Page 57 of Crown of the Dunes

The power of the desert surged inside me, blinding in its intensity as he slid inside me—deeper and deeper until it stole my breath away. Until there was no room for anything inside me—for anything but him and the magic of the desert, which were one and the same.

“Sands, I missed this,” he groaned, his voice cracked and raw with pleasure.

I shivered in response as he paused there, one hand running up and down my spine in a soft caress at odds with the hard length inside me. He pulled out torturously slowly, almost all the way, before driving back in again. I ground back against him, chasing that feeling of fullness—of oneness—that I had missed more than I cared to admit to myself.

Erix did not deny me, thrusting slow and deep again and again as the heat at the root of my spine grew wilder and hotter until it was clawing out of my throat with every broken gasp. My mouth hung open and tears began to gather at the corner of my eyes from the exquisite intensity of it. I let my head fall forward, only for Erix to tangle his fingers in my half-undone braid and pull it back again, my back bowing into a perfect arch.

My vision glazed into a purple and golden haze as I stared out over the endless sands, the low-hanging moon just beginning to glow in the deepening darkness. Despite the city strewn below us, existence narrowed to Erix moving within me and the vibrating web of the desert all around us. Time blurred and became meaningless; the only thing that mattered was the all-consuming way he claimed me.

I peeled one of my hands from where it was locked in a white-knuckled grip on the stone railing to reach between my legs, desperate to break the growing wave of pleasure within me. Erix batted it away immediately, replacing my fingers with his own.

He bent forward as he did so, covering my back with his own body, melding us together. His breath was hot against my ear as he growled.

“I’ve given up everything to have you like this again. And seeing you like this—untamed and coming undone at my touch—I would give up my sanity to keep you this way.”

The edge of madness—of wild magic—tinted his words and spilled across the bond, telling me it wasn’t an idle threat. But I couldn’t bring myself to care. Not when it called to the wildness in my own chest.

“You asked me to make you forget. Let me make you come apart so hard you forget everything but my name,” he continued, his fingers picking up their pace right in front of where he drove into me.

“Erix,” I gasped.

“That’s right, just like that.”

My release hit with blinding intensity, crashing and reflecting through our bond until the lines between and around us blurred. I shook and whimpered as Erix spilled inside me, his teeth digging into my shoulder blade as he bit down to stifle his roar of satisfaction.

The ripples of pleasure echoed through me for long moments until I went boneless in his grasp. My knees finally gave out, as they had been threatening to for long minutes, and Erix tightened his arm around me, lowering us both to the ground until he sat with me settled between his legs, leaning back against his chest.

His heartbeat drummed in my ear, growing slower as we calmed. I timed my breath to it, and for a moment, I felt both more awake and more relaxed than I had in months. Like the rare moment where the desert hummed with life but was still blanketed with peace.

I shivered at the pleasant, ticklish sensation of Erix’s fingers skating over the bare skin of my arms and shoulders, up over my cheek bones to the bare side of my scalp. By now, it was coated with the barest layer of fuzz, my hair just beginning to grow back.

“You’re not as scarred as I feared you would be,” he commented, the pads of his fingers investigating the few bumps and valleys left on my right shoulder blade from my burns.

“I managed to maintain some of my beauty at least,” I teased, reaching up to interlace the fingers of my left hand with his own where it lingered on my shoulder.

He rested his chin on top of my head and exhaled through his nose. “You know that’s not what I meant. I just have enough scars for the two of us.”

I squeezed his hand tighter, speaking through touch, and grateful that Erix seemed to understand. In a city where most people defaulted to words for communication, I felt ill-equipped after a decade of nobody to speak with but myself. But Erix always seemed to find the meaning in my silence.

“The last time I saw you”—his words were halting, and I leaned closer into the curve of his embrace—“I was afraid you might die. I couldn’t heal you on my own. I could barely do anything to help you.”

“Is that why you brought me to Lord Alasdar?” I tried to keep the judgement from my tone, desperate to hear him fill in the gaps of what had happened when I had been unconscious and while we had been separated. But I could not help the tiny lick of rage that worked its way into my question, remembering the way Lord Alasdar had demanded Erix kill me while I lay bleeding in his tent. The simmering anger at being brought to his cruel Lord waged battle with the relief of having Erix near again.

“The desert told me to,” was Erix’s murmured answer. “I didn’t know what to do. I asked for her aid, and she told me you needed to be brought there.”

“Why?” I demanded.

My scarred skin itched, the phantom sensation of how it had cracked and bled in Lord Alasdar’s tent brushing over my flesh.

“I don’t know. I’ve rarely ever known the reason she wants me to do things or why she grants me certain powers sometimes and not others. Maybe she wanted Lord Alasdar to die, and she knew I didn’t have the strength to do it on my own. Perhaps that is why she drew us together and bound us to one another.”

A slight shudder ran through Erix’s body as he said his former lord’s name. At that, I turned in his arms to face him. Instantly, my gaze caught on his bare chest—on the angry red handprint left by Lord Alasdar’s final, brutal punishment.

Ever so delicately, I laid my own hand over it, the burn scars from the lava wyrm on the back of it mirroring Erix’s own warped skin. His heart hammered under my palm, and he squeezed his eyes shut. The pained expression on his face reminded me of the way he had looked the first time I touched his face with his mask off.

“If you didn’t bring me to Lord Alasdar to betray me, then why didn’t you come to Kelvadan after me? Why did you not try to make peace before attacking?” I asked.

He opened his eyes, their silver luminous in the full darkness that had descended as we talked. “Once again, the desert has motivations that I can’t guess. Zephyr never seemed to reach the city with my messages, despite the fact that riders from the city were able to reach us in a day. And while she had given me the power to form a barrier to protect the clans from the riders of Kelvadan, she refused to give me the power to undo it.