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Chapter Thirty-Nine

B y the time I’d reached the tent, the tension and tide of feeling was worse instead of better. As I changed into my night dress and slipped into bed, I was roiling with it, with need , so full to the brim of heat that it felt like it was pressing against my skin. I lay in the dark tracing my fingers lightly across the sensitive skin of my stomach and dwelt in the moment right before I’d left, when something had almost snapped between us that would have brought us crashing into each other. Then I thought of the soldiers renewing their faith in life with the women at the fringe of the camp.

There had to be someone in this whole damn army I could crawl under to deal with this. There were solutions other than a terrible, dangerous fantasy of Draven following me into camp, slipping into my tent in the night like he wasn’t an enemy king of the army we had just been battling. I lay on my bedroll in knots of tension, twisting this way and that, gripped with vivid imaginings that just intensified the ache. Fortunately Mae wasn’t there to reach out and taste my turmoil, though I wasn’t sure where she was. Maybe she had gone to visit the whores as well.

When I heard footsteps, saw the tent flap rustle, I wasn’t sure if I was dreaming, if my fantasies had swept me into sleep. Mae didn’t move like that. The silhouette was too tall and broad for hers. I didn’t scream as the shadowy figure knelt down next to my bed and whispered, ‘Rhiandra.’

Like a prayer answered, a nightmare granted, and I didn’t wait for him to vanish. I didn’t have the discipline to deny myself a second time that night. I reached up, pulling him to me before he could speak again, before he could confirm he was real.

I kissed him.

With a gasping, grasping urgency I kissed him, hands locked tight on his arms, heartbeat thundering and every nerve electrified. His tongue was in my mouth, caressing mine, and gods he tasted just as I remembered and kissed just like I craved and there was no room in my head for anything other than that. He climbed over me, pushing the blanket aside, and I wound my legs around him to keep him there, every fibre of my being screaming quick! Now! Before you realise what you’re doing. Like I could pretend it wasn’t him if I acted fast enough, even as I desperately needed it to be him. I could pretend he was just a warm body, a set of lips and hands to drive away the day’s death.

But what a poor pretence it would be. Everything about him was Draven. The smell of his skin. His breath in my hair. The way his hands moved as they ran over my body, slipping beneath my night dress, seeking out all those places he’d touched me in the past like he was checking to make sure his marks still lingered. The way he relented to my tug at his shirt, shucking it from him in one move that left his chest and arms bare for my hands to roam. My body recognised him in a way that went far deeper than any mental trick my mind wanted to play. I knew the story behind this scar on his back, this one on his chest, knew the hard lines of his stomach, the way my fingers ran over the grooves of muscle, the way it felt to have his hips pressed against me. And his mouth was a trail of searing heat down my body, the scrape of teeth against my ribs, hot breath on my naval as he hooked my knees around his shoulders. I bit down on my knuckles to smother my moan when he pressed his mouth where I wanted him most, his hands gripping my thighs to hold me still as I arched my back, flashes of scintillating pleasure radiating through me at the feel of his tongue. Fuck. What was I doing?! Fuck.

Grabbing his arm, I pulled him back up to me, kissing him wildly to silence that flash of clarity, tugging his pants down, hands moving to find his cock, guiding it where I wanted him, and he granted the request with a powerful thrust of his hips. I gasped, immediately overwhelmed by the sensation of him inside me, firm and insistent against my throbbing, wanting heat. He wound a hand through my hair, clenching it tight, arching my neck, his breathing quick against my throat as he drove into me, hard and deep and unforgiving. Like there was this same desperation in him as there was in me. And I moaned because I couldn’t help it, because I was breaking apart.

There were footsteps outside the tent. Voices. We froze. Mae. Talking to someone. Oh Madeia. Oh fuck. If she found us together, what would she do? There was one way into the tent. One way out. Would Draven kill her to escape? Would I let him?

The footsteps paused by the door as the muffled voices continued.

‘…already be asleep. I saw her drinking with the soldiers. Let her rest.’

‘She was supposed to meet with the king for a strategy briefing.’

‘If it’s magic he has questions about…’

They moved a little further away, but still close enough that I could hear them. My muscles were wound so tight one wrong move might shatter me. I felt Draven’s heartbeat through his chest, pounding against my splayed fingers, his body rigid above me as he held still. Even in the dark, Mae would know I wasn’t alone as soon as she entered the tent, her Yoxvese senses picking up two signatures of life where there should have been one. Would know it without even entering if she decided to check on me, reached out with magic to see if I was awake. The only thing that might keep her from doing so was her knowledge of how much I hated being touched by her magic that way. Her respect for that might just save us.

I bit my lip hard, choking down any noise that wanted to escape me, as Draven began to move again. Pressing into me, each decadent inch stolen agonisingly slowly now, until he was buried completely in me, hips flush with mine. While there were still voices only strides away. While he was risking his capture and death to be here. I seized up, too afraid to do anything other than hold on, hands only moving to grip his shoulders tight enough to bruise, fingernails curling in, like he was suspending me over the edge of a cliff and gripping him was all that would keep me from falling. Terrified that he might stop.

‘They’ll hear us,’ I gasped, barely more than a breath.

‘I’ll cover your mouth,’ he said, his words a whisper.

I should make him stop. I would beg him to keep going if he stopped. It was all I could do to rock gently against him, trying to keep my breathing quiet, hushed. I hardly dared move anything else, just held tight and tense, immobilised, focusing so hard on remaining silent as he slid in and out of me, every sense tuned to his every movement. The rising tide of friction, of feeling, grew.

‘Please,’ I begged, though I didn’t know what I was begging for. For him to end the torture of it. To go faster. Harder. But he wouldn’t, couldn’t, and so I whispered the word again, senselessly, lost to what it meant. He kissed me, consuming the word, and I didn’t know who was trembling harder as he angled his hips, drove deeper, dipped his fingers down between us to caress my clit. Then he locked a hand around my mouth. Like he knew he was about to break me a moment before he did.

I cried out against his hand, for a moment forgetting where I was, who I was, forgetting everything but what it felt like to be filled by him, the way I clenched around him in a blinding crescendo of quivering release, all the way down, unravelled by him until there was nothing left of me. And I felt it in every pulse of him that he was breaking too, in his teeth against my skin, muffling a groan against the curve of my shoulder, hands gripping my hips so tightly, holding me still like he was afraid I would draw away before he was done. As if I could. As if I wanted to.

But after a few moments of exchanging breaths, foreheads pressed together, eyes closed, hardly even time for our pulses to slow, I slammed back into time and place, my rational mind freed by the release of a heartbeat ago.

‘You need to go,’ I urged, still breathless, hands still gripping him. I had to consciously relax them, draw them from him. Push against his chest. ‘Before they catch you here.’

For a pause, it seemed like he wouldn’t. Seemed like he would refuse to release his hold on me. But I didn’t want that, didn’t want him to be caught for the sake of a few moments longer. If he was going to be felled, let it be on a battlefield. Not like this. When I pushed at him again, this time he relented, pulling out from between my legs. Reality seeped back into whatever space his drawing away opened between us.

‘Now,’ I added, voice cracked, desperate, when he seemed to hesitate again. He touched my face, fingers lingering on my cheek in a caress that was too tender for someone I’d been trying to kill only hours before.

‘It would be worth being caught,’ he murmured. And then he was just a shadow in the night again, a breeze through the flap of the tent, and the only sign of him that remained was the utter devastation he’d left behind.

I turned my face into the pillow, bit down around a scream. I wanted to tear apart the tent, call lightning from the sky, break and burn and ruin anything around me because that should not have happened. I was supposed to want to kill him. I was supposed to take any chance I had to do so. How could I pretend that when my body was limp and aching from him?

I listened intently to the sounds of the camp, dreading a sign that he had been spotted, caught, lynched from a tree by a mob of angry soldiers because he’d been mad enough to come here to…what? Had he really just needed a release? Weren’t there other, less dangerous options he could have sought out for that? Less dangerous places he could go? Had this just been another power play? Or had the desperation I’d tasted on him been one that mirrored mine, the same desperation that drove soldiers to the beds of whores, but of a different flavour. A desperation that couldn’t be sated with just any warm body.

Footsteps at the entrance to the tent again, and Mae crept into the room, her silhouette letting me know it wasn’t him returning in a second bout of madness. I held myself still, willed my heart to slow, forced my breathing to deepen. I hoped she wouldn’t sense my turmoil. I hoped this whole tent wasn’t choked with it. I waited for her to accuse me, for the night to whisper to her what she’d very nearly walked in on. But she got changed and settled into her bed, her breathing quickly evening out as she fell into sleep.

I didn’t sleep. Not really. Only dozed in and out of dreams that I couldn’t tell were dreams. Dreams where I’d woken to find Draven strung from a tree by the neck, a crowd of soldiers and Gwinellyn and Esario and all the others standing beneath him, waiting with a noose to hang me next to him. I dreamed he came back, slipped back into my bed and looped his arms around me, whispering sweet nothings into my hair. I dreamed I’d run after him, barefoot and still a little drunk, chasing shadows through trees, feeling like he was always just ahead, always just out of sight. I dreamed he’d set fire to the tent on the way out, that I’d run from it with flames in my hair, smoke in my lungs, to find the army gone and only Draven remaining, standing in the moonlight, watching me burn.