Chapter 38: The Knot That Binds
The lock held them for what felt like an age, a timeless stretch of shared breath and slowing heartbeats. Yamato remained braced above him, the strain in his arms a dull burn, his world narrowed to the feel of Taichi’s body pulsing around his slowly softening length. The omega’s eyes were shut, his breathing evening out from ragged sobs to exhausted huffs.
Then, with a soft, wet release, Yamato’s knot slipped free.
A gush of spend and slick followed, pooling hot on the bed beneath Taichi. Yamato collapsed onto his side, pulling Taichi with him, tucking the omega’s back against his chest. He draped a heavy arm over Taichi’s waist, nuzzling into the sweat-damp hair at his nape. A profound, tender silence settled over them, broken only by the crackle of the dying fire.
It lasted perhaps three minutes.
A shiver went through Taichi. Then another, sharper one. Yamato felt it, a tensing of the muscles under his arm. Taichi’s breathing hitched. A new wave of scent, sweet and cloying as rotting fruit, bloomed from his skin.
“No,” Taichi whispered, a sound of pure despair. “No, not again. Not now.”
His hand slid down, between his own legs, his fingers prodding at his swollen, used hole. They came away glistening with fresh slick, not the leftover mess of their coupling. A low, broken whimper escaped him. “It’s not enough,” he choked out, his body beginning to tremble in earnest. “It’s not fucking enough.”
The fever was rising again, swift and cruel, clawing back through the brief respite. Yamato’s own body, drained moments before, responded with a violent jerk. His cock, still wet and sensitive, hardened again against Taichi’s backside with an almost painful urgency. The alpha in him saw the omega in distress, smelled the renewed, desperate pheromones, and roared back to life.
“Taichi,” Yamato murmured, his voice rough.
“Don’t,” Taichi sobbed, but he was pushing his hips back, grinding against Yamato’s renewed erection, his movements clumsy and needy. “Just… do it. Get it over with.”
Yamato ignored the resignation in his voice. He shifted, rolling Taichi onto his back. The omega’s face was a mess of tears and frustration, his brown eyes glassy with renewed heat. Yamato hooked his hands under Taichi’s knees, pushing them up and apart. The sight was obscenely beautiful: the reddened, slick-stained hole, still gaping slightly from his knot, clenching and fluttering empty.
He leaned down, but not to kiss him. He spat, a crude, wet glob, directly onto Taichi’s entrance, mixing with the copious slick. Taichi gasped, hips jerking off the bed.
“Look at me,” Yamato commanded, aligning the broad head of his cock with that wet heat.
Taichi’s eyes snapped to his, wide and drowning.
Yamato pushed in, a single, relentless thrust that buried him to the hilt in one smooth, brutal motion. Taichi screamed, a raw, torn sound, his back arching sharply off the mattress. He was impossibly tight, his body spasming around the invasion, yet so slick that Yamato slid in like a blade into a sheath.
“You want it?” Yamato grunted, already pulling back. He was losing himself to the rhythm, to the scent, to the sheer, maddening feel of it.
“Yes! Fuck, yes!”
“How do you want it?”
Taichi’s answer was a filthy, broken stream. “Hard! Just fuck me hard, use me, breed your fucking seed into me, you bastard alpha, please!”
Yamato obliged. He set a punishing pace, each drive of his hips slamming the bed frame into the wall with a solid thump, thump, thump. The sound of skin slapping skin was wet, loud, animal. Taichi’s legs wrapped around Yamato’s waist, his heels digging into the small of the alpha’s back, pulling him deeper with every thrust.
“Is this what you need?” Yamato growled, leaning over him, his blue eyes blazing. “This cock? My knot?”
“Yours!” Taichi cried out, his nails raking down Yamato’s back, reopening the shallow wounds from before. Sharp lines of fire traced his skin. “Need your fucking knot, need you to fill me up, make it stop, make it stop!”
He was babbling, lost to the heat, his words fractured and lewd. Yamato shifted, hooking Taichi’s legs over his shoulders, bending the omega nearly in half. The new angle was deeper, more punishing. Taichi’s cock, trapped between their bodies, leaked steadily onto his own stomach.
Yamato fucked him like that, pistoning into the clutching, desperate heat, watching Taichi’s face contort with a maddened cocktail of agony and ecstasy. The omega’s chants became a broken mantra. “Breed me, breed me, breed me…”
His orgasm took him suddenly. His body locked, his passage clamping down in a vice-like series of pulses, and he came with a strangled shout, his release spurting in warm streaks between their sweat-slicked torsos. The intense constriction was the final trigger for Yamato. With a final, deep lunge, his knot swelled and caught, anchoring him inside Taichi once more as his own climax ripped through him.
He came in hot, seemingly endless pulses, pumping his seed deep into Taichi’s receptive body. He collapsed forward, catching his weight on his forearms, their foreheads pressed together, sharing the same ragged, shattered breath.
This time, the knot held as the final, violent peak of Taichi’s heat truly began to subside. The tremors that wracked the omega’s body were of exhaustion, not need. The frantic, clutching tension in his muscles bled away, leaving him boneless and pliant beneath Yamato’s weight. The sweet-rot scent in the air gradually thinned, mellowing into the musky, spent aroma of sex and satisfied alpha.
They stayed locked, motionless, for a long time. Yamato, still buried deep inside him, watched as awareness slowly trickled back into Taichi’s eyes. The frantic black hunger receded, leaving behind a weary, devastated brown. Shame followed close behind, hot and visible.
Taichi turned his face away, staring at the ruined wall beside the bed. A tear escaped, tracking through the sweat and spend on his temple.
Yamato’s knot finally deflated. He slid out, a fresh trickle of their combined fluids following. He didn’t move away. He stretched out beside Taichi, pulling the soiled sheet up over them both. The room was cold now, the fire dead.
The silence was different this time. Thick with unsaid things.
After an eternity, Taichi spoke, his voice hoarse and flat. “You should go.”
“No.”
“Sora will be up soon. She’ll… have questions.”
“Let her.”
Another tear. Taichi swiped at it angrily. “I didn’t want you to see me like that.”
“I know.”
“It’s humiliating.”
Yamato turned onto his side, propping his head on his hand. He looked at the profile of Taichi’s face—the stubborn set of his jaw, the long lashes damp with moisture. “Why?”
Taichi finally looked at him, anger flashing. “Why? Because I was an animal. I begged. I said things… I chanted like some mindless brood-omega. You saw me completely broken.”
“I saw you in need,” Yamato said, his voice low. “And I saw you strong enough to survive it. There’s no shame in biology, Taichi. Only in how we treat each other in its grip.”
“You’re just saying that because you got what you wanted,” Taichi muttered, but the fight was draining from him, replaced by a deep, aching weariness.
“Is that what you think I wanted?” Yamato asked quietly. “To watch you suffer? To fuck you while you sobbed?” He reached out, his calloused fingers brushing a strand of hair from Taichi’s forehead. The omega flinched but didn’t pull away. “I wanted you. Not the heat. You. The man who curses at me and serves the worst patrons with a smile and brews mead that tastes like sunlight.”
Taichi closed his eyes. His breathing hitched, but no more tears fell. “It’ll happen again. In a few months. It always does.”
“Then I’ll be here again,” Yamato said, simple and final.
“You can’t promise that. Your duty, the king’s patrols…”
“My duty is here,” Yamato interrupted. He didn’t fully understand the truth of the words until he’d said them aloud. They settled in his chest, solid and right. “If I have to petition the crown for a permanent posting in this shithole town to be near a surly omega tavernkeeper, I will.”
A faint, disbelieving snort escaped Taichi. “You’re an idiot.”
“For you? Absolutely.”
The first grey light of dawn began to seep through the small, grimy window, revealing the full extent of the wreckage: the overturned chair, the scattered ledgers, the soiled bedding. Taichi’s body was a map of love bites and scratches, the scent of Yamato all over him.
Yamato sat up. “Come on. You need to wash. And I’m starving.”
“I can’t move.”
“Yes, you can.” Yamato swung his legs off the bed and stood, wincing slightly at the claw marks on his back. He turned and offered a hand.
Taichi stared at it for a long moment, then at Yamato’s face. He saw the steadiness there, the concern that had nothing to do with an alpha’s post-coital smugness. He saw the knight who had fought his way past Sora, who had stayed. Slowly, hesitantly, he placed his hand in Yamato’s.
His fingers were cold. Yamato closed his own around them, warm and sure, and pulled him up.