Legs wrapped around Kaan’s hips.
Then he’s moving through the water, into the shallows near the mossy cliff face—steps splashing. The back of my shoulders are pressed against the stone beside the burbling waterfall spraying us in its haste down the mountainside, my hips angled as I’m lowered onto Kaan’s thick length. Drugged with its fullness, that ebb of pleasure restored.
Fed.
He grabs my thigh, stamps his other hand above my right shoulder, then moves—thrusting deep and slow, kissing me with all the urgency of someone devouring their final meal. Fitting, given I’m certain we’ll never recover from this. That we could solidify right here like dying dragons—coiled together like Kaan’s málmr—and it wouldn’t feel like such a tragedy.
His movements hasten, each adamant stroke seeming to crack through the shell of his self-control, until he’s driving up into me with such hungry force it feels like the world’s about to crumble around us.
He pulls away just enough that I’m able to glimpse his eyes—soft, hooded with devotion.
With enough love to break a heart.
“It’s you and me,” he whispers, planting another kiss on my sweat-dappled upper lip. “You and me, Moonbeam.”
“Until the end,” is my heaved response, and the energybursts.
His hand shifts from the wall. Grips my jaw. Fingers firm as our kiss turns into a grate of moans and throaty growls. As our bodies clash and tide, wrestling for release.
I clamp down, and his heavy cock begins to flex, emptying within me to the beat of my own thrashing climax.
I lose all sense of time and self, clawing at Kaan, dragging him closer. Like attempting to pull a volcanic explosion upon myself and wrap it around my body. Wrought with such boisterous pounds of pleasure that I coil, tensing into a knot so tight it feels like every tendon’s about to snap.
In the wake of each ebbing throb, I droop a little more, my strength plundered with each slowing thrust … until our motions smooth.
Stop.
My chin comes to rest on Kaan’s shoulder, head tipping against the curve of his neck as we breathe hard and fast, our hearts hammering in such synchrony that it’s almost as thoughwe’realigned.
As thoughwe’rebonded.
I open my eyes on the world, looking through the trees, past a smudging veil of steam when a flick of luminous motion has my breath stilling.
My gaze narrows on Líri swiping her bloody snout across the grass. Something she does every time she’s finished feasting, since she dislikes the feel of dried blood cracking around her maw.
She lifts her head, passing me a fleeting glance that skewers me through the gauzy veil before she huffs and looks to the sky. Like she’s about to—
My entire body locks up as she flicks out her wings and leaps, drumming the air in billowingthumps. Taking flight toward the moons, but it feels like she’s pounding those same wings beneath my ribs, about to smash through and—
Go.
Leave nothing but a gaping hole in my chest and an empty hollow where she once nested safe within my rapidly beating heart.
I don’t realize I’m wrestling Kaan, thrashing against his flexing might, until he takes my face in his calloused hands. Presses his forehead to mine, eclipsing my sight of anything else.
“It’s okay.”
My vision tightens on his features as I gulp air, filling my lungs with calming bursts of his smelting scent.
“She won’t be going far. It’s okay.She’s not leaving you …”
She won’t be going far …
It’s okay …
She’s not leaving you …
I nod, accepting his firm words of comfort—ofcertainty—despite the way they agitate my quiet awareness of the silver splinter within myself. A tiny tombstone that represents the loss of something too big and heavy to bear. Accepting his firm words even though I want to rip my ribs wide and show Kaan exactly why it’snot okay. Why it hasn’t been since the moment I woke in that cell beneath a mountain that crushed me under its flaming fist all those phases ago.
