Chapter 9 - The Last of Them

The mess tent is silent and Perla is standing on the far side of the bodies, looking at me the way she looked at me on the patrol road three hours ago, right before she swallowed my cock and left me with nothing.

Rain drums the canvas. My shoulder bleeds through the binding, warmth spreading slow and sticky down my back. Men on the ground between us, packed in among overturned stools and spilled ale and bedrolls they never crawled back to. The brazier in the far corner throws low orange light across all of it. Across her.

She is covered in blood. Dark hair plastered to her jaw. Her chest heaves, the leather top still strapped tight, her bare stomach slicked with rain and red. The pearl catches the firelight. My eyes go there. They always go there.

She watches me find it. She doesn't move.

Six hours. Six hours of her mouth on me, her weight in my lap, her cunt grinding against my cock through leather while she bandaged my shoulder and told me to hold still. Six hours of almost. Three times she took me to the edge and three times she walked away and I let her because I thought there would be a next time, and there was, and the next time was worse, and the one after that was worse than that, and now my hands are shaking and my cock is so hard it hurts and I have killed thirty men tonight and I cannot feel any of it, not the kills, not the wound, not the rain. I can only feel wanting her. The wanting is a living thing inside my chest and it has teeth.

She sheathes her dagger.

I don't cross to her. I lunge. Three steps over a dead man's legs and I grab her by the throat, not to choke, to hold, to pin her where she stands, and I slam my mouth onto hers so hard our teeth click. She makes a sound against my lips, not surprise, recognition. Her hands fist in my vest and pull.

I don't kiss her. I bite. Her lower lip, the corner of her jaw, the tendon in her neck. She tastes like blood and copper and I don't care. I grab the back of her head and yank it sideways and sink my teeth into the muscle where her neck meets her shoulder and she hisses, a sharp intake through clenched teeth, and her hips grind forward into mine, hard and deliberate, and my vision narrows to a tunnel.

I shove her backward. She stumbles over a dead man's arm, her knees hit a bedroll, and she drops into the furs. I drop onto her. My weight pins her flat and she takes it, all of it, her legs spreading under me on instinct.

"Off," she says, and grabs at her own shorts.

I don't help. I yank them. The leather tears at the hip where a buckle catches and I wrench it sideways, don't care, can't care, and then her shorts are down one leg, not even all the way off, bunched at her ankle, and I'm already shoving my trousers past my hips because I cannot wait another second. Eight hours. Eight goddamn hours.

I push my cock inside her in one brutal thrust.

She's soaked. Wet since the massacre, wet since the last body dropped, wet since she stood across the tent and looked at me with those blown-dark eyes and I knew. I fucking knew. Her cunt takes me whole, hot and slick and clenching, and the sound that comes out of her mouth is guttural, animal, ripped from somewhere deep. I don't stop to let her adjust. I pin her wrists above her head with one hand, brace the other beside her skull, and fuck her.

Not measured. Not deliberate. Not trying to impress. I fuck her hard the way an animal fucks. My hips slam into hers and the wet sound of it fills the tent, obscene, rhythmic, the slap of skin and the squelch of how wet she is, and she is loud. She is so loud. She says "joder" and "sí" and "duro" and sounds that aren't words, just noise torn from the back of her throat.

The bedroll slides across the tent floor. My knee catches a dead man's outstretched hand and I don't stop. She wraps her legs around my waist and her ankles lock at the small of my back and the angle changes, deeper, and she screams at the canvas ceiling. I drive into her. Again. Again. My wounded shoulder is bleeding freely now, hot red dripping onto her stomach, pooling in the hollow below her ribs, and I don't stop. She sees the blood and her eyes go wide and dark and she bites her lip and clenches around me so hard I stutter inside her.

My hand slides down her body. I still have her wrists above her head and my free hand finds her bare stomach, finds the ring without meaning to, and I stop there. My thumb catches it. Rolls it. The pearl is warm from her skin, small and smooth, and I don't know why I'm doing this, why my hand has stopped moving, why this tiny thing is pulling at something in my chest that the rest of her hasn't. She looks up at me. Her eyes change. Something behind them shifts, closes, goes somewhere I can't follow. Then her hips roll and her cunt tightens and my thumb releases the ring and the lust takes everything.

I fuck her harder. I let go of her wrists and grab her hips with both hands and pull her onto my cock with every thrust and the sound she makes is broken and desperate and it drives me deeper. Her nails rake my back. Four lines of fire across my ribs. She bites my good shoulder, teeth sinking in, and I feel skin break and I don't care because I am so close, so fucking close, the edge right there, the same edge she left me on during the patrol, the same one she left me on in the corner between the tents with her hand on my belt, the same one she left me on behind the tent wall. Eight hours of this. I am going to come inside her and it is going to be the hardest I have ever come in my life.

Except I can't.

The edge is right there. Right there. I can feel it, the tightness in my balls, the heat building at the base of my spine, but it won't tip. I have too much adrenaline. Too much blood going somewhere it's not needed. My shoulder is screaming, a white-hot spike of pain with every thrust, and my body is running on fumes, thirty kills and six hours and no food and blood loss, and the orgasm is a door I can see but cannot open.

I slow. I try to grind deeper. Roll my hips. Nothing works. The frustration hits like a fist to the sternum. I grit my teeth, drive in hard, hold there, grinding, and she can feel me shaking above her. She can feel the strain in my arms and see it in my face.

"Mierda," I breathe. My forehead drops to her collarbone. My arms tremble. I thrust again, hard, and again, and the edge flickers and dies and I want to scream.

She looks up at me. Her eyes are clear. She reads me.

She knows.

I pull out of her. My cock is slick, shining wet in the firelight, hard and aching, and I am so frustrated I could break something.

I know what she wants. I have been reading her all night, every pull-back a deliberate choice, and she wants this, has wanted this, and so have I, and my body will not cooperate. The frustration, the wanting, the failure: all mine. And I cannot stand it.

I grab her hip, pull her down toward me. She comes, no resistance, and I swing a knee over her chest and straddle her, a knee on each side of her face. She looks up at me, bloody and flushed and ferocious, and she opens her mouth.

I push my cock past her lips. She takes me. The taste of her own cunt is on me, and she takes that too, her tongue flat against the underside of my shaft as I slide deep. I grab a fistful of her hair and hold her head still and push deeper, into her throat, and her eyes water and she doesn't pull back. She swallows around me and the sensation shoots up my spine like a bolt.

"Hostia," I breathe. "Hostia, Perla."

I fuck her mouth. I'm not gentle. Not grateful. I hold her head with both hands and thrust into her throat the way I did on the patrol road, but there is no patrol now, no guards, no reason to be quiet, and I can hear the sounds, wet and thick and filthy, her throat working around my cock, spit running down her chin, her breathing ragged through her nose. She grabs my thighs, not to push me off, to hold on. Her nails dig in. She takes me deeper.

The edge builds, slow at first, then faster. I can feel it, the tightness coiling at the base, the heat spreading, and this time it doesn't flicker, it catches, and I know. I know it's coming.

"Perla." Her name comes out wrecked. I thrust into her mouth, deep, held, and her tongue presses hard against the underside and she swallows and the edge breaks.

I come in her mouth with a raw, broken sound, pulled from the bottom of my chest, closer to a scream than anything I have ever made during sex. My whole body locks, every muscle seizing at once, my fists in her hair, my hips pressed forward, cock buried in her throat, and the orgasm rips through me in waves, eight hours of denial crashing out of me at once, pulse after pulse, and she swallows. She swallows all of it. Her throat works and her eyes are open and locked on mine and she doesn't flinch.

The last wave rolls through me and I pull out of her mouth, gasping, and my arms give out and I collapse onto the furs beside her. The tent spins. My shoulder is bleeding badly, the binding soaked through, blood pooling on the furs beneath me. I can hear my own heartbeat in my ears, ragged and slamming, slowing by degrees.

She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. She uses the same gesture from the patrol road. She looks at me sideways, lying in the bloodied furs among the dead, and her lips are swollen and her chin is wet and she says:

"Treinta y cuatro."

"Thirty-three," I manage. My voice sounds like someone dragged it over gravel.

A beat of silence. Rain on the canvas. The brazier guttering low.

She sits up. Looks at my shoulder, at the blood soaking the furs beneath it, at the wound that has been open and weeping for hours. Her expression shifts. Practical.

"Not bad," she says.

Two words. Her line, not mine. Delivered flat, almost bored, like I'm a job she's grading. As if the last hour hadn't happened. Like she's already ahead of me again.

The power shifts back to her and we both feel it.

She reaches for the soaked binding, finds the end, starts unwinding it. Her fingers are warm and steady and covered in blood that is partly mine and partly not. I let her work. I don't have the energy to stop her, and even if I did, I wouldn't.

"Hold still," she says.

I hold still. The rain keeps coming. The bodies cool around us. She rebinds my shoulder in silence, her hands quick and sure, and I lie in the furs and watch the firelight play across her face and think nothing, absolutely nothing, because my brain has finally, mercifully, shut the hell up.

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