Page 10 of My Tiny Human Wife

I come apart on his tongue. The orgasm crashes through me without warning, a wave of pleasure so intense that I lose all sense of where I am. I cry out his name, my body clenching around his fingers, my hips grinding against his mouth as he works me through it, never stopping, drawing every last tremor from my spent body until I collapse back against the cot, panting and shaking.

He rises over me, and in the dim light of the room I can see the hunger in his eyes, the raw need he has been holding back. His cock is enormous, thick and long, and I can see the slick moisture at its tip, proof of how badly he wants this. He has been patient. He has been gentle. He has given me pleasure without asking for anything in return, and now I want him inside me more than I have ever wanted anything.

“I am not sure—” he begins, and I know what he is going to say. That he is too large. That he does not want to hurt me.

“I don’t care,” I tell him, reaching down to wrap my hand around the base of him. He is thick and hot and silky in my palm, and I stroke him once, twice, watching his eyes flutter closed. “I want all of you, Torvak. I can take it. I trust you.”

He lets out a breath that sounds like surrender. I guide him to my entrance, and he pauses there, the head of his cock pressing against my wet heat, and he looks down at me with something like wonder.

“Together,” I say, and I pull him down.

He enters me slowly, inch by devastating inch. The stretch is immense, almost too much, and I gasp as he fills me, the sensation so full and deep that I can barely breathe. He stops when he is halfway in, his forehead pressed to mine, his body trembling with the effort of restraint.

“Tell me,” he grits out. “Tell me to stop, and I⁠—”

“Don’t you dare.” I wrap my legs around his hips and pull him deeper. “Don’t you dare stop.”

He sinks into me all the way, and I feel him at my deepest point, his cock pressed against my cervix, filling me so completely that I am crying out again, a string of nonsense words in a language I do not recognize. He is so big inside me, stretching me wide, and the pressure of it is exquisite, a pleasure so sharp it borders on pain.

He starts to move, slow at first, and the rhythm of it is hypnotic. Each stroke drags against my clit, and I am building toward another orgasm already, the heat coiling low in my belly. He is watching me, his gold eyes dark with need, and the sight of him—this warrior, this commander, undone by the feel of me—is almost too much.

“Faster,” I beg him. “Torvak, please, faster.”

He obeys. His thrusts grow deeper, harder, the cot creaking beneath us as he drives into me. The sounds of our bodies meeting are obscene in the small room, wet and rhythmic, and I am lost in it, lost in him. He reaches between us and finds my clit with his thumb, circling it in time with his thrusts, and I shatter again, my inner walls clenching around him as I come apart.

I feel the moment he loses control. His rhythm stutters, a low groan tearing from his throat, and he drives into me one last time, burying himself to the hilt as he finds his own release. He is pulsing inside me, hot and thick, and I feel every tremor of it, the evidence of his pleasure flooding me. He collapses onto his forearms above me, careful not to crush me, and buries his face in the curve of my throat.

For a long moment, the only sounds are our ragged breathing and the wind sighing beyond the walls.

Afterward we lie tangled in a space meant for a third of us, his arm heavy and certain across my back, my head over the slowing thunder of his heart. Neither of us hurries to speak. The cold sighs beyond the little window; in here, for once, nothing is broken and nothing needs my hands. I can feel the warmth of his seed leaking out of me, and it does not trouble me at all. It is proof of what we have done, what we are to each other.

“This changes everything,” I say finally, into the dark. Not a warning. Only the truth, set down where we can both look at it. “You know that. There is no version of tomorrow where we quietly walk this back.”

“I do not want to walk it back.” His hand travels slow along my spine. “I have lived every year of my life on the wrong side of every wall I ever raised. I am on the right side of this one. Whatever is coming—the closing window, the lines tightening around us, all of it—we meet it together, or we do not meet it at all.”

“Together,” I agree, and feel the word settle into me like something built to bear weight. “Both of us. All the way to whatever waits at the end of it.”

He tightens his arm, and I fit myself closer into the impossible warm shape of him, and out past the walls the war goes on grinding its slow way toward us in the dark. But in here, tonight, we have carved one small room the war does not get to have. It will have to come and take it from us. I have every intention of making that price steeper than it can afford.

CHAPTER 16

TORVAK

The morning after remakes the shape of me, and I lie still a long while learning its new dimensions.

Avery sleeps against my chest on a cot that should not hold us both and somehow does, one hand spread open over my heart as though she drifted off counting its measure. For the whole of my service I have woken already braced, already sorting the day’s dangers before my eyes fully cleared. This morning the first thing I do is nothing. I hold the woman who has dismantled every rule I was built around, and I let the tower breathe about us, and I am braced for none of it. It ought to trouble me. Instead it is the steadiest I have felt in more years than I care to count.

It cannot hold, and I understand that before my feet meet the cold floor. There is a war beyond this door, and it has begun, finally, to recall that we are here.

Kalen finds the first sign of it before midday. He calls me to the console with a pallor I do not like, and points to a ghost riding beneath our own signal, a second faint pulse that answers ours a half-beat late. “Someone’s listening,” he says. “Not just hearing us. Measuring us. That’s a triangulation sweep, Commander. Comes from a big post south of here, and it’s been running since before dawn.” Avery leans in over his shoulder, and understanding crosses her face, and I watch her decide not to wear it where the boy can see.

“They have found the beacon,” I say.

“They’ve always known the beacon’s here,” she answers. “What they didn’t know is that it’s worth wondering about.” She straightens. “That’s new. That’s because we turned back a raiding party and the whole coast started telling stories about the tower that fights back.”

The truth of it settles into the room like cold working through a seam. We made ourselves interesting. Interesting is the one luxury a hidden place can never afford.

Dareth comes in an hour later, and a single look at him tells me the rest before he speaks a word.