisses as one hand slid between them to find her clit.
He touched her, and with that touch, he ended her. Her world dissolved, and she drowned in the shattered pieces of it, crying out his name as her body clenched around him, rippled around him, grasped at him with greedy pulls to drag him deeper. And again he laughed, the god and the man jubilant and victorious.
“You are magnificent when you come,” he told her, still moving inside her, but now his thrusts were harried instead of measured. “Your sweet cunt squeezing me, your back arching, your gasps and moans.” A groan escaped him, then another. Then his hand closed hard on her hip and he jerked into her, his head falling back and his lips parting. He breathed her name as he came, as he spilled hot jets of his seed into her pliant, open body.
Her fingers curled over his shoulders, brushed over the base of his neck. “Yes, yes,” she whispered, awed by his face, by his pleasure, by the look of utter freedom and contentment he wore.
When he was finished, he dropped his forehead to hers, and for a time they stayed like that, still wrapped around each other. Their gazes locked, they simply breathed.
Then, softly, as if the words might break her if spoken to loud, he murmured, “I have waited ages for you, vhenan’ara. You are the heart that beats outside of my chest.”
She smiled at him tentatively, and because the world and its troubles seemed so far away, she said, simply, “You are everything.”
Summary: Strange things happen to the Inquisitor, but nothing stranger than Skyhold wooing her. Solas tries to help, Varric just makes it worse.
On AO3: Link
The Inquisitor stared at her throne. Her boots were there, freshly polished, looking beautiful and pristine like she hadn’t worn them tromping through the Fallow Mire just the other day. She blinked. Tipped her head to one side.
“Something wrong, Inquisitor?” Cullen asked.
She pointed at her boots. “I lost those last night.”
He lifted one brow. “How did you lose them if they’re right here?”
“They weren’t in my room. I took them off and set them aside because I needed to clean them. Vivienne yelled at me about spreading mud everywhere and not taking care of my gear. So I was going to clean them. But when I got up this morning, they were gone. I had Harritt and Dagna make me a new pair.” She pointed at the boots she was wearing. “But now my old boots are here. On my throne. Mud free.” She tipped her head to the other side, baffled and a little disturbed.
Cullen chuckled. “Perhaps Cole thought to help you.”
So she went to Cole, boots in hand. “Did you do this?” she asked, thrusting the boots at him.
Cole stared at her from under his enormous hat. Vivienne was right, they really needed to take him shopping for better hats and possibly get him a haircut and maybe convince him to get some sun in the Western Approach. “The smiths do that,” he said slowly, wandering, turning away from her and her boots. “Shaping, sharpening, smoothing.”
The Inquisitor sighed. “So you didn’t clean my boots?”
“It likes you,” was all Cole said, and nothing she said got anything more from him.
Her dreams that night were fevered, filled with shadows and heated touches. Invisible hands stroked her, caressed her, made her body burn for more, and mouths lingered on her neck, her breasts, the hollow of her hips. Fingers dipped between her legs, making her arch and cry out, and she woke in the middle of the night covered in sweat and gasping, unfulfilled.
In the darkness, she clutched her sheets in her hands and sucked in labored breaths, wondering if she should go to Cullen or Bull or even Solas. Eventually, when her breathing slowed and reason returned, she curled up alone, but she pulled her blankets over her head, unable to shake the feeling someone was watching her. It wasn’t a malevolent sense, but it was discomfiting.
The sensation didn’t go away in the following weeks. The dreams grew more intense, so much so that she sometimes woke to orgasms that had her back arched and her toes curled in her sheets. When she didn’t wake coming, her fingers delved between her splayed legs, sliding into her slick heat until she brought herself over that trembling edge. And still the feeling of being watched lingered.
Three days before they were due to leave for Orlais, her dress uniform went missing. She ran through the halls of Skyhold, desperately searching for it in every nook and cranny and supply closet until Josephine grabbed her by the shoulders. “What is going on?” she demanded.
“Skyhold ate my dress uniform,” the Inquisitor replied, deadly serious, meaning every word.
Solas, standing nearby, straightened. “Skyhold is a building, Inquisitor. A very old, very powerful, very magical building, but a building nonetheless.”
The Inquisitor pressed her lips into a thin line. “It. Ate. My. Uniform.”
“You have simply misplaced it,” Josie said, tone placating. “Or perhaps Cole is trying to help?”
A scowl crossed the Inquisitor’s face. “After I accosted him about the boots—”
“What happened with your boots?” Solas asked.
She ignored him. “—he’s been staying out of my space.” Her brow furrowed. “I think I hurt his feelings. Josie, remind me to do something nice for Cole the next time I’m out doing things.”
“I will add it to my list,” Josie deadpanned. “Now about your uniform.”
The Inquisitor balked, paled, and felt dread slam into her stomach like a druffalo. Or maybe like one of those Venatori with a tower shield. She’d gotten shield bashed by one the other day and her left shoulder still wasn’t quite right. “It’s gone. Skyhold ate it.”
Josie dropped her hands with a sigh. “We will find you another one,” she said, and she hurried off with a harried expression.
As the Inquisitor stood in the hallway, nibbling her thumbnail, deep in thought, Solas slipped up to her. “I can assure you, Inquisitor, Skyhold could not have eaten your uniform,” he said.
She shot him a venomous look. “The ancient, magical, elven fortress that’s borderline sentient can’t clean my boots and eat my uniform?” She sighed, then, and shrugged. “I guess it’s not a complete loss. I really hated that uniform anyway. Of course we have to wear it, we’re going as the Inquisition, but I was hoping for a dress.”
“A dress?” he asked, surprised. “I did not take you for a woman who enjoyed such trappings.”
With a dreamy sigh, the Inquisitor smiled. “Fitted through the chest and torso,” she said, smoothing her hands over her waist, ignoring the strangled sound Solas made. “The bodice covered in intricate, delicate embroidery. Silver thread on green velvet. A scandalously low décolletage made somewhat more decent with lace. And Thedas’s fullest skirt, done with seed pearls and ribbons and even more lace. So many fripperies and fineries that all of Orlais would be jealous.” She sighed again.
And two hours later, she found that dress on her bed. She blinked at it, not sure if she ought to be horrified or not, before snatching it in her hands and running through the keep. “Solas!” she shrieked, brandishing the dress overhead like a weapon. “Solas, you son of a bitch, I’m going to string you up by your ears and peel your skin off your body!”
Varric, standing in the great hall with Blackwall and Iron Bull, called out to her. “Isn’t it a bit early to be threatening bodily harm, Inquisitor?”
She skidded to a halt in front of them, shook out the dress, and held it out for them to see. It was just as she’d described it, but somehow even more beautiful. And she knew it would fit her like a glove if she took the time to try it on. Which she hadn’t. Because Skyhold had eaten her dress uniform and vomited up a dress and she was pretty sure if she put the damn thing on she’d get possessed or something. “Look at this,” she hissed.
“Nice neckline,” Bull said, giving her a lascivious and inviting grin.
The look she gave him could have rusted iron and spoiled silverite.
“It’s very lovely, Inquisitor,” Blackwall said, far more diplomatic. “Are you wearing it to the ball in Orlais?”
She made a strangled noise in the back of her throat.
“And here I thought we were all going in matching uniforms,” Varric drawled. “Lucky you, getting something different.”
Another strangled sound escaped her.
“You were about to skin Solas alive?” Varric prompted.
Clutching the dress to her chest, she glared at them all. “I’m going to rip off his head and feed it to him.”
“Now that’s an interesting idea…” Bull said, a thoughtful expression on his face. “If completely impossible.”
“I will make it possible,” she snarled, spinning on her heel and all but smacking into Solas’s chest.
“You were threatening bodily harm, Inquisitor?” he asked, giving her that smug, know-it-all bastard look of his. That one he wore whenever he was talking about the Fade and elves. Insufferable, sexy, know it all jackass. “What can I do for you?”
She took a step back and held up the dress. “It threw up a dress. Skyhold threw up a dress.”
Solas regarded the gown for a long, silent moment with an expression of intense curiosity. Of course he would find this curious instead of downright disturbing. “It’s a lovely dress.”
The Inquisitor dragged one hand down her face wondering what she’d done over the course of her Blighted life to deserve this. “Skyhold threw it up. It was waiting for me on my bed.”
Behind her, Varric snickered. “Maybe Red just took pity on you,” he said, “and got you something nicer than what the rest of us get to wear.”
“Who am I taking pity on?”
The Inquisitor whirled on Leliana and thrust the dress at her. “Did you do this?” she demanded. “For the love of all that is good in the world, please tell me you did this.”
Leliana took the dress by the waist, spreading it out, and positively cooed. “I haven’t seen craftsmanship so fine in years,” she purred, stroking one hand over the velvet bodice. “Look how tiny and perfect these stitches are.” Her hands slipped down the skirt and she gasped with delight. “And there are even pockets for hiding daggers! Inquisitor, where did you get this?”
The Inquisitor fixed Varric with a look of death that would have given even Corypheus a moment’s pause. Bull had the good sense to shuffle slowly backwards, muttering excuses before fleeing. Blackwall followed a moment later with much less grace.
“It is a nice dress,” Varric groused.
“A dress that a Blighted keep threw up on my bed!” the Inquisitor exclaimed. She spun about, jabbing a finger into Solas’s chest. “You! We are going into the Fade to find whatever psychotic spirit is doing this and putting an end to it.”
Solas let out a long suffering sigh. “It doesn’t work quite like that, Inquisitor. Such a journey would be—”
“So help me, Solas, if you don’t do the Fade walking thing with me right now I will rip open a Fade rift the size of a high dragon right on top of your face.”
“Perhaps I can manage something,” he said quickly.
Somewhat appeased, the Inquisitor tugged the dress out of Leliana’s hands. “But I was admiring it!” Leliana protested.
“I need it back in case it’s possessed,” the Inquisitor said. “Because then I’m going to burn it.”
“That’s a bit overwrought, Inquisitor, don’t you—” Solas broke off when she leveled that iron-rusting look on him. “As you will, of course,” he said slowly, holding up his hands in a placating gesture.
The Inquisitor wasn’t placated. Not by a long shot. But she was willing to work with him as he prepared them for their journey into the Fade, which included an herbal tea. “To help you relax,” he said.
“I am relaxed,” she spat, and as she said it, she felt a vicious twinge in her damaged shoulder. The repercussions of moving with too much tension. Solas looked at her without expression, and she met his gaze with a flat look of her own. “Give me the damn tea.”
He gave her the damn tea. They both drank a cup, sitting in barely comfortable chairs in the Inquisitor’s bedroom. She was fairly certain this wasn’t going to work for all Solas seemed to know everything about the Fade. As she slouched in her chair, waiting for the potion to take effect, she reflected on that. His knowing things about the Fade, that is. “You know too much,” she slurred, blinking rapidly, fighting the sudden and heavy pull of sleep.
“Are you planning to kill me, Inquisitor?” he asked, tone deceptively mild.
“Maybe,” she said, and then her eyes closed.
She found herself in the gardens, standing beside Solas. She was wearing the Blighted dress. He was wearing a harlequin costume.
“Well this is different,” she said, grabbing the dress by the neckline and trying to hoist it higher. As it was, the lacy bits barely covered her nipples. Her breasts were small, but the way the dress fit lifted and plumped them she was fairly certain if she bent over, her tits would go everywhere. Convenient for Orlais, maybe, but definitely not for the Fade.
She glanced at Solas. He was staring at her face. Fixedly. There was a faint, red flush on his cheeks. He cleared his throat and turned away.
“Are my tits too much for you?” she asked blithely.
“They’re very…” He coughed. “Present.”
“Well, thanks for not looking too much,” she muttered, trying to stuff them further into the dress and failing miserably. Not that she particularly minded his looking. She didn’t mind any of them looking, really, not when the rest of the world thought of her as the holy Herald of Andraste. It was nice for a man to stare at her tits with want in his eyes.
Kind of like how the exceptionally naked man striding toward them was staring at her.
“Uh,” she said, lifting her hand and pointing.
Solas stepped forward, a look of concern on his face. “You are Tarasyl’an Te’las,” he said, and then he started speaking a string of elvish the Inquisitor couldn’t hope to understand. It seemed like Solas was the only elf in Thedas who had mastery of their language.
And wasn’t that just bizarre. She filed it under Things To Deal With When Awake And Slightly Less Disturbed By Everything Happening In My Life.
So while Solas talked the spirit creature’s ears off, she studied it. Unabashedly male (bless him for his magnificent nudity), he was tall, lithe but defined with lines of muscle. His hair shimmered in the sunlight, some incomprehensible color, and it fell down his back in waves. The Inquisitor had the sudden desire to card her fingers through those locks, to cling to them while he pinned her to a wall, a bed, the ground, and thrust into her. She’d nibble on his delicately pointed ears, suck them into her mouth as he rode her, and—
Well, that line of thought was ridiculous. He was a spirit. She knew better than to fuck a spirit.
He glanced at her, his eyes iridescent and scintillating, and she took a step back. A feral, hungry grin flashed across his face but instead of frightening her it left her wet. Trembling. “The dress suits,” he said, speaking right over Solas. He took a step toward her, and the garden dissolved. They were, quite suddenly, standing in her bedroom. Except it wasn’t her bedroom at all.
The whole place glittered, but not in a tacky, everything-is-diamonds way. It was like starlight had been worked into the very stones. Sunlight poured through stain glass windows, painting vibrant pictures across the glimmering walls. The Inquisitor sucked in a breath as she turned, slowly, taking the whole sight in. It was mind-bogglingly beautiful, defying words – not that she was very good with words, that was all Josephine, making her sound smart and clever.
Then she realized Solas was gone. “Where’d Solas go?” she asked as she turned back to the spirit creature. That was when she realized the dress was different, too.
She glanced down at herself and went completely still. If the walls were made of starlight, she was wearing the moon. The fabric, soft and sumptuous, wrapped her body in such a way that it covered everything and yet remained entirely scandalous. In places, it was nearly translucent. Light rippled across it, warm and comforting.
The Inquisitor looked at the spirit, blinking rapidly. “Um,” she finally said, gesturing vaguely to the whole of everything around them. “Do you have a name?”
“Skyhold,” he said, striding toward her. If she was wearing the moon, he wore the sun. The fabric was rich and red and she swore arcs of fire lined the hems.
She took a step back, not because she was scared but because that’s what she did when people walked toward her. She stepped back and to the side and then they passed her by and she put a dagger in their back. So much easier than flinging around fireballs. So much more prudent, too. Everyone always saw the fireball coming. No one expected a knife in the kidney.
But when she turned, so did he, and then he was dragging her against him and all she could think was He’s hung like a battlenug.
“Um,” she said aloud, again, stupidly. So close to him, she was able to see the absolute perfection of his face in perfect clarity. “Did you make that face yourself or were you born with it?”
“I made it for you.” He paused. “That disturbs you?”
It probably should have disturbed her. A lot. On a fundamental level. Instead, she was oddly charmed. “Why?”
“Because I like you. I was lonely, but then you came and brought life back. I want you to stay, so I want you to like me.” He gave her a broad, charming smile. “I made a face that you would like.”
She pursed her lips. “You’ve been giving me the fever dreams.”
The brightness of his face became dark, a passionate storm of desire flickering in those unfathomable, iridescent eyes. “You’re beautiful when you come,” he said, voice thick and rough. “Muscles straining, taut with pleasure, body arching and aching.” She shivered at the words, as he drew her closer, as his hands parted the folds of her dress until fabric pooled at her feet and she was left in a heavy gold necklace and nothing else. His finger hooked in the necklace, traveling along it, and he drew her flush against him. “I want to taste you.”
Shivering, she slid her hands over his chest, trying to push his clothes off the same way he’d removed hers. She couldn’t, though, couldn’t fathom the intricate magic that wreathed him in fire. Giving up, she twined her arms around his neck. “You already have,” she breathed, her voice just as husky as his. “Nightly.”
“Just in dreams. You’re here now.” He pulled her arms from around his neck and went to his knees, nuzzling the juncture of her thighs.
She should have felt vulnerable, naked as she was while he still wore all his clothes. Instead, with him kneeling at her feet, reverence in his eyes, she felt power. Power over an ancient, monolithic keep that contained untold mysteries. And the spirit that possessed it wanted her.
Fucking him was a terrible idea. Which was precisely why she took a few steps back, until her back touched a pillar, pulling him with her. She leaned against the pillar, draping her leg over his shoulder.
He met her gaze, his eyes positively smoldering with lust. And then, gaze still on hers, he leaned forward and touched his tongue between her legs.
She swore and he laughed, and then his tongue was pressing into her, laving her, licking her, lapping up every drop of arousal he coaxed out of her. If there was ever a creature devoted to her pleasure, it was this one. He left no part of her cunt untasted, and with every stroke of his tongue little sounds of delight came from him. Those noises made heat flare in her belly, made her hot and desperate.
He added a finger, sliding it deep inside her. She let out a gasp, eyes going wide as he curled it against her muscles, rubbing the pad of his finger over a spot inside her that had her seeing stars. Literal stars, not just the shimmering walls all around them.
Trembling, she threaded her fingers in his hair. The sane part of her mind (which she thought was also a rather stupid part) wanted her to pull him off her. She should run, find Solas, and get out of the Fade. The not so sane part of her mind, the part she was much more inclined to agree with, pointed out she hadn’t gotten laid in years and the spirit was doing a much better job than any of her other lovers ever had.
She was going to be damned for this. Whatever waited for her after death, it was going to be punishment for letting a spirit have its wicked way with her in the Fade. And she didn’t even care.
Gasping, she arched into his mouth, rocking her hips against his face as he lashed her clit with his tongue, brutally intense in his efforts to pleasure her. She felt him humming against her, a slight vibration that, combined with his finger inside her, pushed her, at last, over the edge. She came with a cry, her fingers clutching at that beautiful, silken hair of his.
Somehow, they ended up in the bed. Her back hit the sheets, and she had the irrational thought that the sheets felt like clouds, and then he fell over her. His skin seared her with heat, blazing like the sun but not burning, and he was inside her in a second. His cock was big enough that it was almost too much. But it didn’t hurt, it just filled, and she was gasping, coming again, drowning in the pleasure of his touch.
He fucked her for what felt like hours but was probably only seconds. The Fade was strange, its paths twisted, and she couldn’t rightly comprehend half of the things he did to her. At one point, he stroked her hair and she thought his fingers passed into her skull to probe her brain. The result was blinding pleasure so great she thought she would burst.
With his hands on her hips, clutching her with bruising strength, he filled her, slaked his need on her body, slaked her need. Every time she thought it might be nice for him to touch her, kiss her, lick her, he was there and performing that act. Half of her wondered if she hadn’t conjured him, if this wasn’t another fever dream born of loneliness and sexual desperation.
When he finally came, he filled her to overflowing with his seed. If spirits even had seed. She didn’t care, really, except that the flood of heat and the ecstasy on his face was so overwhelmingly beautiful she had to kiss him. He tasted like fire and the wind on a summer day, of solid earth and reassurance.
She woke on the floor, gasping, with Solas staring at her.
“That,” he said, “should not have happened.”
She dragged a hand down her face. Through her hair. Sucked in a sharp breath. She’d gone from naked with a spirit balls deep in her to clothed and on the hard, uncomfortable floor of her room. “The part where he kicked you out of the Fade or the part where he—” She broke off. Peered at him. “Let’s pretend this didn’t happen. Let’s pretend you don’t know this about me.”
He gave her a long, considering look. “As long as the spirit of this place doesn’t trouble you or cause us harm,” he said slowly.
“Oh, no, I wouldn’t call it trouble at all.” She sank onto the floor, not bothered by the hardness of it at all. Limp, boneless, she smiled stupidly at the ceiling. “I’m just going to lay here for a while. You tell everyone we figured it out. Everything is fine.”
He hesitated before leaving her, but leave her he did.
She poured herself another generous helping of that herbal tea and passed out on her bed. Skyhold was waiting for her in her dreams.
The rest of her companions, bless them, never asked why she never lost her socks. They didn’t wonder how there was always a glass of exorbitantly expensive wine within her reach. They didn’t question the fact that she could open a door that should have lead to a closet only to find the gardens on the other side. They were good people, her companions.
She supposed, when she got letters inquiring after her many adventures from friends and family, that it would be easier to tell them she’d tripped and fallen onto either Solas or Cullen’s dick. But in the end, she preferred shagging Skyhold. The fringe benefits were mighty nice, too.
