Chapter 6: Bloodied Reunion
The air outside the war tent smelled of mud, cold iron, and conifer sap. It was a male smell, sharp and unsentimental. Kia pulled the hood of her grey travel cloak tighter around her face, her heart a frantic bird against her ribs. The sentries had recognized her, of course, but Aaron’s standing orders were clear: she was to be allowed to pass, but never escorted. A test, she knew. A measure of her courage, or her foolishness.
She slipped between the flaps of the vast pavilion, the heavy embroidered fabric brushing her shoulders. Inside, the world condensed into a haze of smoke and low lamplight. The space was a chaotic echo of Aaron’s mind: maps unfurled across a central table, weighted with daggers and chalices; discarded pieces of armor on a stand like a shed steel skin; a brazier glowing with low, peaty heat.
And him.
He stood with his back to her, leaning over the map table, braced on his fists. He’d shed his plate, but wore the heavy, quilted gambeson beneath, dark with sweat and other, older stains. His blond hair was matted with grime and blood—not his own, she thought, judging by the ease of his stance. The scent of him hit her: male sweat, leather, the sharp, coppery tang of battle. It was utterly foreign to the incense-and-herb world of her temple, and it made something low in her belly tighten with a dread-fueled hunger.
“The scouts are unreliable west of the river,” he said, his voice a grating rasp, not realizing who had entered. “The terrain favors ambush.”
A grizzled general across the table nodded, then his eyes flicked past Aaron’s shoulder and widened slightly. Aaron straightened, his spine going rigid. He turned.
His face was streaked with dirt and dried blood, a thin cut marring the line of his jaw. His blue eyes, usually chips of ice, were the color of a storm-ravaged sea, exhaustion and a residue of fury swirling in their depths. They locked onto her, and for a heartbeat, there was no recognition, only the lethal assessment of a warrior confronted with an unexpected variable.
Then the heat changed. The fury banked, replaced by something darker, more possessive. “Leave us,” he said, without looking at the general.
The man departed with a silent bow, the tent flaps falling shut behind him with a final sigh.
Silence, thick and charged. Kia stood frozen, clutching her cloak. The journey had been long, the roads perilous. She had argued with her remaining guards for days before forging ahead with only two bewildered eastern soldiers as escort. She had told herself it was to deliver the information she’d pieced together about the dissent in her father’s court, names whispered by Elara in happier times. That was a lie. She was here because the cold, vast bed in the northern fortress had become a mouth that swallowed her whole with his absence. Because the memory of his hands, his weight, his claim, was the only flame in the creeping dark that followed Elara’s death.
“You are a thousand miles from where you should be,” he said, his voice low. He didn’t move.
“I had to see you,” she whispered. The words sounded pathetic, a child’s plea.
He moved then, not with his usual controlled grace, but with the predatory stalk of a wolf. He closed the distance between them in five silent strides. Up close, the smell of blood and violence was overwhelming. He didn’t touch her. His gaze scraped over her, from the hood shadowing her face, down the humble cloak, to her boots, dusted with the grime of the road.
“Foolish,” he breathed. “Reckless. This is a camp of five thousand armed men, not a royal court. Dangers here don’t wear poisoned rings. They carry axes.”
“I was safe. Your orders—”
“My orders are a piece of parchment. Out there,” he jerked his head toward the tent wall, “are men who haven’t seen a woman in months. Men who would knife a sentry for a chance at the prize they think you are.” His hand came up, fast, and he pushed the hood back from her face. Her dark hair tumbled free. “Look at you. You couldn’t look plain if you tried.”
His thumb brushed her cheek, a rough, calloused stroke that was more accusation than caress. The contact seared her. She flinched, but didn’t pull away. His eyes dropped to her mouth.
“Why are you really here, priestess?”
All her rehearsed reasons—the political intelligence, the need for counsel—shriveled to ash. The truth was a humiliating, physical ache. “I… I couldn’t sleep.”
A muscle twitched in his jaw. “And you thought I’d provide a lullaby?”
She shook her head, her eyes burning. “I felt safe. With you. After… everything.” After the murder. After the fear. After he held her through the night.
He stared at her for a long, unbearable moment. The storm in his eyes churned. Then, with a sound that was half-groan, half-snarl, his control snapped. His hands, still in their worn leather gauntlets, came up to frame her face. His kiss was not gentle. It was a conquest. It tasted of salt, of iron, of a desperate, brutal hunger that mirrored her own. It was nothing like the calculated seductions in the royal bedchamber. This was raw need, stripped bare by exhaustion and the proximity of death.
She kissed him back, her hands flying to his chest, gripping the stiff, sweat-damp quilt of his gambeson. She moaned into his mouth, the sound swallowed by his aggression. He walked her backwards, his body driving hers until the edge of the massive map table dug into the small of her back. Parchment crinkled beneath her.
He broke the kiss, his breathing ragged. “You see what I am,” he growled, his voice thick. “Covered in the filth of war. Stinking of it. Is this what you traveled across kingdoms for?”
She looked up at him, at the savage, beautiful man streaked with the day’s violence. The man who had vowed to skin her enemy alive. Her hands came up to his stained face. “Yes.”
His eyes closed for a second, as if in prayer. When they opened, the last vestige of restraint was gone, replaced by a pure, incendiary hunger. “Then you’ll take me as I am.”
He spun her around, bending her forward over the table. The mapped lands of the northern frontier sprawled beneath her cheek. She felt his hands at her waist, hasty, ruthless, yanking her skirts up over her hips. The cold air bit her exposed skin. One gauntleted hand pressed between her shoulder blades, holding her down. The other fumbled with the laces of his trousers.
She heard the wet sound of him spitting into his palm, a crude, efficient preparation. Then the blunt, hot head of his cock was pressing against her entrance. She was already wet, her body shamed by its own eager betrayal.
“Aaron,” she whimpered, not a protest, but a plea.
His answer was a single, powerful thrust that buried him inside her to the hilt.
The air punched from her lungs. He was thicker than she remembered, stretching her brutally, the angle deep and unforgiving. A cry tore from her throat, muffled by the parchment.
He didn’t pause. He set a punishing rhythm, each drive of his hips slamming her into the hard edge of the table. The metal buckles of his gambeson dug into her back. The maps tore beneath her clawing fingers. It was merciless, animalistic. It was everything the polished court was not—raw, unadorned, a frantic coupling born of relief and terror and the stark truth of their existence.
“That’s it,” he grunted, his voice guttural. “Take it. You wanted to be here? This is here. The smell, the sweat, the fucking war outside the tent.” He pistoned into her, his grip on her shoulder tightening. “You feel that? That’s me marking what’s mine. In the middle of all this fucking chaos.”
She did feel it. Every savage inch. The pleasure was a dark, coiling thread woven through the pain of the impact, the humiliation of her position, the sheer wrongness of it. It built, a terrifying pressure. She tried to muffle her sounds, biting her lip until she tasted blood.
“Don’t you dare,” he snarled, leaning over her, his mouth at her ear. “I want every man in earshot to know I’m fucking my wife. I want them to hear your greedy little cunt taking my cock. Scream.”
He punctuated the command with a particularly deep, twisting thrust that struck a blinding bolt of sensation through her core. She screamed. A high, ragged sound of utter surrender. It seemed to feed his frenzy. His pace became frantic, brutal, the table groaning under their combined weight. One of his hands left her back and snaked between her legs, his fingers finding her swollen clit.
The touch was electric, precise even in his frenzy. The coiled spring inside her snapped. Her orgasm ripped through her with violent, silent convulsions, her vision graying at the edges, her body clamping around him in rhythmic pulses.
With a choked, guttural roar, he followed. He drove into her one last, shuddering time and held himself deep, spilling into her with a heat that seemed to sear her from the inside. His weight collapsed partially on her, his sweat-slicked forehead resting between her shoulder blades, his breath coming in ragged gasps against her skin.
For long moments, there was only the sound of their breathing and the crackle of the brazier. The world outside—the murmuring camp, the distant sounds of industry—seeped back in. The rough parchment was stuck to her damp cheek.
Slowly, carefully, he pulled out of her. The sudden emptiness was a shock. He righted his trousers with a few rough tugs. She stayed as she was, bent over the ruined maps, her skirts still rucked around her waist, exposed and trembling.
His hands, now surprisingly gentle, grasped her hips and pulled her upright. He turned her to face him. Her legs were liquid, barely holding her. He looked down at her face, streaked with tears and ink from the maps. His own face was still a mask of war-paint and sweat, but his eyes had softened, the storm subsided into a strange, weary calm.
He lifted a hand and wiped his thumb across her smudged cheek. “You’re a mess,” he murmured, his voice hoarse.
She looked at the destruction around them—the scattered weapons, the torn maps, the evidence of their joining seeping down her inner thigh. “So is your war room.”
A faint, exhausted smirk touched his bloodied lips. “It was already a mess.” He leaned forward, resting his forehead against hers. “You’re safe now,” he said, and it was not a question, but a statement, an incantation. “Here. With me.”
Outside, a sentry called the hour. The war waited. But for this stolen, ruined moment, in the wreckage of his strategy, she believed him.
But for this stolen, ruined moment, in the wreckage of his strategy, she believed him. The illusion shattered with the clearing of his throat. He stepped back, his expression sealing over like ice reforming on a winter lake, the brief vulnerability gone as if it had never existed.
“You should not have come,” he said, turning away to lift a wineskin from a nearby stool. He drank deeply, the line of his throat working. Kia swayed, her body humming, sore between her thighs, the cold air now raising gooseflesh on her exposed skin.
She fumbled with her skirts, pulling the fabric down with trembling hands. Her underthings were soaked, a slick reminder drying on her skin. “I brought information,” she said, the words sounding hollow even to her.
“Information is delivered by courier.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, not looking at her. “Not by princesses who wander into war camps looking like a feast laid out for starving men.”
His words were a slap. She flinched, clutching her cloak around herself. She hadn’t thought of that. She never did. The cut of her nun’s habit, the slits that bared her legs, the neckline that hinted at the swell of her breasts—it was just her clothing. It was how she had always dressed. She didn’t see the invitation. He did. Every man here would.
“I… I didn’t think—” she began.
“You never do.” He finally turned, his blue eyes scanning her from head to toe, a cold assessment. “That’s the problem. You are a lamb who keeps wandering into the wolf’s den, wide-eyed and wondering why its fur is rough.”
The crude metaphor stung. She straightened her spine, a flicker of defiance cutting through her shame. “I am not a lamb.”
“Aren’t you?” He took a step closer. The fire in the brazier cast shifting shadows across the planes of his face. “You’re here now, in my tent, smelling of me, dripping with my come. What does that make you, Kia?”
Her name on his lips was a weapon. It stripped her of title, of pretense. She was just a woman standing in the aftermath of being taken over a map of his conquests. She had no answer. Her gaze dropped to the floor, to the scattered parchments.
He closed the distance in two strides. His hand, still rough from the gauntlet, caught her chin, forcing her head up. “Look at me.” She did. His thumb brushed her lower lip. “You want something. Not just my cock. Not just safety. What is it?”
Tears welled, hot and infuriating. She didn’t know. She wanted the man who held her after the assassin died. She wanted the monster who just fucked her senseless. She wanted to not feel so lost. “I don’t know,” she whispered, the confession tearing from her.
His eyes searched hers. Then they dropped to the pale column of her throat, to the rapid pulse beating there. Something shifted in his gaze, a rekindling of the earlier frenzy, banked but not extinguished. The adrenaline of battle, the shock of her presence, the raw sex—it had not been enough. A deeper hunger remained, unsated.
“You will,” he said, his voice dropping to a low, dangerous register.
He yanked her cloak open. It pooled at her feet. Before she could gasp, his mouth was on her neck. Not a kiss. A bite. His teeth sank into the tender junction where her shoulder met her throat, a sharp, claiming pain that made her cry out. It was not a love bite. It was a brand. He sucked the skin, hard, marking her as his sport, his prize, his foolish, naive wife.
She whimpered, her hands flying to his hair. It was coarse, tangled. She didn’t push him away. Her body arched into the pain, a dark bloom of pleasure spreading from the point of his teeth. He released her neck with a wet sound, breathing heavily against the red, throbbing mark. “You see?” he growled. “Your body knows what you are. It begs for the claiming.”
His hands ripped at the lacing of her dress. The worn threads snapped. The fabric gaped, exposing her breasts, the cool air pebbling her nipples. He palmed one roughly, his thumb scraping over the peak. “You come all this way, dressed like a temple whore, and think I’d be content with one quick fuck over the maps?” He pinched her nipple, a sharp, bright pain. “You know me better than that.”
“Aaron, please—” The plea was out before she could stop it.
“Please what?” He shoved her backwards. She stumbled, falling onto the large, fur-covered bedroll laid in the corner of the tent for his rest. He was on her before she could orient herself, his weight pressing her down into the coarse pelts. “Please stop? Or please more?”
He yanked her skirts up again, his fingers finding her cunt. She was swollen, sensitive, still wet from their first joining. He pushed two fingers inside her, a brutal, curling thrust. She gasped, her hips jerking. “You’re still so fucking slick,” he muttered, his eyes on hers. “Dripping for it. My messy little priestess.”
He withdrew his fingers, shiny with her arousal, and brought them to her lips. “Taste,” he commanded. She turned her head, cheeks burning. He grabbed her jaw, his grip firm. “Taste what you do to me. To yourself.”
He smeared his fingers over her mouth. The taste was salty, musky, utterly intimate. Shame and a shocking, deep thrill coursed through her. She met his gaze, her tongue flicking out instinctively, cleaning his skin. A low, approving grunt rumbled in his chest.
He unbuckled his trousers, freeing his cock. It was hard again, angry and flushed. He was relentless. He drove into her with a single, punishing stroke, burying himself deeper than before. The air left her lungs in a sob. He didn’t wait for her to adjust. He set a ruthless, pounding rhythm, each thrust jolting her up the furs.
“You asked for this,” he gritted out, his hips hammering into hers. The leather of his gambeson chafed her inner thighs. “Walking in here. Looking at me with those big, fucking innocent eyes. You wanted the beast. Now you’ve got him.”
She was split open, filled beyond bearing. Pleasure, sharp and devastating, coiled tight with each brutal invasion. She couldn’t catch her breath. Sounds were torn from her—guttural moans, sharp cries, the wet, rhythmic slap of his flesh against hers filling the tent. “Oh gods,” she choked out.
“Forget them,” he snarled, leaning down, his breath hot on her ear. “There’s only me here. And you. And this cunt.” He plunged deeper, a vicious twist of his hips. “Tell me you want it. Say it.”
She shook her head, tears leaking into her hair. The peak was there, a terrifying cliff edge. He was pushing her toward it with merciless, mechanical precision. “I… I can’t.”
He slowed, torturously, almost withdrawing. The sudden emptiness was agony. “Say it.” He held himself still, a master of this particular cruelty. “Or I stop. I walk out to the campfire. You can lie here, throbbing and empty, and think about what you’ve thrown away.”
The threat was unbearable. Her body screamed for him, for the crushing completion. Her pride dissolved. “Please,” she sobbed. “Please, Aaron. I want it. I want you. Fuck me. Please.”
He slammed back into her, a animal noise tearing from his throat. “Again.”
“Please fuck me!” she cried, the words filthy and freeing.
He bit her neck again, right over the fresh bruise, as his thrusts became wild, ungovernable. She shattered, her orgasm a raw, convulsing wave that ripped a scream from her lungs. He followed with a final, brutal surge, pumping into her with a ragged groan, his whole body shuddering atop hers.
Collapse. Weight. The smell of sex and sweat and fur. His breathing was harsh in her ear. Hers was a ragged, broken thing. He softened inside her but didn’t pull away. His face was buried in her neck, next to the teeth marks he’d left.
Minutes passed, marked only by the slowing of their hearts. Finally, he shifted, rolling onto his back beside her. He stared up at the dark canopy of the tent. She lay on her back, exposed, ravaged, a trickle of his release cooling on her inner thigh. The naivety she wore like a second skin felt torn away. He had seen the raw, begging thing beneath.
“The information,” he said, his voice flat, detached. “What was it?”
She turned her head to look at his profile, carved in the dim light. This was the man, now: the strategist, the prince. The lover was gone, retreated behind the ice. She swallowed, her throat sore. “Lord Braxus,” she whispered. “He was my sister’s lover. He has the southern regiments loyal to him, not to my father.”
Aaron was silent for a long moment. Then he nodded once. “Good.” He sat up, tying his trousers, becoming the commander again piece by piece. He looked down at her, her dress torn, her body marked, her eyes wide with the aftermath. A strange, almost painful tenderness flickered in his gaze, gone before she could be sure it was there. “Get some sleep. You’ll leave at first light.”
He stood, walking toward the map table, already reassembling his world from the ruins they’d made. She curled on her side on the furs, watching him, feeling the deep, throbbing ache between her legs and the sharper sting on her neck. She had come for safety, for him. She had found something else entirely. And as she closed her eyes, the taste of herself still on her lips, she knew she would come again.