Page 22 of My Tiny Human Wife

I do not turn to watch. I keep my hands on the signal, and I let the tears come at last, silent and unashamed, and I finish sending my brother’s murder to the world, so that Eli—sweet, brave, murdered Eli—was not spent for nothing after all.

CHAPTER 34

TORVAK

The lull arrives the way it always does in a long fight, sudden and unearned: the diehards fall back to gather themselves, the defenders sag against the walls they held, and for a stretch of stolen minutes the tower simply breathes.

We have driven Rake’s core back from the center, and Okafor’s turned soldiers are closing a ring around the admiral’s position, and word has gone out to take him alive. It is not over. But there is a seam in it, a held silence between waves, and in that seam I go looking for Avery, because I felt what that man did to her come across the channel like a thrown blade, and I refuse to let her sit alone inside it.

I find her in the ruined equipment loft where all of this first began between us, folded into the corner with her spine set to the flank of a dead generator, and she is not weeping. That is the thing that frightens me. She is dry-eyed and very still, staring at nothing, and the grief has gone somewhere too deep to reach the surface.

I lower myself down beside her, my torn side protesting the movement, and I do not offer her anything wise, because no wise thing exists to be said in the wreck of a night like this one. I only put my arm around her and let her feel the size and the heat of me, the plain animal fact that I am here, and alive, and hers.

For a long while she does not move. Then she turns into me, hard, her hands fisting in the front of my ruined jacket, and when she tips her face up to mine her eyes are burning with a thing that is grief and defiance and hunger all braided together.

“He took Eli,” she says, low and fierce. “He took ten years of my life. He took the whole reason I built myself the way I did. I have given that machine everything, Torvak—everything—and I am done letting it take from me. I need—” Her voice fractures, then steadies into the most certain thing she has ever said to me. “I need to feel something that is not loss. I need you. Right now. Alive. Prove to me the machine did not get all of it.”

I take her face in my hands, and I search it, because even now, even here, I will not accept what grief offers if grief is the sole thing doing the offering. “You are certain,” I say. “Not as an escape from it. As a choice.”

“As a choice.” She covers my hands with hers. “You are the single thing in my whole life the lie never once touched. The one real thing I chose wide awake and clear-eyed. Let me choose you again. Please.”

That undoes the last of me.

I kiss her. It bears no resemblance to the reverent thing on the array platform, nor to the slow worship of the night before the fighting. This is need meeting need, two souls who have lost far too much reaching for the single thing neither of them has lost. She kisses me back as though she means to prove the point herself, teeth and heat and desperation, her hands already dragging at the fastenings of my jacket. I meet her with equal ferocity, my own hands finding the hem of her thermal layer and pulling it upward.

The loft is cold, but neither of us feels it. My fingers find her skin beneath the fabric, and she gasps against my mouth at the contact. I am not gentle. She does not want gentle tonight. She wants to be reminded that she is still alive, still here, still capable of feeling something beyond the raw edges of a grief too vast to contain.

I push the thermal up and over her head, and her hair spills loose, dark and wild around her shoulders. The sight of her, bared to the waist in the dim gray light, steals the breath from me. Her breasts rise and fall with the speed of her breathing, and I lower my mouth to her throat, tasting the salt of her skin, the frantic pulse beating beneath.

“Torvak—” The name tears out of her, ragged and wanting, her fingers already working the fastenings of my trousers.

I stop her long enough to strip my own jacket and shirt away, and when my bare chest meets hers I feel the shudder that runs through her. We fit together, impossible as it seems—this small fierce human and this scarred Vakutan warrior—and the rightness of it burns through me like a brand. I set my hand at the small of her back and press her closer until there is no distance left between us, nothing but the heat of our bodies and the frantic beat of our hearts.

“Please,” she breathes against my lips, and the word is a wound and a prayer and a battle cry all at once. “I need you inside me. Now. Torvak⁠—”

Her hands find my cock, already hard and thick, and the feel of her fingers wrapping around me, her small hands barely circling my girth, makes me groan low in my throat. She strokes me slow, twice over, her thumb tracing the slick heat at the tip, and I have to grip the edge of the generator to keep from losing control entirely.

“Avery.” My voice is a growl. “If you keep touching me like that⁠—”

“Then come here and take what is yours.” She pulls me down over her, onto the cold floor, the dead generator at her back, and I brace above her on my forearms, all that leashed power held a careful measure off her body. Her legs part beneath me, and the damp heat of her comes through the fabric of her trousers, the proof of her wanting.

“Tell me,” I say, forcing the words out through the red haze of need. “Tell me this is what you choose.”

“Torvak.” She slips a hand between us and strokes the crown of me, and I buck helplessly against her hand. “I choose you. I have always chosen you. Now quit asking and take me.”

She draws her trousers down her hips, and she is open to me now. The dark thatch of hair between her thighs, glistening with her wetness, undoes something in me that the discipline of a lifetime built. I touch her there with one careful finger, sliding through her slick folds, circling the tight pearl of her clit until she cries out and arches against my hand.

“You are so ready for me,” I breathe, and it is not a question.

“I have been ready for you since the night we took the crawler,” she answers, her voice shaking. “Since you threw yourself in front of that bullet. Since you taught my baker to stand his ground. Since the first time you looked at me like I was not a thing to be handled but something you could love. I was always ready, Torvak. I just needed to be brave enough to take it.”

I cannot wait any longer. The battle is still raging, Rake is still out there, and the world is still burning, but in this small cold loft, the war blinks out of existence. I guide myself to her entrance, the head of me pressing against her slick and waiting heat, and I hold there, one last heartbeat of restraint.

“Together,” she says, and she wraps her legs around my hips and pulls me down.

I thrust into her in one long, deep stroke, and the feeling of her around me—so tight, so wet, so exquisitely hot—rips a sound from my chest I never knew lived in me, a raw and broken groan that is all the years of loneliness leaving me at once. She cries out beneath me, not in pain but in pure sensation, her back arching off the cold floor as I fill her completely.

“Fuck,” she gasps, and the profanity on her lips sounds like a prayer. “Torvak—you’re so deep⁠—”