Word to the wise: this one's quite NSFW.
There is one chapter after this in the first volume of Headless Over Heels. People have been asking me how many in total--I'm not sure, tbh. I've left it intentionally pretty open-ended, just like PotV. There is plenty of space in the United Territories of the Legion that I would love to explore.
The Thief
The dull pain of his tenderizing beneath August il Agante’s fists drummed against his exhausted brain to the rhythm of Demetrius’ hooves; he flitted back and forth across the boundary of consciousness, now and then, when the horse’s gait changed and his body discovered an exciting new way it hurt.
But it didn’t matter. It was okay. She’d come for him.
He only remembered snatches of their return. Tiago and Ofelia helping him from the horse. Hands clasping him, sure and sturdy against his back.
Then he was in bed, and it was day. And Ofelia was in the easy chair in the corner of his hotel room, reading.
He rolled to his side and winced. “Morning.”
Ofelia glanced up and back down again. “Good afternoon, in fact.”
Maybe that was why his throat was so parched. There was a pitcher of water on the nightstand; he reached weakly for it, half-expecting Ofelia to intervene and pass it to him. She didn’t, and he sat up more, and he was tender and bruised, but he was all right.
He poured a glass of water, threw it back in a breath, and poured another. “Where’s Annalise?”
“She’s off on the scaffold,” Ofelia said. “Everyone was quite cross with her, how much she delayed. The condemned are impatient to get their heads lopped.”
Seth stretched his sore arms and rubbed the ligature marks on his wrists. The woman who’d saved his life last night was outside taking the lives of others. He supposed you might call that playing God, but Annalise struck him as uniquely deserving of deification. He looked to the shamrock square of sky beaming into the hotel room. “Tiago’s with her?”
“Mmhmm.” Ofelia turned a page. “He’s forgiven her.”
“For what?”
“For chasing you away,” Ofelia said.
“Sorta thought you were the pro-Seth sibling.”
“We are both pro-whatever you did with that grouse you fixed for us.” Ofelia got up. “If I pop off to tell them you’re awake, you won’t have any kind of mysterious aneurysm while I’m out, will you?”
“Don’t think so. I actually feel pretty good.”
“The benefit of a city Fontana’s size,” Ofelia said. “At least a few of the apothecaries are slinging panaceas more reputable than pulped popmites and ink-dyed suet.” She tossed her book into her satchel, and added another laying open on the floor with its pages bent. “Are you mended enough for a hug?”
He held his arms open. She bent by his bed and pulled him into a quick, tight embrace.
“Thank you for coming back, Seth,” she said. “Welcome home.”
This earnestness, coming from wry, dry Ophelia, stunned him too severely to cobble together a proper reply before she hurried from the room.
The bright green day became alpine night.
Seth and Annalise’s room was lit in glittering amber by a wax forest of candles, thick enough to rival the Tower Wick. Thin taper candles in crimson atop the nightstands and the shelves, tea candles and votaries in chipped saucers and travel tins. They’d lit them together, laughing and egging each other on until the shadows of the room were stark and dancing.
Annalise sat at the head of the bed, the light lapping at the contours of her body. It lit the firm grace of her muscles and the proud, beaky prow of her nose in bold geometries. It softened in harmonious contrast with the rhythm of her curves, where they flowed from her exposed thighs and shoulders and the tops of her breasts. It outlined the voluptuous promise waiting in silhouette beneath her lacy black camisole.
Waiting for him.
“So,” she said, and the few feet of bed she said it across was an expanse, suddenly, and to journey it would take great courage.
“So,” he said, and his hand crept the first perilous inch across the silk bedspread.
“D’you reckon if we went to the front desk they’d have more candles?” she asked, and he laughed, and the distance collapsed on itself.
“I think I’ve set enough bedrooms on fire this week already,” he said. “Literally, I mean. I’m open to metaphor.”
“Let’s get metaphorical, then.” The shadows shifted across the fluid movements of her muscles as her arms opened. “C’mere to me, boy.”
He came to her. The bed creaked as they eased further into it. “You in the market for a soul?” he asked.
“Sure.” Her nails rasped against his back. “Whaddya want for it?”
“Let’s call this the negotiations,” he said, “and see where we end up.”
“It’ll be scary.” She stroked the back of his neck. “No way around it. When your soul lifts out. When that happens, you’ll want to stop.”
“I promise I won’t,” he said. “You know how hard I fought for this. I’m committed.”
“I’m not doubting your commitment, love.” She lay back and drew him further into her embrace. Their stomachs pressed together. “It’s just what happens. It’ll only go a few feet, right into the sword’s animaxis.” Her foot rose to point at the executioner’s blade in the corner, its bared dynamos pulsing. “Once it’s staying put you’ll feel better again. But the moment you feel it happen, it’s a hard moment. Your body’ll panic. It’ll try and hold on, make you feel like you’re disappearing. When it happened to me, I thought I was dying. It’ll be too late to reverse it at that point. But when you try to stop, do you want me to stop, and wait it out before we keep going? It’ll take a while, but I’ll be there with you, the whole time. Swear on the sword.”
“What if you keep going?”
“If I keep going it’ll be quicker.” Her legs folded upward, easing him into the warm space between them. “And messier. It’ll happen when you, uh… finish.”
“When I cum,” he said.
She nodded.
“You’re gonna make me literally cum my soul out.”
She scoffed and nodded again. An iron blush crept across her face. “If you wanna act the maggot about it, yeah.”
“That’s hilarious,” he said. “Let’s do that.”
“Seth, cop on and take this serious, right? And be sure. Cause when you’re grabbing at me going wait, stop, I need to know not to.”
That put a shiver in his skin, but he shook it off. “Don’t,” he said. “I want this.”
“Okay,” she said. “And it’ll be a grand ride before, and after. But just… be prepared. It’ll be hard.”
“I hope it’ll be hard. I’ll try not to wilt.”
“Little fucking gobdaw.” She nestled him further up her body and rubbed her nose against his. The lacy fabric of her thong was pliant with humidity where it pressed against him.
He gathered her cami’s gossamer material at her short hem. Slowly he uncovered the gorgeous body beneath it, shining in the candlelight like a mastercraft in porcelain. As the garment rose to her chest, it gathered and caught at the heavy globes of her breasts. Her arms tightened against her sides. A plaintive little noise rose in her throat.
“Hey,” he prompted. “You’re good?”
“It’s just—I’m trying not to feel wrong. I’m old, I’m used up, I’m…” Her stomach rose and fell. “You’re so new. You have so much promise. You could fall in love and have kids and a life—”
“I have a life.” He resumed his slow unsheathing, coaxing her tight posture open. “And I’ve already fallen in love.”
He kissed her, with the deliberate care absent from their first desperate makeout. A feathery sigh loosened her. She lifted her arms and the fabric slid away. The weighty bounce of her breasts as they were freed put a momentary halt to Seth’s simian brain.
“Holy fucking Saints,” he whispered. He reverently lifted one, felt the chubby heft. Watched the milky flesh spill from his palm.
Her laugh was pinched and breathy. “You’re such a kid.”
“No, I’m not.”
“You. Mmm.” She squirmed as he laid a kiss on the mole that had hypnotized him for weeks. Her nipple was hard on his cheek. “You are. I’m—for fuck’s sake. I’m old enough to be your mother.”
“Uh huh.” His thumbs hooked into the pinching black waistband of her panties. “But you’re not.”
The tension returned; her legs tightened across his waist.
“I’m sorry.” Her eyes flitted away from his. “I’m—I’m trying.”
“It’s okay.” His thumbs caressed the lines of her quadriceps. “We have all the time we want. Any way I can make you more comfortable?”
“It’s nothing wrong with anything, it’s just…” Her clavicle stood out as she swallowed. “It’s been a while.”
“What’s a while?”
“I haven’t really, seriously fucked since, uh. When I was pregnant, my husband didn’t really want to touch me. And I suppose the frigidness just sort of… carried on, after.” Her ankles brushed together at his back. “Just as well, ‘cause when I found out the kind of father he was, I wanted him nowhere near me. And then he died and I went north, and I went unlit. And that was that.”
“That was that, as in… nobody since?”
She shook her head. “I’d just—I’d always been a big lass, but I put on all my soldier weight, and I got all my scars, and I went unlit, and sort of came out of the Winter War feeling… uh. Feeling like a monster. Hating my body. And I had my kids and my job and it just didn’t… it just felt like that part of my life was done.”
“Annalise,” Seth said, in rising horror. “You are telling me you haven’t gotten laid in twenty-five years?”
“I guess not. Saints.” Her face darkened with embarrassment. She covered it with her hands and laughed helplessly. “Saints, what are we doing? Last time I was with a man, you were in diapers. D’you realize that?”
Seth’s jaw hung agape. This was cosmic injustice. This was slapping a loving Creator in the face. To have an absolute smokeshow like Annalise on the face of the world, too afraid and ashamed to let herself be loved. With a cold shock he wondered whether she was interpreting his nerves as reluctance.
“Even before the unlighting, and the tats, and the crow’s feet, I was an acquired taste,” Annalise was saying, over the hum of the blood in his ears. “Now I’m—I’m spent brass.”
“No fucking way.” He snapped out of it. “I’m fixing this. Right now.”
“Fixing what?”
“I know what to do.” He kissed her sternum. “To make you understand how sexy you are.”
She chuckled uncertainly. Her thighs flexed as he inched lower. “What’re you doing?”
He peeled her panties off; the cushion of her illustrated thighs pinched and then bloomed as the waistband slid away. “Acquiring your taste.” he said, and parted her elegant legs.
The rippling muscle and the white skin put him in mind sometimes of a statue, some goddess of antiquity chiseled from marble. But she didn’t feel like a statue. Or taste like one. And statues didn’t squirm and whine (as far as he knew; he’d never tried) when you kissed their bellies.
Her abdomen tensed and flexed; the elegant symmetrical muscles hardened, and with a pulse of lust he foresaw the tight, coiling warmth churning beneath them, waiting for him. Lower down past her belly button was a sweet little paunch of softness, gilded by faint, silvery stretch marks.
His breath caught with the reminder. A mother. The woman sighing and trembling under his touch was a mother, and he’d met her children, and counted them now as closer friends than any he’d ever made in his life. Two strong, statuesque young warriors. And they’d quickened right here, in this divinely formed stomach. They’d come into the world through the elegant sweep of these hips. They’d been nourished by the heavy teardrop breasts that wobbled adorably now with the sharp intake of her breath, as her whitefire eyes stared down from between them, wide and anxious and desperately needy.
His lips traveled along the pale milk skin, cooling to silver from the rushing onyx blood beneath it. He kissed her mound, and the sable, silky hair there tickled his nose. His mind swam with sensation—with the hot, healthy aroma of her, with the strained soft sounds she was making, the last gauzy curtain separating him from the great, glorious mystery of what Annalise al Ydris sounded like in the throes of passion. This monochrome woman, leached of all color, and yet so vividly alive.
His thumb kneaded gently at the downy plumpness of her labia, and then tucked a soft groove in her flesh as he spread her, beheld the shining slate of her blushing vulva. It twitched as his breath touched it. A hiss of air left her trembling lungs, a Ss that quivered on the edge of a t—for stop? Seth paused—and then resolved into an urgent “Seth,” the whimpering syllable full of horny disbelief at what he was about to do to her, the blessing nobody had taken from her in decades.
Her left leg rose, and the curve of her asscheek where it had flattened onto the bed rounded out again, joined with the motion of her leg, and he wanted to fucking cry, it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, and then her heel graced his back, and looking was over. Waiting was over. The month of starvation was over. He devoured her.
“Oh fuck,” she gasped, and “Seth,” again as he worked. Her toes fanned out and then curled against his back. He hummed in satisfaction. He was good at this, he knew. The angular planes of his nose and his chin, the nimbleness of his tongue, the precision of his movements. A woman’s pleasure was a lock; none of them were quite the same, but that was the joy of it. Find the angle, the right way to tease them open, where they bound and where they gave and how deep they needed you to push.
His tongue found the firm button of her clit and he closed his lips around it, made out with it, and his fingers slid into her like she was sucking them in and she wailed, her voice breaking gorgeously, and with larcenous expertise his fingertips found the ridge they’d been looking for inside the slick pulsing heat, and she threw her head back and howled “SETH” and the steel-cable tendons in her legs stood out and clamped down on him with a vast Valkyrie force, and the world muffled and then filled with heat as she came all over his face. Her hips bucked and tugged him along with them and he rode the convulsions with the same desperate excitement as the day he’d met her, when she’d swept him onto her galloping warhorse and taken him away from his old life forever.
He was so lost in the blissful buoyant undulations of his lover that he didn’t notice the shifting of her legs and the coiling wind-up until it was too late, and his waist was scissored between the steel-cable strength of her sartorius muscles.
“Caught you, little fox” she purred, and the name was new again in Annalise’s lilting Orwinese accent.
He wriggled gamely in her grip. Her heavy-lidded eyes crawled across him, and within them he saw the beast he’d hoped to awaken.
She shouldered up from the bed and rolled, thumping him onto his back and coming up astride him, her thighs pinning his waist in place, her cunt wet and wanton where it kissed against his chest. She slammed his arms up over his head and leaned forward, and her breath was heavy and humid and redolent, and her voice was low and decadent as dark chocolate, and she whispered: “Mine.”
And he whispered: “Prove it.”
She hitched her hips up and back. The tattoos printed across her danced sinuously. Her weight descended, and as the heated slickness slid along his aching cock, his jaw clenched hard enough to send a phantom pressure through the tooth he’d lost for her.
She settled on him, breasts hanging inches from his reddened face, sandwiching his cock between his stomach and her throbbing heat, and there in the crystal moment before he finally lost his soul inside of Annalise al Ydris, her predatory grin faltered. Self-consciousness took her over again.
“This’ll unlight you the rest of the way in one stroke,” she murmured. “No going back. You ready?”
“Annalise.” Seth folded his hands around Annalise’s where they pinned him to the bed, and clasped tightly. “I promise to you.”
She blinked her wide, dark eyes.
“I’ll last more than one stroke.”
A surprised laugh from her banished the anxiety.
“You’re beautiful and I’m incredibly pent-up, but I think I can do at least three.”
“All right, all right.” She tamed her giggle fit. “This is it, then.”
“This is it.”
“Your soul.”
“Your soul.” He rested his hands on her hips. “Take it from me.”
They shifted and fidgeted. He pushed and slid past what he’d hoped to slide into.
“Sorry.” Annalise fumbled between her legs. “Sorry, it’s—Lisa would be better at this bit. My virginity grew back, I guess. Not literally. I—oh.”
He groaned as the head of his cock slid into her; her abs stood out and the viselike squeeze was nearly enough to pop him back out. She took a billowing breath and her abs disappeared beneath her relaxing stomach and they both gasped in wordless wonder as she sank onto him, and he felt every sacred inch, every bump and fold and quiver.
“Oh,” Annalise whispered again, and her belly hardened again and the slick warmth and clinging, coiling pressure slid and pulled. Cold air tingled the hot arousal she’d coated him in. Then the lascivious smack of her full, jiggling flesh as she dropped her ass back on him and swallowed him again. And again. And she melted further and further into his lap, and the great tattooed mantle of her arms tightened and drew him closer and closer. Until there was no space between them at all anymore, and every undulation of her insistent rhythm moved him with her, and he couldn’t tell whose heart was whose any longer.
She switched her motion, from the smearing grind to a hurried pumping, and wind squeezed out between their sticky bodies and she made a little halting haa that he mistook for a laugh until she buried her face in the crook between his neck and his shoulder and there was dampness on his skin. Her graceful shoulders shook. Was she crying?
“I was so lonely.” Thick black streaks of makeup tracked down her cheeks, carried by the tears. “Decades. Decades, and I never—I nnuh—it’s so good, Seth, it’s so fucking good—”
The up-down gave way again to her kneading, gyrating grind. Her core hardened and softened and hardened again, the way it did beneath his hands when she rode. A seizing sob bubbled up from her lungs. Her grip tightened to bruising force. Her speed ratcheted into frenzy, slamming against him with such warrior drive that the bed squealed its structural peril.
She was cumming again. Seth was making the most beautiful woman in the world cum. He wanted to laugh with triumph, or maybe cry with her. Annalise al Ydris was fucking him flat, and he was making her cum, and this was every night, from now on, and it would be every bit as incredible as he’d dreamt.
He slapped her ass. Its layer of fat rippled under his palm. Its springy muscle flexed. She laughed through her tears, high and elated like the wild girl she’d been, before all her tragedies, running barefoot and free across the highlands. She tossed her head back, fanning out the inky bob atop it, and leaned away from him, showing him the whole graceful span of her. There was another mole on her ribcage, a twin, only visible when her breasts were mid-bounce, winking in and out of view as she rode him.
The sweat stuck her sharp bangs to her forehead. “You just looking, boy?” Her eyes gleamed in the racoon mask her tears had made of her mascara. “Or you gonna suck them?”
He leaned forward and buried his face in her breasts. They rocked against his cheeks, and he laughed with her as he tried to fit a bouncing nipple into his mouth. When he finally succeeded, and sucked, she moaned and shoved further forward and his vision filled with pale, buxom wonder.
She yanked his face up and out of its pillows by the scruff of hair on his crown and locked her lips around his again, sloppy and heedless, teeth clicking, breath billowing, tongues lolling and licking. He was soaked in her sweat and spit and jubilant tears.
Then he glanced down and saw what was happening to him.
The desaturation had spread from his hands and his feet. It was flowing up his arms. He watched with a growing lump in his throat as his forearms leached themselves of color. It was happening so fast. His heart thudded insistently; the unlighting was creeping along his ribcage toward it. His veins and arteries spread forth his newly unlit blood; he felt it happening, felt that tingling strangeness suffuse him. The tense pull against the pit of his stomach built and built.
The jolt came through him like a thrown bucket of ice water. He was going unlit. Right before his eyes. So fast. “Oh, Saints.”
Her smile wilted. “Seth?”
The gnarled fingers of panic seized his throat. What if something had gone wrong? What if the sword wasn’t there to receive him and this was all he’d ever get with Annalise, this was the last moment?
Or what if it was a lie? A horrible trap? What if the woman on top of him wasn’t Annalise, and it wasn’t Tiago or Ophelia? What if there was something behind their eyes that wasn’t them, and now it had come for him?
“Is it happening?” Annalise sounded so urgent, but her voice was strange and thin against his brain. Like an echo from a cave. “Seth. You all right?”
Seth’s breath was coming in rapid bursts now. His heart jumping. Some higher surface of his mind insisted over and over like a mantra: You’re fine. This is part of it. You want this. You’re fine. But there was a fundamental wrongness here. He was sealing his fate. He was losing his light.
“Wait. Annalise. Wait.” His hand landed on her hip.
She slowed. “Are you hurting? Or is it happening?”
“It’s—I don’t know, I—”
“Okay. Listen to my voice.” She was picking up speed again. “I have you. I’m here.”
“Wait,” he stuttered. “Waitwaitwait Annalise—”
She buried her face in his hair and shook her head. “I’ve got you,” she breathed. “You’ll make it through. I’m here on the other side. I’ll keep you safe.”
Fear was swirling through his brain, alchemizing with pleasure into a choking, multicolored fog. He couldn’t breathe; he couldn’t see. He didn’t even realize he’d said anything but Annalise’s voice cut through like a searchlight.
“No. No. Seth. Look right here. You’re staying. You’re here.”
Tears cut down his face; the woman atop him was an indistinct blur. The room was going dark. He was disappearing.
“I can’t,” he realized. “I can’t—I’m not ready.”
“You are.” Her hands perched on either side of his face with gentle but unyielding pressure, holding it still as he tried to thrash it back and forth. “It’s time.”
“No. Nononono. I’m scared.”
“Be brave,” she whispered. “I love you.”
She lay flat against him. Her chest smushed across the galloping pulse in his neck. Her hips pistoned and gyrated. He scrambled and writhed, but she was too heavy. Too strong.
“Cum in me. Let go. Let go and I’ll catch you. Give your soul to me. I’ll keep it safe. I love you so fucking much.”
The color had faded from his chest, now. The bleaching was spreading to his shoulders, his neck, his trembling throat. Even as the cracks spread through the seal in his abdomen, even as the tingling force built in his limbs and his trunk, and his climax strained against its fetters. His entire being was narrowing to a point, flowing through him, building and building and building. He wouldn’t survive this thing that was about to force its way out of him. He’d be husked when it came; it would ruin him; the tattered wisps would disintegrate into the black phantasmal wind lifting him out of himself and be blown into oblivion.
“Give it to me,” she urged. “It’s time.”
He let out a panicky breath as it slid up his face, and his mouth went numb, and his vision darkened, and he felt the last tiny thread keeping his soul inside waver, and her hips came plunging down, burrowing, and her tongue slid along his earlobe, and she tensed and the hot hungry void closed on him, wrapped around him, and yanked.
And the thread broke, and the torrent washed him away.
The mindless thrusting of his hips, again and again, pinned and bucking beneath hers. The gasping sounds she made as she felt him. All his heat and vitality, all his light, spilling into her sucking, kissing blackness. The hot breath on his face. The salt taste of her skin. All of it left behind as he spun into infinity.
And there was only darkness. There was nothing but dark.
And then a pale circle rose like the moon from the nothing all around him. Her pupil. He was staring into the eye of Annalise al Ydris, as she held him in her vast, warm arms.
“Seth.” She wiped the sweat from his forehead. “Are you back?”
He opened his mouth and felt the miracle of the bone and flesh shift, and the lips stick slight together before they parted. Everything glowed at the edges. Everything was so sharp and vivid. He was alive.
“Yeah,” he said, his own relieved voice filling his skull. “Yeah. Saints. I’m back.”
“It’s done.” She nodded across the room. “Look.”
The sword had a lambent glow along its edge. Seth watched it filter past the dynamos, into the blade’s hilt where its animaxis core sat beneath steel and wrapped leather.
“That’s my soul?”
“That’s my soul,” she whispered. “Remember?”
He chuckled. “Oh, yeah.” He felt giddy and light, as if the thing now thrumming in her blade had been a heavy burden.
She put her hand around his neck. Not tightly, just lying there, over his pulse. And he felt like how a dog must feel when it’s wearing a beloved collar.
She nuzzled him. Her long, beautiful nose pressed against his. “Good boy,” she whispered. “You’re such a good boy, Seth.”
And that had to be how a dog feels when he hears that.
She shifted atop him. “Eugh. Almost forgot about this bit.”
“Don’t care,” he said. “Drip on me.”
They split a sigh between them as she slid off him. The intermingled nectar of their joining shone in the sea of candles.
She clicked her tongue. “Little vandal. Look what you did. “
He held his arm up and examined it. The warm bronze was gone. He’d braced for an unpleasant shock at his new skin, to bite back some despair at the pallid gray he’d turned—but in the firelight, and with the sweat coating him, he wasn’t drab. He was silver. “Look what you did.”
She scrupulously stood from the bed and teetered to the bathroom. “Gimme two shakes.”
“Only two?”
“More’n that, you smug little so-and-so.” He heard the grimace in her voice. “Eugh. You really stuffed me.”
A faucet turned. He sat up. “Are you showering?”
“I might,” she called, over the onrushing water.
He hopped out of the bed, shaking his leg out of the sheets. “Me too.”
Annalise playacted annoyance at his intrusion, and when he shrugged and backed out of the bathroom, she snared him with one long, beautiful arm and tugged him beyond the curtain with her. They lingered together, kissing languidly in the mist and the spray, and okay—he understood now why you might like having one of these over a bathtub, even if the flow eventually went chilly and evicted them.
Through the steam coating the mirror, he could see himself only indistinctly. Annalise reached past him and wiped a dripping stripe across the mirror, and Seth’s heart skipped at the face she uncovered. At the shadowy eyes, and the burning white embers that gazed from them. He laid a finger on his cheek and tugged his eyelid lower; the man in the mirror did the same thing, and so strong was the swell of emotion that he had no idea what to call it, neither in his reflection or in his heart. Was he happy? Was he mourning? He felt like a man standing at the foot of a colossal statue, so towering that he couldn’t conceive of its contours, only its size.
Annalise’s arms draped over his shoulders. She kissed the top of his head. “They’re beautiful.”
The mist was clearing. The great statue came into view. And he smiled, and tilted his head back into the warm pillows that smushed against the nape of his neck. He turned, away from the mirror, and closed his embrace around her herculean waist. A watchtower, Lisa had called them once. She’d been right. He was the perfect size.
“Are you hard again? This quick?” She gave a matronly click of her tongue as he burrowed further into their hug. “Such a needy young man.”
“You gonna execute me if I say yes?”
“Seth.” She gave a tap of playful admonishment to the spot between his shoulderblades. “We just got all clean.”
“It’s okay,” he murmured. “We can sleep.”
“This is what I signed up for,” she said. “Can’t land yourself a young colt and be shy about riding him. Besides.” She swiveled her hips. “Feel that?”
His stiffening cock brushed against a wetness silkier than the squeaky-clean thighs around it.
“I didn’t know anyone could do this to me anymore.” Her chest swelled as she filled her nostrils with him. “I didn’t know. And now there’s you. And you’re staying with me.”
He nodded into her.
“Not through the end of the year, I mean.” Her massive hands curled possessively around him. “Not for a job or a season. You’re caught, il Gutierre. I meant it. You’re mine.”
He was. He knew he was. The Verdugo had claimed his soul. The great nightmare of all crooks had come true. He laughed softly at the realization. “Oh, woe is me,” he said. Her rumbling laugh vibrated against his face.
“Come on, then,” she said, and with a fluid, swaying step that luxuriated in his stare, she led him back to bed.
This was where he belonged now, curled up against this invincible war-witch, sheltered in her huge hexencraft arms. The eternal ambient menace, that unceasing threat always over his shoulder—he’d thought that was just how it was to be alive. He’d never imagined it could just… go away. But it had.
“I love you, Annalise,” he said, and it was the easiest, most true thing he’d ever said.
She kissed his neck. “Te chasel tuo’mie krei, Lynnokíen.”
“That’s Orwinese?”
“Mmhmm.”
“What does it mean?”
“You are the beat of my heart, little fox,” she whispered. And then her wide tongue slid into his mouth, and her heavy thigh nudged him beneath her, and her hips swayed against him, and found him ready, and she took him again, slow, this time, and deep, and gentle. And when he came in her, she whispered his name, and closed her hands around his.
As he drifted off, still halfway hard inside Annalise al Ydris, snug and warm and infinitely safe, a leering, vulpine titter tingled at the edge of his consciousness, and said: You’re welcome, by the way.