The shadow works with me without asking. It bands her free wrist again and pins it to the glass, climbs her thighs and holds them wide where my hands are busy, cold against the heat I'm making, until she's open and held and shuddering top to bottom.
She grabs a fistful of the dark itself with her caught hand—and it holds for her, solid as rope, because it's hers now too, more hers than mine—and she pulls on it the way you pull on something that won't give, and grips my hair with the other hand hard enough to sting.
"Don't stop," she gets out. "Right there—God, Callum—don't you dare stop."
I don't. I don't stop when her spine bows off the glass. The shadow lets her wrist go and both her hands fly into my hair, and I don't stop when she rides my mouth shameless, saying my name like it's the only word she has left in her.
She comes against my tongue with my fingers still buried in her, and I feel every muscle in her clench and ripple aroundthem, and the shadow flares so black the window goes to nothing.
And through it, through the dark, through the bond I have spent months refusing to lean on because leaning on it meant admitting it was mine, her pleasure arrives in my own chest from the wrong direction. Outside me. Not in. Hers laid down over mine until there are two hearts going behind my sternum and only one of them is keeping my time.
I stay on my knees until she stops shaking.
Then she pulls me up by the shirt, by whatever she can reach, and kisses her own taste off my mouth and says against my lips: "Now the rest of you. All of it. I meant it."
I get us to the floor because there's no bed and neither of us will wait for one. The torn shirt comes off my shoulders. My hands have stopped moving the way I tell them to and I have stopped telling them anything.
I drag my trousers off and my cock comes free, heavy, aching, and her eyes go down the length of me and her breath changes—and that, her wanting the size of me openly in the dark, gets me harder still, a hot pulse I feel in my teeth. She's under me in the spreading shadow, her knees coming up around my hips, and when I line myself up and look down at her she takes my face in both hands and holds it so I can't look anywhere else.
"Watch me," she says. "I want you here. Not managing it, not bracing for the cost, not three rooms deep in your own head. Here. With me."
"I'm here," I tell her, and I push into her.
The wet heat of her takes the head of my cock and closes around it, scalding after the cold of the shadow, and every coherent thought empties out of my skull at once. I make myself feel the whole of it—her body giving way around me inch by inch, the tight slick grip of her, the small broken sound she makes against my jaw as I sink—and by the time my hips meet hersI'm shaking with the effort of not simply rutting into her like an animal.
"All of it," she breathes. "You promised."
I don't go slow. She told me not to and I couldn't if she begged.
I draw back the whole length of myself and drive home, and her gasp breaks against my throat, and I feel it in my chest half a beat before she makes it, the bond running her sensation back into me, so that I'm fucking her and feeling what it does to her at the same time. The drag of my cock inside her, doubled. Mine and hers. The clench of her when I hit the place that arches her spine, arriving in my own body like heat poured down the thread, until I can't tell whose pleasure is winding tighter.
I set a rhythm that isn't gentle and she rises to meet it. Deep, hard strokes, each one jolting a sound out of her, her nails scoring my shoulders, her heel dragging up the back of my thigh to pull me in. Sweat runs down my spine. My arms shake with the work of it and I don't slow, won't, the ache at the base of my cock climbing every time she tightens around me. I have never once in my life let my body simply want like this—no measure, no restraint, just the slick heat of her and the sounds she's making and the wet obscene rhythm of us echoing through a gallery built for portraits and silence.
"Callum." My name comes apart in her mouth. "There—right there?—"
"I know." I do know. I can feel the exact place through her side of the bond, feel it light up every time the head of my cock drags across it, and I angle my hips and give it to her again, and again, exact as a metronome, because precision is what I have and I have never had a better use for it. "I can feel you from the inside, Everly. Every time you tighten on me. You have no idea what that—" Her body clamps down on me and my voice fails entirely, a groan tearing out of me instead, low and ruined.
The shadow has stopped being anywhere near my hand. It's everywhere now. Pooled black across the whole gallery floor, climbing the walls, swallowing the candlelight whole—everything my bloodline ever beat into me burning off a man on the floorboards of a house that was never ours to own. And where it touches her she only pulls me deeper.
It binds us. I don't will it and I don't stop it. It loops her wrists and winds up my own forearms and lashes the two of us together at every place we meet, dark on dark, a tether drawing tighter the harder I move in her.
Somewhere far back in my head the disciplined part of me knows this is the edge of something I was taught never to do: give my shadow a will and a person to want. I do it anyway. I bind myself to her with the one thing my family ever made me good for.
She feels it. She gets a hand loose and grabs a fistful of the dark binding us and uses it to haul herself up onto me, taking me deeper, claiming the leash for her own.
"More," she pants, nails and shadow both dragging down my back. "All of it. Don't you hold one inch of it back from me. Keep—God, Callum—just like that?—"
I keep. I get a hand under the small of her back and angle her up and she cries out, and I give her the same stroke again, and again, the one that takes the words out of her, because that's the only mercy I have left.
She meets every thrust. Her breasts drag against my chest with each one, her thighs locked hard around my hips, and she's saying things I'll keep the rest of my life—my name,yes,don't stop,don't you ever stop—and her body is climbing again. I feel it through the bond before she shows it, the warmth gathering hot and tight behind my ribs that was never mine.
My own release is climbing with it, drawn up tight at the base of my spine, heavier with every stroke, and holding it back is thelast discipline I have left in the world. I spend it gladly. She goes first. In this, always, she goes first.
"Let me feel it," I tell her, mouth at her ear, my own control fraying past anything I can name. "In you and in me both. Come on. Let me feel what I do to you."
She breaks apart under me, and the second one tears through me on the same wave—her body clenching around my cock in long rolling pulls, the bond shoving her climax up into my chest until hers and mine fuse into one thing with no seam in it anywhere.
I come harder than I have ever come in my life. I bury myself to the root and spill into her, every pulse of it wrung out of me, her name in my mouth like something breaking, and the shadow snaps every candleflame out across the length of the gallery.
