Page 17 of My Tiny Human Wife

"Now," she says. "Torvak, now."

She guides me to her entrance, and I pause there, the head of my cock pressing against her wet heat. I need to see her face.

"Look at me," I tell her. "I need to see you."

She meets my gaze, and I enter her.

The heat of her engulfs me, tight and welcoming, and it is overwhelming. She is so wet, so ready, and still the fit is tight, the stretch of her around my girth almost too much. She gasps, her fingers digging into my shoulders, and I hold myself still, giving her time to adjust.

"Move," she breathes. "Please, Torvak, move."

I obey. I draw back and thrust into her again, deeper this time, and the sound she makes is one of pure pleasure. I find a rhythm, slow at first, but she hooks her heels behind me and pulls me deeper, and I cannot hold back any longer.

I drive into her, and she meets me thrust for thrust, her hips rising to meet mine, her breath coming in sharp gasps. The cot groans beneath us, but neither of us cares. All that exists is this room, this moment, the clutch of her around me, her face as she climbs toward release again.

She comes apart a second time, her inner walls clenching around me, and the feeling is exquisite, pulling me over the edge with her. I bury myself deep, feeling the heat of my release pulse into her, and I press my face into the curve of her neck, shaking.

After, we lie knotted together in the dark, my hand splayed over the small of her back, her heart slowing against my chest, and for a while the war ceases to exist.

"Tell me a future," she says quietly. "One where we both walk out of tomorrow. What does it look like?"

So I give it to her: the coast on my homeworld I confessed to her weeks ago—the black rock, the cold clear water, the house my grandmother kept where the war was never once allowed through the door. "You would hate it at first," I tell her. "It is quiet in a manner you are not built for. And then you would learn its voice the way you learned this tower's, and you would never again wish to leave it."

She laughs, soft, and I feel it ripple through both our bodies.

"There is a thing my people do," I go on, and my voice roughens, because I am about to offer her the largest thing I possess. "A vow. Older than the clans, older than this war. It is not spoken lightly, and it cannot be unspoken once given. It binds two lives into a single one, so that whatever comes to the one comes to both."

She goes very still against me. "Torvak."

"I am not asking it for tomorrow," I say. "Tomorrow may strip the choice from us both. I am asking it for tonight. Whatever hours we are granted, I want them lived as one life and not two." I find her eyes in the dark. "Let me bind myself to you, Avery. However long or short the thread proves to be."

She answers me not in words but by taking my hand and setting it over her heart, the same wordless thing she did the first night, so that I feel her reply hammering under my palm before she gives it. "Say the words," she tells me. "Whatever they are. Say them, and I'll say them back to you."

So I speak the old vow into the dark of a doomed little room on a frozen frontier, in the tongue of a people who taught me everything but how to feel a thing this large—and she repeats each strange syllable back to me, clumsy and certain, and in the saying of it, the rite my whole culture reserves for the sacred quietly becomes true between a Vakutan war-commander and the mate he was never meant to claim. It ought to feel like a small thing. Words in the dark, on the eve of a fight we may not survive.

It feels instead like the only act of my life that was ever entirely, unmistakably right.

"Whatever comes at dawn," I tell her, when the words are spent between us, "we meet it bound. One life. I am yours, and you are mine, and no army on this world or any other holds the authority to unmake that now."

"One life," she echoes, and seals it against my mouth.

We do not sleep much. We refuse to waste the night on sleep. And when the gray light finally seeps in, and with it the far sound of engines on two horizons, I rise and dress and go down to meet the war a different male than the one who met every war before it—no longer a weapon aimed by another's hand, but a man with a reason and a vow and everything in the world worth losing, which is the only reason I have ever been truly dangerous.

CHAPTER 25

AVERY

By the time the sun clears the ridge, Beacon Station Seventeen has stopped being a shelter and started being a fortress with a voice.

I spend the morning doing the thing I swore across two long years I would never do: I give orders, and people follow them. By rights it should chafe like a costume that does not fit. Instead it settles onto me like a coat I have been carrying folded over one arm all this time, waiting for the cold to get bad enough to wear it. Kalen and I gut the relay bay to rebuild it into something that can throw our voice farther than this tower was built to reach. Torvak walks the perimeter with Dareth, turning corridors into kill-boxes and doorways into decisions. Okafor sits with the evidence and her own credentials, hammering the broadcast into a thing no chain of command can dismiss as forgery.

And the refugees—my refugees, the people the war threw away—line up to help without being asked.

The baker who learned to give ground and shield the man at his back asks me for a harder job. The old man whose sons died in a Coalition shelling sits for six hours splicing relay cable with hands that shake, because, he tells me, if his voice can be part of the thing that ends this, then his boys bought something after all. A woman driven off her land by a Vakutan push teaches the younger ones how to move the wounded without a stretcher. No one makes them. That is the part that keeps snagging in my throat. Each of them has already lost enough to be excused from caring, and to a person they refuse to sit this out.

Around midday Jonah finds me at the console and says the thing I have been dodging. “They’re waiting on you, you know. All of them. They keep glancing at the door and then glancing at you.” He sets a hand on my shoulder, heavy and steadying. “You spent two years telling yourself you weren’t a leader because you never carried a rifle. Kid, half of leading was never about the rifle.” He nods at the crowded room. “It was always about being the one who won’t leave. You’ve been that the whole time. Might as well answer to it.”

So I do. I climb up onto a supply crate at the center of the room, and I force myself to look at all of them—seventy-one faces, human and refugee and the two aliens I would have run screaming from a season ago—and I tell them the truth, because they have earned nothing less than that.