His jaw flexes. He pushes inside me, one long, slow stroke that fills me to the point of madness, and holds there.
"Tell me you're mine," he says.
"I'm yours."
"Tell me again." He pulls out slowly. Pushes back in harder. The desk groans beneath us.
"I'm yours, Kaelren."
"Again." Harder. Deeper. His hand finds my throat again, his thumb pressed against my pulse.
"I'm yours. I've always been yours. I was yours before I knew what that meant."
Something breaks behind his eyes. The restraint snaps, and he stops being careful. He drives into me hard enough to shove the desk back an inch, then another. I wrap my legs around his waist and meet him thrust for thrust.
The room responds. Moss blazes. Vines along the walls bloom in cascading bursts, flowers opening everywhere as the scent of a thousand blossoms fills the air.
He flips me over. My chest presses against the desk, my feet on the floor, and he's behind me, one hand on my hip and the other pressed flat between my shoulder blades, holding me down. The new angle is deeper, sharper, and the sound I make when he pushes back inside me is not something I'd want witnesses for.
"This is what I imagined," he says behind me, his voice ragged. "You, bent over my desk, taking everything I give you. Do you know how many nights I lay awake thinking about this? About burying myself inside you and hearing you scream my name?"
"Then make me scream it."
He does. He sets a pace that is relentless and thorough and specifically designed to destroy me. His hand slides from my hip to between my legs, his fingers finding my clit and pressing in tight, fast circles while he drives into me from behind. The desk shakes. The floor vibrates. The entire room is alive with light and heat and the wet, desperate sounds of two people who have earned this.
"Come for me," he says. "One more time. I need to feel you come around me. I need it, Elle."
The second orgasm builds differently from the first. Slower. Deeper. It starts in my core and spreads outward in heavy,rolling waves that make my whole body tremble. When it breaks, I scream his name into the desk, gripping the edges, my marks blazing so bright the room fills a warm bronze glow. He follows seconds later, slamming deep and holding there, his forehead dropping between my shoulder blades, his whole body shaking against mine.
We stay like that. Bent over a war desk covered in scattered maps, breathing hard, skin slicked with sweat. His hands move gently now, sliding up my sides, tracing the curve of my waist, pressing softly against my spine. The violence of the last few minutes gives way to something tender and quiet.
He pulls me upright and turns me to face him. His hands come to my jaw and he holds me there, the same way he did in the alcove on our first day in the Verdance. But his eyes are different now. Open. Unguarded. Everything he usually hides behind silver and steel is right there on the surface, and it takes my breath away worse than anything his body just did.
"I love you," he says.
Three words. Simple. No flourish, no dark poetry, no qualifier. Just the raw, bare truth of a man who has fought across realities to stand in front of me and say it.
My eyes burn. My throat closes. I have heard a version of those words before, spoken as I was scattering across time, flung into the void as a last desperate offering. But this is different. This is two people standing in a room, whole and breathing, looking at each other with nowhere to go and nothing to run from.
"I love you too," I say. "I have loved you since before I understood what that meant in this world. Since before the void. Since the first time you looked at me like I mattered more than anything you'd ever lost."
He kisses me. Slow and deep, with none of the urgency from before. Just warmth and weight, and the taste of someone who means it.
When he pulls back, his forehead rests against mine.
"We should probably pick up the maps," I say.
He glances at the floor. Battle markers everywhere. Maps crumpled and scattered. The desk has moved a full foot from where it started.
"Tomorrow," he says.
"The council will notice."
"Let them."
I laugh. He pulls me against his chest and wraps his arms around me, and we stand there in the ruined war room, naked and covered in petals, as the Verdance hums around us like it's satisfied with its evening's work.
I've rehearsed this conversation fifty-three times.
