Page 144 of Flames and Blood

“God, yes.”

He moves. Slow, at first, drawing back until he’s nearly out of me and sinking home again, the whole length of him. I feel every hard inch of it dragging inside me on each stroke. He keeps his face where it is the entire time, so close I can’t focus on him properly, and that’s better than looking. His hand comes up under my head and holds it.

My dragon is awake and completely still. She isn’t taking anything tonight. She’s letting me have it, but she’s enjoying every minute.

It builds slowly because he lets it. He goes faster, deep grinding strokes that hit something inside me that makes my vision blur. Then makes himself slow down again, and does it a second time. By the third, I’ve got my heels dug into the backs of his thighs, and I’m holding on to his shoulders.

“Please, Gideon! God…I need…need…”

This time he doesn’t stop. He drives into me and keeps driving, and the wet sound of it and the sound of me fill the room.

My chest starts to burn, the same burn I get right before a shift, and it spreads down through me and out into my arms. The room warms up around us. It warms up because of me, and I can’t do anything about it, and I don’t want to.

“You’re hot,” he says, ragged.

“I know.”

“Don’t stop.”

“That’s my line.”

He gets an arm under my lower back and lifts me into his thrusts, changing the angle so every stroke hits deeper, and after that I stop keeping any kind of order to what’s happening. The bed hits the wall. My nails rake down his back and dig into his shoulders, and I know they won’t leave a mark, and I do it anyway.

“Kalli…” He keeps saying my name into my open mouth, low, over and over, and there’s no question anywhere in it.

I come apart the second time with him inside me, everything in me seizing tight around him, and it takes him with it. He buries his cock to the hilt and goes rigid and holds himself there. I feel him spill inside me, feel it go through him, all of it, in long shaking pulses. I hold on with my legs and my arms and don’t let him move away.

Afterward, he doesn’t get off me. He stays inside me, softening slowly, and puts his mouth against my jaw and stays there while both of us come back.

“You’re warm,” I say.

“That’s you.”

“I know it’s me.”

I end up lying half across his chest with my ear against it. There’s no heartbeat under there. There never has been, and it doesn’t trouble me anymore. His arm is under my neck. His other hand moves slowly in my hair and doesn’t stop.

“Sleep,” he says.

I close my eyes.

“Kalli.”

“Mm.”

He leaves it so long I’m nearly gone.

“Nothing,” he says. “Go to sleep.”

He didn’t finish it, and I don’t make him. It’ll keep.

It has to keep, because tomorrow night I’ll be standing inside the mountain I walked away from, in front of four hundred people who watched them bury me.

Chapter 35

Kalli

Five Cravens fly to the Eyrie, and I make six. Gideon can’t fly, and he can’t take the road, because the road is two days and we don’t have two days. One of Craven’s people offers to carry him, a broad young man already strapped in, and I say no before he’s finished the sentence.