Chapter 2: The Commander's control
The flicker in Griffith’s eyes lasted only a heartbeat, but Guts caught it. That tiny fracture in her absolute control. He saw the way her gaze dropped, the almost imperceptible tightening of her throat as she swallowed. It was the same look a new recruit got staring down a charging heavy knight for the first time—a primal, sizing-up calculation of sheer, physical impossibility.
He hesitated. The burning momentum of the last few minutes cooled by a degree. His voice was rough, unfamiliar to his own ears. “Griffith. We don’t have to—”
“Don’t.”
The word was a whip-crack. Her eyes flashed up to his, the momentary nerves incinerated by a sudden, towering fury. His attempt at comfort was an insult. A pity. It implied she couldn’t handle him, that she was something fragile. It undermined everything—her command, her secrecy, the ruthless strength that had built the Hawk. Her lips drew back from her teeth in something that wasn’t a smile.
“You do not get to patronize me,” she hissed, the regal cadence of her battlefield voice gone, replaced by something low and venomous. “You do not get to hesitate.”
To emphasize her point, to reclaim every shred of authority, she moved. She planted her heels into the rough wool of the cot and let her knees fall wide apart, holding his gaze with a defiant, blazing challenge. The invitation was brutal in its clarity. The lamplight illuminated everything—the slick, flushed evidence of their coupling in the water, the delicate, swollen flesh that pulsed with her quickened heartbeat.
“You want to be useful?” Her voice dropped, became a cold, commanding thing. It was the voice she used to order a siege, to dictate a flanking maneuver. “Use your mouth. Just your tongue. Show me you can follow a simple order.”
There was a provocation in it, a barbed assumption. She was sure of it. A man like him, a blunt instrument of war, all brute force and swinging steel? He’d have no finesse, no knowledge of this. It was a way to seize back the rhythm, to make him clumsy and keep herself apart, in control. To reduce him to a tool obeying a command, even here.
Guts looked at her. He saw the anger, the pride, the calculated dismissal. He said nothing. He just lowered his head.
The first touch of his tongue was a shock. It wasn’t tentative. It was broad, warm, and deliberately flat, a slow, assessing stroke that made her hips jerk off the blanket. He wasn’t fumbling. He was mapping.
Griffith’s breath seized. Her hands, which had been braced at her sides, clenched into fists. She stared at the damp stone ceiling, jaw set, determined to remain silent, unmoved, the commander enduring a service.
He found a rhythm, a focused, relentless attention to the bundle of nerves at her apex. His tongue was thick, and surprisingly long, and he used it not with artistry, but with the same damned, unwavering persistence he used to maintain his sword. He learned what made her thighs tremble—a firm, circling pressure—and he stuck to it. He learned what made her breath hitch—a flat, lapping drag—and he repeated it. It was tactical. Observant. Maddeningly effective.
A low, traitorous sound escaped her throat. She tried to choke it back, biting her own lip. Her body, however, began to betray her grand design. Tiny, involuntary undulations started in her hips, a subtle pushing against his mouth, seeking more of that shocking, precise friction. It was a helpless, physical plea.
Guts noticed. He always noticed the shifts in a fight, the tell in an opponent’s stance. This was no different. As she arched again, a silent demand in the roll of her pelvis, he acted.
He kept the steady, circling torture of his tongue exactly where she needed it. At the same time, his hand—calloused and scarred from a thousand grips on a sword hilt—slipped down. A single blunt finger, slick from her own arousal, pressed against her entrance and, without breaking the rhythm of his mouth, slid inside her.
The effect was immediate and catastrophic to her composure.
Griffith cried out, a sharp, shattered sound that echoed off the stone. Her back bowed, her head thrashing side to side on the rough blanket. The dual sensations—the relentless, sweet friction outside and the deep, filling stretch within—unraveled her completely. Her hips lost all their tiny, controlled movements, instead bucking openly against his face, her hands flying down to tangle in his short, dark hair, not to guide him, but to hold on as the world fractured into pure, mindless sensation.
She was no longer a commander giving orders. She was just a woman coming apart, and the soldier below her was proving, in this as in all things, to be devastatingly, mercilessly competent.
She was just a woman coming apart, and the soldier below her was proving, in this as in all things, to be devastatingly, mercilessly competent. Her cry was a raw, stripped thing, torn from a place deeper than command or strategy, echoing off the stone as her body shuddered through its release. Then she went still, her breathing ragged, the only sound the drip of water from the broken spout in the corner.
Guts lifted his head, his jaw wet, and looked at her spent form. He thought it was over. The frantic energy of the bath and the cot seemed to drain from the room, leaving only the humid quiet and the slow return of reason.
“Sit on the edge of the bed.” Her voice was hoarse but clear, an order delivered to the ceiling. She didn’t look at him.
He blinked, the command cutting through his own haze. After a moment, he pushed himself up and moved to sit on the cot’s iron frame, the cold metal a shock against his thighs. The lantern light painted his scarred torso in gold and deep shadow.
What happened next shocked him. Griffith slid from the blankets, her movements fluid and deliberate, and knelt on the stone floor between his spread legs. Before he could process it, she took him into her mouth.
The heat was instantaneous and overwhelming. “Griffith, don’t—” he gritted out, his hands coming up to her shoulders to pull her away. But his push lacked force, tangled in a knot of disbelief and rising pleasure.
He looked down, and noticed something. One of her own hands was tucked between her thighs, her fingers working in a slow, circular rhythm against herself as she took him deeper. The sight of it—her self-sufficiency, her quiet focus on her own pleasure even as she served him—unraveled any last resistance.
A groan built in his chest, low and helpless. His fingers tightened in her silver hair, not guiding, just holding on. The dual sensation of her mouth and the visual of her touch coiled a spring tight in his gut, fast and inevitable.
He came with a sharp, choked gasp, his hips lifting off the edge of the cot. It was too much, and she pulled back, coughing as she spat some onto the stone between her knees. A few stray drops landed on her own stomach, stark and white against her skin.
“Sorry, I—” Guts began, the word automatic, clumsy in the thick air.
Griffith didn’t let him finish. She simply stood up, placed a hand on his chest, and pushed him back onto the bed. He fell onto the wool blanket, watching as she swung a leg over his hips, her eyes holding his with that same unnerving focus.
She settled atop him, grinding herself slowly against the renewed hardness of his cock, her wetness smearing his skin. “Apologies are useless,” she said, her voice a flat statement. Then she reached down, aligned him, and sank onto him in one slow, excruciating slide.
She began to move, a rolling, possessive rhythm that claimed the air from his lungs. Her head fell back, silver hair cascading, as she rode him with a intensity that left no room for thought, only feeling.