Chapter 174 – Giving Freely
Eli
He pulls me to my feet. Kneeling to standing isn’t graceful when your hands are tethered and your legs are shaking and the whole world is a moving target of sensation, but the rope helps and his hand at my hip helps more.
He backs me up a step so the rune at my feet matches the one over my heart and I can feel the old lines under my soles.
“Feet wider,” he says, and I obey because I love what happens to his breath when I do.
Oil ghosts my skin when he lubricates his fingers. As if I’m not already drenched with my own slick. The first press is careful, the second less so, and the third makes me forget my own name and remember his like it’s the only word I was ever meant to say.
The beads become a wicked echo of his hand, teasing when he crooks and finds the place that makes my knees blur. He doesn’t give me the mercy of a rhythm. He teases, withdraws, drives me to the edge of the cliff and lets me see over, then pulls me back by the collar with a hand that doesn’t move.
“Not yet,” he says, when I break around nothing, shaking. “You told me to take more. I’m taking as much as I safely can, so I can save you when the time comes.”
“Please,” I say, and the word is not a demand, or even a bargain. It’s simply true.
He steps in against my back, crowding me, heat along my spine, chest to shoulders, breath at my ear. He slides his fingers out and his body in, hard heat nudging where he has spent patient minutes making me crave him.
The stretch bites, the sting melts, the rope sings. He pushes, stops, lets me shake on it, presses a palm over the fresh cut on my sternum and whispers, “Be calm. Stay with me.”
I stay. Because I want to. Because I’m allowed to want to.
He sets the pace with that pitiless, ritual precision. Deep enough to make me sob, slow enough to make me think I’ll die of it, each push a strike of the same bell in my bones until I am nothing but the ringing.
The beads drag mean and sweet at once. I swear under my breath and he laughs like it feeds him. When I lean into the rope and the collar catches, a sound spills out of me that I will never make anywhere else. It only belongs to Ronan.
“That’s it,” he growls, praise pulled low. “Let me make reparations for your offering.”
“Take more,” I say again, because this is why we’re here, because the maps on the floor and the heat in the air and the steady way he always leaves me better than he found me are not enough tonight. “Don’t be careful for me. Take it.”
He goes still behind me, inside me, everywhere. The quiet has gravity. Then leather whispers. Steel answers. I can feel him lift his own hand, the one he will cut, the one he will press to my chest when he wants to draw a storm through a door I didn’t know I had. He hesitates a heartbeat long enough to listen for any lie in me.
“Are you sure?” he asks again, softer, the question more intimate than any touch.
I breathe around the rope, around him, around the fear that isn’t fear at all. “Always.”
Steel kisses his palm. The scent of his blood rides the air. His hand finds my chest, settling over the open rune, and everything in me arches to meet it.
The world changes.
It isn’t loud at first. It’s a second pulse under the one I know, a shy heat waking in the boards, a tone in the bond that shakes dust from old rafters and makes the hair lift at my nape. Then he thrusts once, holding me open, and his bleeding palm presses hard, sealing skin to skin, and the ritual bursts to life.
Fire without flame. Wind without air. The room inhales us.
Power pours through that contact, through the cut, through his hand, through the line of him inside me, and out again into him. I feel myself become a conduit. I feel no fear. There’s only the savage relief of giving the exact thing my body was built to give the man I love.
Ronan groans. It’s a sound dragged out of him, teeth bared, joy too feral to be tender. “Fuck,” he says, the word loaded with reverence. “Yes.”
“More,” I whisper, and he believes me.
He grips me tighter and starts to move faster. It’s not a pace for kindness. It’s a pace that builds a tower and then pushes it over and then builds another and dares me to beg before he kicks it down. I beg anyway.
He has a hand at my throat now and the collar works with him. Every squeeze is a permission slip to fall further. The beads are a mean little choir. I shake. I sob. The bond roars.
He drags me up and up and up, not letting me fall. “Not yet,” he snarls into the corner of my jaw, and that denial tastes like deliverance.
Because the truth is, I want to be emptied of everything that isn’t him. The truth is, I’ve never felt more myself than when I am bound and blind and at his mercy. “Take it. Take me.”
He does.
He drives, anchoring me by the throat, by the cut, by the knot in the rope. Every time I think this must be the edge, he finds a step beyond it and carries me there. The runes answer in pulses under my feet. The fire leaps and dips like breath.
When I finally break, it’s not because he gives me permission. It’s because my body is simply too full of pleasure to hold any more.
The fall is violent and grateful at once. He holds me together while I come apart, hand gentle for a heartbeat, then merciless again in the next so the power doesn’t gutter but climbs.
He doesn’t follow. Not yet. He rides me through it, keeps the heel of his bleeding palm pressed to my chest, keeps the bond white-hot and wide, and consumes. Every tremor, every plea, every aftershock wrung out like nectar.
He’s shaking too now, breath wrecked, rhythm controlled by the size of what we’ve asked for. I hear that one ragged sentence he never gives me slip loose. “I can’t hold it.” The word lands like a strike.
He knots. The stretch is brutal, sanctified, absolute. My cry tears at my throat and he cradles it with his palm. The runes flare one last time, a soft gold under skin and bone, and for a breath I feel the way he feels everything.
We stay fastened together as our ragged breaths pepper the air and the stretch and fullness threatens to make me pass out in delight.
He unknots me carefully when he can move. He loosens the rope at my wrists so the ache stops singing and starts soothing. He unties the blindfold and the world comes back into sharper focus. The beads get slid off with a low, filthy promise against my ear about later. The collar stays.
I blink up at him, eyes stung, throat raw. He’s haloed in firelight and something else. It puts a gold at the edges of him I’ve never seen before. It’s not my imagination.
He touches my cheek with two fingers, then my mouth, then the mark at my throat, each touch filled with adoration. I catch his wrist and turn his palm to see the cut. It’s already sealed into a neat, drying line. Mine sting a little. He frowns at that and reaches for the salve.
“I told you to fill up,” I say hoarsely, smugness too weak to stand but refusing to sit down entirely.
He huffs a laugh that’s halfway to a groan. “You nearly emptied yourself, idiot.”
“Not nearly.” I tip my head to bare my throat, lazy and unafraid. “Did you take enough, though? You have to be safe.”
His eyes go molten in that way that makes the inside of my ribs feel like a forge. “Enough to walk into Silvercrest and make them wish they’d asked for mercy before they learned how little of it I have.”
“Good,” I breathe.
He lifts me before I fall. I fit in him perfectly. Loose as thread pulled from a seam and wrapped around the spool of his chest. He cleans me. He waters me. He pets the rope marks with thumbs gentler than I knew was possible and kisses the little cuts tenderly. Every time he says good boy, something inside me relaxes a bit more.
When he’s finally satisfied he’s done everything for me that I need, he lies back with me sprawled half across him, his hand heavy over my sternum where the rune sits under a new thin line. The collar is warm. The fire is low. The room smells like iron and pine and smoke and my own sweetness that I used to be ashamed of, but am not anymore.
“You did so well,” he says, so soft I almost don’t hear the words.
“I’m amazing,” I mumble, mouth against his shoulder.
His laugh vibrates into my jaw. “Noted.”
I hum, sinking, and then remember the one last sharp truth that brought us here. “Ronan,” I say, pulling my cheek off his skin long enough to meet his eyes. “If it costs me more next time, I’ll still tell you to take it.”
He doesn’t smile or scold. He just cups the back of my head and lowers his mouth to my temple.
“I’ll take only what makes me strong enough to be a worthy protector for you.”
“So magnanimous,” I murmur, sated and meanly pleased.
“Alpha,” he corrects, and lets me hear the purr coiled under it.
By the time the coals collapse, I’m asleep, and when I dream, it’s of runes warming under my shoulder blades and a voice saying stay like the gentlest kind of order.