Chapter 10: Chapter 10 - Stay
Chapter 10 - Stay
He stands and lifts me with him.
There is bare skin and scar tissue and the humid air between us. His body is what it is: massive, scarred, dark green muscle built for killing. Arms that have broken spines. Hands that have crushed bone. He is free and standing and holding me against his chest and I weigh nothing to him.
The law says run. My legs don't move. This is Brath of the Gorrath unbound.
His thumb traces my jaw slowly, the pad of it rough, calloused, wider than my chin. He looks at my face the way I looked at his wound that first night, studying and careful.
"Little jaguar," he says quietly, like he's testing how it sounds in the air between us.
"I'm not little," I say. My voice is steady. My hands are steady. Everything is steady and nothing is a performance.
"No," he says. "You're not."
He sets me down on the flat rock near the wall and turns me. His hands on my hips, positioning me, and I let him. I brace my arms against the stone.
He picks me up. Both hands around my waist, lifts me off the rock like I weigh nothing, and brings me to his face. My legs dangle. My hands grab his forearms because there is nothing else to hold and his mouth finds me and that tongue, that rough wide tongue, drags the full length of me. My whole body jerks in his grip. He does it again, slower, and I feel every ridge of his tongue dragging through me while he holds me in the air like a cup he is drinking from. Wide flat strokes that make my spine arch and my toes curl and I am gripping his forearms so hard my nails draw blood and he does not notice. He licks me like I am the last water in the jungle, his tongue pushing inside me, his grip shifting me closer, and each pass lifts me higher against his mouth and my vision goes white and I am screaming and my voice echoes off the grotto walls.
"Now," I say. My voice breaks on the word. "Now, Brath."
He sets me back on the rock. I am shaking so hard I can barely brace my arms. I look back over my shoulder and his amber eyes are glazed, his chin slick with me, and he is smiling with those tusks.
He lines up. I feel him against me, that massive cock, thick and slick with me, the veins pulsing against my skin, the head swollen dark and pressing where his tongue just was.
He pushes into me from behind, slow, and I feel every inch. The stretch, the fullness, his hips against my ass and his hands gripping my waist. He thrusts, not frozen-still but moving. The first real thrust he's ever given me and my arms buckle and I catch myself against the rock and push back into him harder. He gives me harder. His hands grip my hips and I am whole. Nothing breaks. He thrusts again and I am still whole and a sound comes out of me that I don't control.
His hands slide up my body, my ribs, my waist, finding my breasts. He cups them from behind, thumbs circling my nipples.
I come fast, his cock buried in me, his hands on my breasts, his mouth against my shoulder. The orgasm tears through me and I arch back against his chest and my legs shake and he holds me up because I can't hold myself.
He doesn't stop.
I pull out of her. She gasps. My hands on her shoulders, spinning her, and her back hits the grotto wall. I lift her thighs. She wraps her legs around me. My cock finds her again and I push in and pin her between my body and the stone.
Her arms go around my neck, fingers in my hair, gripping. Her face is inches from mine. Dark eyes, copper skin, the jaw that clenches when she's faking and the mouth that cracks when she's not. She is not faking. She is looking at me and she is not faking.
I kiss her. My mouth open on hers, tusks pressing her cheeks, my tongue clumsy and warm.
She opens her mouth against mine and her teeth click against my fangs and neither of us knows what we're doing and I don't care. I thrust up into her and she moans into the kiss and her whole body tightens around me.
I fuck her against the wall with my forehead against hers, my breath and her breath mixing. My hands find her thighs, her ass, the curve of her waist, every part of her I held vines instead of touching. I am touching her now, my palms on her skin, her breasts pressed against my chest. I hear the wet sound of our bodies and the drip of the grotto. I am not fighting this jungle anymore. I am inside the part of it that chose me.
"Don't stop," she says. The word is a request this time. The difference shakes something loose in my chest.
I touch her face and trace her cheekbone, her jaw, the line of her throat where my vine used to sit. She turns her head and kisses my palm.
I thrust harder and deeper and she cries out. Her legs tighten around me, her cunt gripping, the sound she makes is my name. My name in her mouth while I am inside her and my hands are on her body and she is whole.
I come so hard my knees nearly buckle. My cock pulses inside her, thick hot ropes, and I feel myself flooding her, filling her, my hips jerking with each spasm, pinning her harder against the wall. My face buries in her neck and I am groaning into her skin and my arms are shaking and I cannot stop, my body emptying everything it has into hers. She gasps and grips my hair and I feel her tighten around me, milking the last of it out, and my vision goes dark at the edges. I hold her against the wall and breathe. Her ribs under my palms, her heartbeat against my chest. She is whole.
The wall behind her is warm.
I notice it through the haze, through the aftershocks still rolling through me, his breath on my neck, his hands on my thighs. The stone at my back is warm, skin-warm, the way a living thing is warm.
Something blinks.
It is low, near my hip, in the stone. An eye, half-hidden in moss and rock, the size of my fist, lit from inside, blue-white. It blinks again, slow, and the lid slides sideways, patient.
The wall shifts. A settling, the way a sleeping thing adjusts when the weight on it changes. Under my palms: warmth, give, the faint pulse of something breathing. It is hide, thick, mineral-crusted hide, the color of grotto stone, mottled with fungal growth.
It is the troll.
The wall is the troll. A rock troll curled around the hollow, its body forming the curve of the chamber, its hide grown over with moss and fungi until it became the room itself. The warmth I felt every night. The way the rain never reached us.
The druidic magic I flinched away from every time it stirred. It called a rock troll. It healed him. It grew the vines that covered him. It built a nest around us while I thought I was tying up a monster.
I needed him alive. I needed to be safe. I needed a place no one could reach me.
The magic knew.
"Brath," I say.
I see the eye. My body goes rigid because the last time I saw that eye it was attached to a fist that opened my ribs.
The troll blinks at me. One slow, mineral blink.
I look at the grotto, at the wall, at the room we have been fucking in for days. The thing that killed my warband has been curled around us like a dog by a fire. I have been sleeping three feet from the creature that opened my ribs, held in place by a girl whose magic called it here and who had no idea. She is pressed against a rock troll and the troll is watching with the patience of something that has been watching for a long time.
It guards her because she's part of the jungle and the jungle takes care of its own.
I start laughing, tusks and fangs and the full feral sound bouncing off the troll. My shamans said to find the conduit, to stand inside it. The power would come. I am standing inside it. The power is going everywhere except me, into the grotto, into the troll, into her. The magic can't be stolen. It does what she needs.
She is my little jaguar, and she has no idea what she is.
I pull back enough to look at her, amber to dark. Her face is open, stunned and processing.
"Vine-witch," I say, low and careful.
"Monster," she says. The word she used when she dragged me by my ankle through the jungle. It sounds different now. It sounds like a name.
I grin with the whole terrible face.
She looks at the troll. Looks at me. Looks at the troll again. Then she starts laughing, and I am still inside her, and the laughter shakes through both of us.
"We've been fucking against a troll," she says.
"Yes."
"It's been watching."
"Yes."
I push into her, pinning her between my body and the troll's hide, and the troll shifts beneath her, settling, making room. She gasps and grips my shoulders and I thrust deeper, her back sliding against warm hide, and the absurdity of it makes me laugh into her neck and she is laughing too and I am fucking her and we are both laughing and the troll breathes slow and deep behind her like a hearthfire.
I take her harder against the living wall, her legs locked around me, her nails in my back, her voice breaking on my name. The troll's eye half-closes, content. The vines on the walls thicken and pulse. Her magic is flooding the grotto, filling it, growing everything it touches, and she doesn't know and I don't care. I kiss her with tusks and fangs and she bites my lip and I taste blood and she tastes like the jungle.
I come inside her again, pressed against the troll, her body wrapped around mine, and the sound I make is not a warchief's sound. It is the sound of a man who found something he did not come looking for.
She holds me after. Her face against my neck. The troll breathes. The fungi pulse blue-green. The vines keep growing.
"Now what?" she says into my skin.
I press my forehead against hers. The Omazin would kill her for this. The Gorrath would kill me. The grotto is warm and the jungle is dark and nothing out there wants either of us back.
"Stay," I say.
The troll settles deeper into the earth. The eye closes.
This is home.