Page 56

Ambrose’s stomach swooped pleasantly. He did as instructed, and Emery placed the salty head of his cock against his tongue.

He closed his lips around it, tasting. The sucking noise didn’t sound half so lewd as Emery letting out all his breath in a hissing groan.

He tangled his hand in Ambrose’s hair, the grip firmly guiding him to take more. To bob his head.

Emery’s voice was a purr. “Good.”

The praise made a molten wet tension reel tightly in Ambrose’s belly. This—being commanded—was familiar. It might have picked at old scars, but he didn’t mind wearing a collar when it was Emery holding the leash.

His confidence grew. Emery’s instructions petered off into muffled moans as Ambrose used his hands, slickly stroking up and down with his mouth. Then over Emery’s balls and behind them.

Until the fingers in his hair tightened and pulled him off. A glimmering string of spit still connected his lips to the tip of Emery’s cock.

He gazed up. Emery looked down at him with a wrecked expression. The hand in his hair settled at the nape of his neck again, guiding him.

“Come here.”

Ambrose got to his feet, met with a sloppy kiss because of how wet his mouth was, though Emery didn’t seem to mind. Ambrose took him in hand.

“Stop,” Emery said.

“You don’t want to finish?”

“Not before finding out what you like.”

“I liked that. Very much.” Though his body ached.

Emery pulled him closer. “Where do you want me to touch you?”

“Anywhere.” Ambrose felt keenly aware of Emery’s erection against his thigh. His words came out shivering. “Everywhere.”

Emery yanked on his belt and deftly popped open the button on his trousers, eyebrows raised in question as he pressed his palm flat to the trail of hair leading beneath the hem.

“Lie back on the bed,” Emery instructed.

Ambrose obeyed, but he’d begun to worry whether the things he wanted Emery to do to him were wrong for men, or if Emery had somehow forgotten that he wouldn’t find the same thing in Ambrose’s pants as other men kept in theirs.

Emery said, “What are you fretting about?”

“How do you know I’m fretting?”

Emery touched a finger between his brows. “You get this worry line right here.” He smoothed it out, and Ambrose did find himself relaxing. “What’s wrong?”

If anyone else had asked Ambrose to bare his vulnerabilities this way, he’d have denied he had any. Not with Emery.

“I’ve never been touched … there .”

“Do you want me to?”

“Yes.” Desperately . Ambrose closed his eyes. “But … does that make me less a man?”

Emery searched his face for a moment, then dropped a hand to Ambrose’s stomach. He raised an eyebrow as if to ask, May I?

Ambrose gave a shaky nod, letting Emery’s touch undo some of his tightly wound tension. Then his hand slipped lower, trailing beneath clothes and between Ambrose’s thighs, parting him with his fingers, and if his thoughts had been blurry before, they were oblivion now.

All his life, he’d only known the hunger of the magic in his blood. It drowned out all else so he could never address the things he truly wanted. Now he couldn’t think for how much he wanted.

He wanted and wanted and wanted.

“Good?” Emery’s lips quirked in a self-effacing smile. “I’m new to this myself. So let me hear you.”

Ambrose pushed his face into Emery’s shoulder and moaned .

“You sound like a man to me.” Emery’s voice brushed, husky and laughing, against his ear. “Most of us sound the same with our faces down and our arses in the air.” His fingers slipped deeper and curled. “I don’t care what other people think makes a man. I’m only interested in making you cum.”

Ambrose reached for Emery, finding his cock still slick, but it was awkward to stroke him while lying on his back, and besides—

He wanted more than Emery’s fingers inside him.

Twisting, he rolled Emery onto his back. It took a frantic moment to wrestle out of his trousers. Finally naked, he crawled over Emery’s body, straddling and kissing him. The rasp of stubble against Ambrose’s lips grounded him enough to make unambiguous his aims.

Experimentally, he lowered himself to rub Emery’s cock between his lips.

“F-fuck, Ambrose, holy shi—Hold on.” Emery abandoned the garbled attempt at speech to lean over, wrest open his bedside cabinet, and fumble out something in a square packet.

“If we’re going to—which I very much would like to, by the way, but if we are, we should—” He paused to rip the packet open with his teeth, producing a rubbery, slimy disc of some sort, which he rolled over his cock. “There. Carry on.”

Ambrose looked confused.

“I’m not sure what the medieval equivalent of a condom was, but I don’t think either of us are ready to be dads,” Emery elaborated.

Comprehension dawned, and Ambrose’s eyebrows shot to his hairline. “ Oh. No.”

“Good. Now, come back here.”

Ambrose went to him. The interruption had disrupted some of his courage, so his kiss was almost shy, but Emery’s hands on his hips and his clever tongue quickly emboldened him anew.

He sank into it, testing his weight. He liked the sense of power it brought to feel Emery go soft and pliant under him.

To take Emery’s hands, lace their fingers, then pin them above his head.

Emery liked it, too. His cock twitched.

Ambrose rose onto his elbows and knees, repositioning himself. He watched Emery’s face for any sign he was doing this all wrong, but he only looked hot and eager.

Ambrose held his breath. They both did. He lowered himself, slowly, slowly down.

He’d heard this could hurt the first time, but he was so wet that it only took a careful, prolonged stretch before he glided down. Pleasure sang a verse through his body, plucking at sensitive chords, hinting at the melody of the chorus to come.

Once Ambrose settled into his lap, Emery’s breath let out all at once, caught between their lips as he leaned in for a kiss. Ambrose tested raising his hips and bringing them down again. It drew a huffed breath from both of them, then another as he did it again.

“Am I—?” he asked.

“Yes. Fuck yes, that’s good. Keep going.”

Pleasure spiked as he took Emery into himself. Again and again. Pinning him down harder, slamming his hips harder. Taking up a rhythm that made the mattress creak.

Something rusted in Ambrose’s mind creaked, too. A bent nail in the ramshackle construction of his sense of self.

In the world he’d come from, love had been a complicated array of conditions and contradictions.

He was a man, so his affinity for other men had to stay secret.

Yet there were parts of him connected to womanhood, which other queer men rejected.

He felt as if he’d had to carve himself up to match a diagram like the ones butchers used to carve a cow, only his body had parts labeled “male” and “female.”

The witch king had never touched him like this, and he’d said it was because the risk of discovery was too dangerous, but Ambrose had understood that in the ramshackle scaffolding of his body’s construction, he was both lovable and loathsome, desirable and disgusting.

He didn’t know it could be like this: Emery, under him, moaning and begging him not to stop when minutes earlier he’d stood over Ambrose with a hand on his neck and ordered him to kneel.

That he could want Emery inside him tonight, and ask tomorrow if any modern magic would let him into Emery the same way.

He could desire someone without being unmade by them.

He could rip out all the rusted nails and haphazard pieces and call himself a man and his body a home, regardless of what went into its making, or how he lived there.

Emery took Ambrose just as he was—grinding up into him, grasping at his hips, whispering his name. The normally quiet sanctuary of his bedroom was loud with their panting, the creaky mattress, and the supple percussion of Ambrose riding Emery’s cock.

The pleasure felt urgent now. Where before, it had been a steadily growing burn, getting hotter, now it spiked and blazed and made him clench. Ambrose’s thighs started quaking the nearer he got, as if he’d been riding horseback for days. Emery’s teeth scraped his shoulder.

“Ambrose.”

Fingers dug into his hips. Ambrose’s thighs gave out. He shivered as ecstasy crested through him, spiraling from the place Emery was buried snugly inside. Emery’s hips gave grinding, abortive thrusts as he let out a strained, growling sound of satisfaction.

They tensed, holding on to each other as the wave ripped through them, before the tide of it finally let them go.

Lethargy made his limbs heavy, made Ambrose hyper aware of his pulse ticking under his overheated skin.

Finally, he rolled onto his back. Emery stared up at the ceiling, his chest still inflating rapidly as he caught his breath.

Flushed and shiny with sweat, he looked like a sunbather luxuriating on the beach in summer.

One of his knees he’d cocked outward, revealing the tender skin of his inner thigh, paler than the rest.

Ambrose thought about kissing that spot.

Emery caught his look. “Have mercy.”

But he said it with an indolent moan that implied he’d only like the mercy to be temporary.

Ambrose chewed his lip. He didn’t know what came after. He’d never shared a bed.

Emery’s head flopped sideways to look at him. “Do you want to cuddle?”

Ambrose turned scarlet. It was ridiculous. Why should he find this part mortifying? He’d just ridden Emery like a prized stallion.

Being treated softly was new in a different way.

Emery looked a little coy, rolled closer and tucked himself under Ambrose’s arm. Flushing, Ambrose dropped a kiss into his hair.

“The Grim Wolf of Bellgrave turned out to be just a sweet puppy,” Emery said.

“With you.”

Emery looked pleased by that.

“We still have to deal with the spell jar.” Jars. Every initiate likely had one.

“It can wait until morning,” Emery said.

He drifted off first, his breaths softly tickling Ambrose’s skin.

His lashes made dark fans across his cheeks.

The candlelight and deep shadows caught on all the pretty architecture of his face—the hollow between his collar bones, the deep groove of his upper lip, still red from being kissed. He looked so calm and at peace.

Vulnerable.

They had to find a way to destroy Morcant’s spell jar and extract all the others from the initiates, including Hellebore. Now that Ambrose had a taste of this, the thought of losing Emery was intolerable.

But what if the worst threat came from him?

He waited, listening for a voice while tracing a lazy pattern over Emery’s skin. If any crumb of the witch king remained, surely he could not resist castigating Ambrose now.

His mind was silent. Calm. The witch king was not there.

He was out there . Somewhere.

But not entirely. Ambrose rubbed the bump of his spine, where the witch king’s vertebra had temporarily replaced his own his own. How to extract someone who’d scarred him so indelibly?

Perhaps he would have to die …

Yet, as he drifted off to the sensation of tingling skin and Emery’s breath on his shoulder, he couldn’t help but think, I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive …