Chapter 2: Bleed
Neither of you moves.
He fills the doorway, one hand braced high on the frame, and the light behind him is a single lamp turned low, so his face is mostly shadow and gold. You can feel him the way you'd feel a fire in a small room. Want, so much of it that it's almost anger. And under it, threaded through, something careful. Something that's checking.
"Say it," he says.
"Say what?"
"Why you're here." His voice is low and very even, but his knuckles are white on the doorframe. "Because I can feel what I'm doing to you, and I'm not going to touch you if this is just the bond pulling. I won't be a thing that happened to you because two dragons got territorial over a cliff."
It surprises you so much you almost laugh. Of all the things you expected from Xaden Riorson, it wasn't this. And then, because you can, you reach for him down the bond, past the heat, and find the thing underneath. He's afraid you'll say yes for the wrong reasons. He's more afraid you'll say no.
"I looked at you on my first day too," you say. "Before any of this. Before Fiachra decided he was in love with your terrifying dragon. You walked across the flight field and I forgot what I was saying to the quartermaster. He had to repeat my own question back to me." You step forward, into the spill of shadow, close enough to feel the heat coming off his skin. "I'm here because I want you. Me. I'd want you with the bond closed. I'd want you if I couldn't feel a thing."
Something in him breaks open. You feel it go, like a dam giving way, and a second later his hand is in your hair and his mouth is on yours.
He kisses like he fights. No hesitation, no wasted motion, all of him behind it. He walks you backward into the room and kicks the door shut behind you without looking, and the shadows close in around the two of you, cool and soft against your bare calves. You grab his shoulders. His skin is hot. When you drag your nails down the curve of his back he makes a sound into your mouth, low and rough, and you feel what it did to him a heartbeat before he presses you against the wall.
That's the thing. That's what neither of you was ready for.
Every time you touch him, you feel it twice. Once in your own hands, the heat of him, the hard flex of muscle under smooth skin. And once from the inside, from him, the jolt of pleasure when your palm slides over his ribs, the way his whole body goes tight when you bite his lower lip. It loops back into you, his pleasure stacked on top of your own, and you're shaking before he's done anything but kiss you.
He pulls back an inch. His eyes are black. "Gods," he breathes. "Can you—"
"Yes."
"Every time?"
"Every time." You slide your hand down his stomach, slowly, and watch his eyes fall shut as the feeling of it goes through both of you at once. "You?"
He answers by lifting you. One arm under your thighs and you're off the floor, and you wrap your legs around his waist on instinct, and he carries you to the bed like you weigh nothing and lays you down on dark sheets that smell like him, cedar and leather and smoke.
He kneels over you and stops. Looks. His gaze moves over you slowly in the lamplight, your mussed hair, the sleep shirt rucked up high on your thighs, and you feel his reaction to what he sees in a slow hot pulse that lands right between your legs.
"Take it off," he says. "Please."
You sit up and pull the shirt over your head and drop it on his floor.
He doesn't move for a moment. He just looks at you, and you feel it, a want so deep and wordless that it almost hurts, and then something else under it, something you weren't expecting, soft and startled, like he can't believe he's allowed. Then he leans down and puts his mouth on your throat.
He's thorough. Gods, he's thorough. He works his way down your body like he's mapping it, and every time he finds a place that makes you gasp, he feels the gasp land and goes back for it. His mouth on the curve of your breast. His tongue circling your nipple, slow, until you're arching into him. His teeth, light, at your hip. You tangle your fingers in his hair and feel his satisfaction purr through the bond every time you pull.
When he settles between your thighs and looks up at you along the length of your body, you forget how to breathe.
"Tell me if you want me to stop," he says, against the inside of your knee.
"If you stop, I'll have Fiachra eat you."
You feel him laugh before you hear it, a warm burst of surprise. "Sgaeyl would eat him first."
"She'd try."
Then he puts his mouth on you, and you stop being able to talk.
It's too much. It's so much more than too much. You feel the slick slow drag of his tongue and you feel, at the same time, what it's like for him: the taste of you, the heat, the way your thighs tremble against his shoulders, the sounds you're making that go straight through him and make him groan against you, which you feel, which makes you louder. It feeds back and back. He slides two fingers into you, curls them, and the pleasure doubles over on itself until you're grabbing at the sheets and gasping his name.
"Xaden. Xaden, I can't, it's too—"
"I know," he says, rough, not stopping. "I feel it. Let go."
You come apart so hard your vision goes white at the edges. And you feel him feel it, a jolt so strong it tears a raw sound out of his chest, his hips pressing into the mattress, and the echo of his pleasure crashes back into you and drags the whole thing out longer than should be possible. By the time it lets you go you're limp and shaking and he's pressing his forehead to your hip, breathing like he's just flown through a storm.
"That," he says hoarsely, "was not in the texts either."
You laugh weakly and pull at his shoulders. "Come here."
He comes. He kisses you, and you taste yourself on him, and you feel how much he likes that you don't mind. You reach down between you and work at the laces of his leathers with clumsy fingers until he takes over, impatient, kicking them off. Then he's bare against you, all of him, heavy and hot, and when you wrap your hand around him he shudders so hard that the shadows in the corners of the room jump.
You both freeze. Then you look at the corners. The shadows are curling inward, toward the bed, slow and seeking.
"Sorry," he mutters, and you can feel him trying to call them back, embarrassed.
"Don't." You look at a tendril of darkness that's crept up over the edge of the mattress, near your wrist. It's cool, almost silky. "Are they always like this?"
"No. Only when I lose control." He swallows. "Which I don't."
"Let them," you say.
He goes very still above you. You feel his surprise. And then his want, all at once, so strong it makes you gasp.
"Are you sure?" he asks. "Say it if you're sure."
"I'm sure. I want them. I want you not holding back."
The shadow at your wrist wraps once around it, soft as a ribbon, and draws your arm gently up above your head. Another finds your other wrist. They don't pull. They just hold, cool and patient, and you could slip free with a twist if you wanted to. You test it, to know. He feels you test it. He waits until you stop.
"Still sure?"
"Yes," you say. "Xaden. Yes."
He fits himself against you and pushes in slowly, so slowly, watching your face the whole time. You feel the stretch, the fullness, the ache of it, and at the same time you feel what it is for him: tight wet heat closing around him inch by inch, so good he has to stop halfway and drop his forehead to yours and just breathe.
"I can feel you feeling me," he says, wrecked. "I'm not going to last."
"Then don't."
He sinks the rest of the way in and you both cry out at once.
He moves. Slow at first, deep, deliberate, and then not slow at all. You meet him, lifting your hips, and the shadows hold your wrists and his hand slides under your back to pull you closer, and with every stroke you feel it from both sides. The drag and fill of him inside you. The grip of you around him. His pleasure and yours braid together until you can't tell which is which, until it's just one rising thing with two heartbeats in it. He's saying things against your neck. Your name, over and over, the first time you've heard it from him. "Gods, look at you." "Never felt anything like this." "Mine."
"Yours," you gasp. "Yes. Yours."
He loses it. You feel it go through him, his rhythm breaking, his whole body seizing, and the force of his release floods down the bond and drags you over with him. You come clenched around him with your head thrown back and his name torn out of your throat, and he holds you through it, shaking, buried as deep as he can get, until there's nothing left of either of you.
The shadows unwind from your wrists and melt back into the corners.
Afterward, he doesn't let go.
You thought he might. You thought a man like Xaden Riorson would roll away and stare at the ceiling and make you feel like a mistake. Instead he pulls you onto his chest and runs his fingers up and down your spine, slow and absent, and the feeling coming off him is something you don't have a word for. Quiet. Like a man who's been standing guard for years and has just, for the first time, sat down.
You trace the relic where it swirls over his collarbone. You feel him tense, then make himself relax.
"Does it hurt?" you ask.
"Not anymore."
You lie there and listen to his heart slow under your ear. Outside, the wind moves along the cliffs. Somewhere far above, two dragons are curled together on a ledge, and you can feel Fiachra's smug, sleepy contentment at the back of your mind like a cat in a patch of sun.
You must doze, because when you open your eyes the lamp has burned out and the window has gone grey. Xaden is sitting on the edge of the bed, dressed, pulling on his boots.
"Patrol," he says softly, before you can ask. He leans over and kisses your forehead. "East ridge. I'll be back by midday. Sleep."
You almost do. You're warm and wrung out and you can still feel him in your body. But as he stands, as he reaches the door, something comes down the bond that makes your eyes snap open.
It's not desire. It's not tenderness. It's guilt. Thick and old and wrapped in fear, and it's not for you. It's for something else entirely. And as you reach for it, curious, half asleep, it vanishes. Like a door slamming. Like a wall going up.
You sit up. Xaden's hand is on the latch, his back to you.
"What was that?" you ask.
"Nothing." He doesn't turn around. "Go back to sleep."
He leaves. You lie in his bed and feel him move away down the corridors, then up to the flight field, then into the sky on Sgaeyl's back. And because your signet has never once in your life been wrong, you feel exactly which way he goes.
Not east.
Wrong by half the compass. Fast and low, on a heading that doesn't run along any patrol line you have ever mapped. A heading that leads through the mountains, deep into Tyrrendor, to the one place every rider at Samara knows is nothing but a scorched ruin.
Aretia.