Page 231 of The Sun He Buried

“Harder.” Her nails drag down the brands. “Eirik. Harder.”

“You’ll take what I give you.” I give it to her harder anyway—her wanting is the only order I take.

“I can feel you,” she gasps. “All of it. You’re—”

“Then stop talking.”

“You love—”

I cover her mouth with mine before she can finish it.

Coward, says the one part of me she can hear now.

She gets that too, and she won’t let me off. So I take the only way out I’ve got left.

I pull out of her—she makes a sound like I’ve stolen something—and flip her over, one palm flat between her shoulders, and press her down until her chest is on the table. Cheek to the wood. Spine a long bared line. Everything of her laid out and lifted because I put her there.

“Eirik—” Muffled. Half a demand.

“Quiet, sweetheart. You’ve had my mouth and my hand. Now be good and take the rest.”

“Fuck me. Please. Now, please—”

I drag her hips to the edge, line up, and bury myself in her in one stroke, all the way, and the new angle punches a cry out of her I feel in my own throat.

Better. She can’t reach my face here, and I can’t see hers, and there’s nothing between us now but the bond and this—and both of them are brutal.

One hand pinning her shoulders, the other locked on her hip, and I fuck her like I’ve wanted to since the snow. Hard. Deep. Nothing merciful in it. The table grinds across the stone with every drive, and behind us a stone works loose from the old wall and falls, then another, the room coming down around us by pieces and neither of us slowing for it.

“Look at you,” I get out. “Bent over my table, dripping down your thighs, taking every inch. Whose are you?”

“Yours—” It breaks in the middle. “Yours, gods, don’t stop—”

“I wasn’t going to.” I fist her hair and pull her head up off the wood so she can’t hide from it. “Louder. Let the whole ruined room hear whose you are.”

“I’m yours!”

I reach under her, find her clit still swollen from my mouth, and work it in time with the drives. She’s sobbing now, wound tight, and the bond has her climax building in me before it breaks in her.

“Come,” I tell her. Not a request. “Now. All over me. Let me feel it, sweetheart.”

She does. Clamps around me and screams into the table, and her release tears straight up through my chest—mine breaks with it, too fast, too close, wrenched out of me by hers.

I don’t pull out. I haul her up off the table instead, back to my chest, still inside her, and come as deep as she’ll take me with my face pressed into her hair. The bond gives her all of it—every pulse, the way it takes me apart, the sound I finally stop swallowing.

“That’s my girl,” I say into her hair, wrecked, the words gone before I can stop them. “Mine.”

She takes that too. Takes me filling her, feels exactly how far gone I am, and reaches back to hold my head against her while the last stone drops off the wall somewhere in the dark.

Neither of us moves.

Other minds press in again by degrees.

Fire settles in a room below. Boots cross the east passage. Baldr remains awake in the west rooms.

Solveih receives that last fact from me.

Her hands slip from my face.