“Hey.” Ruhn grabbed her hand, squeezing tight. She dragged her gaze over to him. “None of this is your fault.”
She shook her head, and Ruhn gently touched her face. “You are allowed to feel whatever you need to right now. But come dawn, when we walk out of here, you’ll have to bury it and become the Hind again. One last time. Without the Hind, we’re not going to get into that palace.”
She scanned his gaze, and leaned forward, her brow pressing against his.
Ruhn breathed in her scent, taking it deep into his body—but he found it already marking him. It had been there, hidden in him, since that first time.
“Can I …” She swallowed hard. “Can we …”
“Tell me what you want,” he said, kissing her cheek.
She pulled back, and slid a hand against his jaw. “You. I want you.”
“You sure?” She had so much burdening her. With her sons in the Asteri’s hands, he didn’t blame her if—
“I need to not think for a while,” she said, then added, “and … I need to touch you.” She traced her fingers over his lips. “Your real body.”
He closed his eyes against her touch. “Tell me what you want, Lidia.”
Her lips grazed his, and he shuddered. “I want you—all of you. In me.”
A grin spread across Ruhn’s face. “Happy to oblige.”
He followed her lead, letting her set the pace. Each kiss, he answered with his own. Let her show him where she wanted him to touch, to lick, to savor.
Thankfully, the parts where she wanted him to really focus were the ones Ruhn had been especially interested in. The taste of her sweetness on his tongue had him nearly coming in his pants—and that was before her breathy moans filled his ears like the most beautiful music he’d ever heard.
“Ruhn,” she said, but didn’t give him the order to halt, so he kept working her in long strokes of his tongue, wishing to the gods he still had his lip piercing, knowing he could have driven her to distraction with it—but there would be time later.
She arched off the bed, and her orgasm sent him writhing, desperate for any sensation against his cock.
She put him out of his misery a moment later, her eyes nearly pure flame as she unzipped him, and her slender hand wrapped around him—
He bucked against her first stroke, and was about to start begging when she pushed him back onto the bed. When she climbed over him, straddling him, and that hand around his cock guided him to her entrance.
Ruhn slid his hands into Lidia’s golden hair, the silken strands spilling through his fingers, and held her gaze as she sank down onto him.
He gritted his teeth at the warmth and tightness of her, panting through the rush of pleasure, the sense of perfection, the flawless fit—
She settled against him, seated fully, and her chest rose and fell so rapidly that Ruhn grabbed her hands, pressing kisses to her fingertips. Her eyes fluttered shut, and then her hips moved—and there was nothing more to say, to do, as she rode him.
He lifted his hips, and her moans heightened. He wished he could devour the sound. He made do by rising up, kissing her thoroughly, her legs wrapping around his middle. It plunged him impossibly deeper, and he lost it. Went positively feral at being so far inside her, at the smell and taste of her—
Lidia met him stroke for stroke, met his savagery with her own, teeth grazing his neck, his chest. Every thrust had him rubbing an inner wall, and fuck, he was going to die from this pleasure—
Then her head tipped back, and her delicate muscles tightened around him as she came, sending him spiraling after her. He pounded into her through it, that feral part of him relishing spilling into her, and she was his and he was hers, and there was a word for it, but it eluded him.
She stilled, and Ruhn took her weight as she leaned against him, their bodies now a tangle of arms and legs, his cock still buried to the hilt. Her every breath pushed against him, and he stroked his fingers down the column of her spine, over and over.
She was here. He was here.
For as long as Urd would allow them to be.
* * *
Lidia lay in Ruhn’s arms as the hours passed, sleep eluding her.
It had been everything she’d wanted, needed, this joining with him. She’d never felt so safe, so cherished. And yet her sons remained in the Asteri’s hands. In Pollux’s hands.
The hours dripped by. Lidia shut down the part of her that cataloged every possible torment that might be inflicted on Brann and Actaeon. The torments that she herself had inflicted on so many others.