by Kit Rocha
He said it like he needed it, and now she understood. The purest truth of this moment wasn’t in his demands or her submission. It was in taking and giving, in the fact that here, like this, they trusted one another enough to be both powerful and vulnerable. Naked and open.
Kora dragged him close and nipped at his lower lip, biting down until he growled. His hand moved faster, and she met every driving thrust of his fingers with a snap of her hips until the tension exploded. The orgasm tore through her, white-hot and mindless, shredding her awareness of everything but him.
She felt the loss of his fingers, but only for a second. His body covered hers, warm and hard, forcing her thighs wider as he settled between them. His cock ground against her clit, sparking new shudders through her.
“Hold on to me,” he commanded as he rocked his hips, working his shaft against her until it was slick, gliding easily. She grasped his shoulders, but the next flex of his hips left her digging her nails into his skin as the head of his cock pressed against her.
His fingers had felt big, but this was so much bigger. He stopped, retreated just a bit, and then he was back, deeper than before. Logically, she knew it should have hurt, but she was so wet and relaxed, and she’d been waiting so long—
One final thrust, and their bodies collided. Kora stared up at him, her entire body throbbing in time with his heartbeat. “Oh.”
He braced his elbows on either side of her body, holding himself carefully still except for his fingers, which crept into her hair, and his thumbs, which stroked her temples. “Okay?”
It would be hellishly rude to laugh, but the question was so absurd that she had to bite her lip. “I don’t think that covers it.”
That won her another of his precious smiles, along with a gentle flex of his hips. She gasped and arched off the bed as the friction shot fire through her.
“Kora—” He groaned, his fingers tightening in her hair.
And then he began to move.
He took her with slow, firm thrusts. Each one shattered her conceptions about pleasure, replacing it with a newer, grander ideal. Over and over, until she was rising to meet him, instinct taking over where thought failed her.
His skin grew slick with sweat under her hands, and she clutched him more tightly. Her lungs burned, and soon she was dragging in desperate, hitching breaths, only to release them on sobbing moans. He filled her, overwhelmed her, and she was drowning in him.
“Come on, Kora.” He gripped her thigh, pulling her leg up his body. His next thrust sank deeper, sharper, the friction unbearable. “Let go.”
She came with a shuddering scream. Release surged through her in quick, hot pulses that made her clench around his cock, and every clench sparked another chain reaction of pleasure.
Kora rode the orgasm until every muscle quivered and she was hoarse from crying out, but it didn’t end until he stopped moving inside her, still hot, still hard, and stroked the hair from her cheeks with a soothing whisper. “Breathe, Kora. Look at me.”
“Ashwin.” Her voice was rough, like she’d been screaming for days.
He kissed her. Her lips. Her cheeks. The corner of her mouth. The inexplicably sensitive spot on her jaw. Even with the evidence of his unsatisfied arousal buried inside her, he dropped gentle, soothing kisses to her face and throat, as if he had nothing more pressing to want.
She gripped his head, but she couldn’t bring herself to pull his mouth from her skin. “Why did you stop?”
“Because I want you to stay with me.” He nipped the point of her chin and lifted his head to meet her eyes as he flexed his hips again. “I can do this for as long as you can take it. For as long as you want it.”
He spoke of iron will, but she could sense the storm raging beneath the placid surface of his perfect control. She moved without thinking, pushing at his shoulders until he rolled to his back with her on top of him.
She ended up straddling his thighs, his hands resting lightly on her hips. He watched her, patiently indulgent as she surveyed him. He really was beautiful, especially like this—naked and unashamed. Aroused and waiting. If you didn’t look closely, you’d miss the tensed muscles, the way his chest rose and fell steadily but a bit too fast. The way his hands shook slightly on her hips.
Not so patient, after all.
That thin veneer dissolved when she wrapped her fingers around his cock. He hissed when she stroked up and down his slick, hot length, and groaned when she moved, guiding him back inside her.
She had to take him slowly, but it was easier this time—one long, languorous motion, and he was completely buried in her, deeper than before. Kora shifted her hips, and had to brace both hands on his stomach to keep from tipping over as he rose to meet her.
“Sorry,” he murmured, settling back to the bed. His hands stayed on her hips, steadying, but his grip eased.
“Why?” She lifted her wet fingers to his mouth and traced them over his lower lip. “You need this, just like I do.”
He caught her fingers with his teeth and watched her as he swirled his tongue around one. “I need you,” he said after he released her. “Any way that gives you pleasure.”
“I’m still finding out.” She moved her hips again, this time tilting them as she rocked against him. A bolt of sensation splintered through her, reigniting the banked flames of her desire. It didn’t matter anymore that he’d just made her come so hard she could barely breathe. Right now, the only thing in her world was Ashwin.
He gritted his teeth as she began to move, the muscles of his chest bunching and trembling under her outspread fingers. It was difficult to recapture the rhythm at first, but Ashwin’s fingers pressed harder against her hips, guiding until she found a rolling glide that dragged across all her sensitive spots as she lifted up and then drove low, growling noises from him every time she slammed back down.
He shattered her rhythm by moving his thumb to brush her clit. She jerked and gripped his wrist, but she couldn’t deny him. She ground against him, riding his touch as well as his cock, as the tension built again.
“Yes, just like that. Find your pleasure.” He held rigidly still, his hand barely grazing her hip now. Only his gaze held her—his eyes dark and delighted as he watched her drive herself higher. “Come around my cock. Let me feel it again.”
She couldn’t imagine a substance more addictive than the way he was looking at her, anticipation clashing with frenzied desire. The first quaking pulses began deep inside her, tumbling outward until they gripped her entire body. Her heart pounding, every muscle quivering, she tried to maintain her rhythm, but all she could do was slam down against him, harder and harder, until everything exploded.
“Fuck.” The rare curse dragged free of him, the only warning before he grasped her hips and dragged her up. A rough thrust followed, his cock driving up into her at an angle so sharp that it tore a shocked cry from her throat. He did it again, and again, each advance punctuated by a grunt so naked, so uncontrolled, she thought she must be imagining the sounds. Hearing what she wanted to hear, what she craved.
He pounded up into her one last time and froze, buried deep. Her inner muscles gripped his pulsing cock as he came, gasping her name. They seemed frozen there, her body still thrumming, his rigid in release. When his hips finally sank back to the bed, he pulled her forward to sprawl on his chest, his heart pounding beneath her ear as his unsteady breaths lifted her body.
His skin was damp, and when she pressed her lips to the hollow of his throat, she tasted salt. He had scratches on his chest, ones she didn’t remember at all—a testament to just how far over the edge she’d gone.
Her limbs were heavy as she reached up to touch one red welt. “My turn to apologize,” she rasped.
He covered her hand with his own. “No. Still mine. I meant to be...gentler. You’re going to be sore tomorrow.”
She smiled. “I know I say this to you a lot, but...there are worse things.”
“I know.” His other hand found her spine, tracing
her tattoo as if he had the exact shape and placement memorized. “I just feel more comfortable when I know you’re all right. More stable. I don’t want to hurt or scare you ever again.”
He’d frightened her exactly once in all the years she’d known him—in the heart of the city, during the final battle of the war with the sectors. Dallas O’Kane had been mortally wounded, and Kora had been desperately trying to keep him from slipping away.
Then Ashwin had shown up, wild-eyed and determined to drag her out of harm’s way, no matter the consequences.
Kora leaned up on one arm and propped her chin on her hand. “Do you know why I was scared that day, Ashwin?”
He studied her expression. “I was extremely irrational. And—and violent. Your fear was logical.”
“No, it was because you wouldn’t let me do my job. You would have pulled me out of there, and Dallas would have died, and it would have been my fault.” She drew in a deep, bracing breath. “But if you had been willing—or able—to wait, then I would have come with you. I didn’t want to be in danger, it’s terrifying. But I couldn’t let someone who was injured die just to save myself.”
His fingers traced up and down her spine as he turned the words over, and a tiny furrow appeared between his brows. “I don’t know how to promise that. Nothing short of another round of recalibration can stop me from prioritizing your safety. You wanted me to feel, and this is what I feel. That it’s intolerable to see you in danger.”
Her throat hurt, and she had to swallow past a lump in it just to speak. “It always is. But sometimes danger is unavoidable, so we accept the risks and hope for the best.”
“Kora…” He broke eye contact with a sigh and closed his eyes. His hand came to rest at the small of her back, his fingers splayed possessively wide. “I can’t promise, and I won’t lie to you. I can try...but if it comes down to you or anyone else in the world? Or everyone else in the world? I can’t promise.”
“Even if sacrificing others like that would kill me anyway, in all the ways that matter?”
His eyes popped open, and his hand tensed at her back. “Ouch.”
She soothed him with a string of kisses to his jaw. “If it were simple, life would be easy, and love would always make sense.”
He turned his mouth toward her ear. “I’m not good at things that aren’t logically consistent. You’ll have to teach me.”
A shiver rushed down her spine, raising goose bumps on her skin. “It might take a while.”
“Good. You need to be thorough.”
Warmth surged through her again as she grazed his lips with hers. “You can count on me, Lieutenant.”
Chapter Sixteen
When she was tired, Ashwin suspected Kora could sleep through a siege.
She barely stirred when he slipped from bed to get dressed just after dawn, and only murmured sleepily when he returned to wrap one of the silver chains around her wrist. When the sun spilled through the windows in another hour, the sapphires strung on the chain would catch and refract the light—bright blue, just like her eyes.
A sentimental thought. He recognized it. Examined it from several angles and couldn’t find any rationalization that reordered it into something recognizable and manageable. That left only one conclusion.
At some point last night, his psyche had fractured beyond repair.
For a broken man facing catastrophic destabilization, he felt perplexingly…
Normal?
Not a word he was accustomed to using. It was imprecise and subjective, useful only within a social construct where norms were clearly defined. Nothing about Ashwin’s current situation could be defined as standard. And last night…
Last night, he’d felt the cracks in the wall. Uncertainty, familiar and metallic. The sickening pressure of unexpected vulnerability. He’d been taught to recognize, process, and disregard emotions as chemical stimulus—but no one had ever taught him what to do when they were alien and unidentifiable. When they came too fast to process. Too strongly to disregard.
Last night, he’d felt unstable.
Then Kora had framed his face with her hands and whispered for him to slow down. She’d undressed him with the reverent solemnity of a ritual, unafraid in the face of his shredding control. She’d done what she’d been born to do, drawn the pain and uncertainty from him like the poison it was, until all that was left was wanting her.
Taking her. Having her.
The Base spent months stabilizing him with pain. Kora had done it in one night with pleasure. Except that was too simplistic. If simple physical pleasure was enough, his domestic handlers would have sufficed over the years. They’d served as a necessary outlet for tension, but none of them would have been able to handle him in the state he’d been in last night.
None of them would have wanted to. They would have been too terrified.
And that was the heart of everything, wasn’t it? No one here seemed scared of him. Not even the royal guards, though they watched him attentively as he slipped out the back door into the cool dawn air. Finding a way past them unnoticed would have been possible, but there was no reason to hide.
Gideon was winning. And Ashwin’s concern over this fact felt distant and muted. Their game could be tomorrow’s problem, or the next day’s.
Today he had a different problem, and she was waiting for him in the training room on the second floor of the Riders’ barracks, already dressed to spar. Ana had twisted her long braids up on top of her head and kicked off her shoes, and she wasn’t alone. While she went through her warm-up stretches, Hunter had wrapped his hands and was standing by a heavy bag hanging from a metal frame in the corner.
“Morning,” Ana greeted him, bouncing slightly on the balls of her feet as she stretched her arms. “Thanks for agreeing to this.”
Ashwin acknowledged her with a nod and bent to unlace his boots. “Are you participating as well, Hunter?”
“I came up to hit the bag.” He smacked the back of his fist against the canvas with a dull thud. “But if you’re offering your jaw instead, I’m up for it.”
“No jumping the line.” Ana watched Ashwin, her brown eyes lit with familiar challenge. “I’m trusting you to be more practical than the rest of these fuckers. They still don’t like swinging at my jaw.”
From a historical standpoint, he understood the cultural prohibition against hitting women. It was an erroneous conclusion springing from good intentions—the idea that the powerful shouldn’t perpetuate violence against the weak. The flaw was insisting that physical power followed arbitrary gender lines inherently, instead of being the result of systemic lack of access to training, opportunity, and encouragement.
He’d seen Ana fight. She had the skill, and she’d clearly been given the training and opportunity. Now she needed encouragement.
“I don’t have a problem hitting you,” he remarked, tucking his socks into his boots before rising. “However, I also expect you to be practical. Having something to prove leads to sloppy decision-making and unnecessary risks.”
“Fair enough.” She grinned at him. “I can keep my ego under control. Not speaking for anyone else in the room.”
Hunter made a show of turning to look over each shoulder, even though he was standing too close to the wall for anyone to be lurking behind him. “Oh, you mean me. I see how it is.”
She flipped him a middle finger without looking. “Don’t worry. I’ll let him kick your ass when he’s done with mine.”
The odds that either of them could defeat him in hand-to-hand combat without an improbable stroke of luck seemed unlikely—though Ashwin might give Ana the higher chance. Even he was susceptible to underestimating a smaller opponent, and Ana was small. Lean, well-muscled, and excessively fast, but the top of her braids would barely brush Ashwin’s chin. Next to Hunter, who was wider than Ashwin as well as a few inches taller, she looked tiny.
Her unthreatening stature could be one of her biggest assets. Men would underestimate her, and a split second
was all it took to press that advantage. Their ignorance could prove fatal.
“All right. Come here.” Ashwin pointed to a spot in front of him and waited for Ana to approach. He extended his arm and stopped her when he could reach the top of her head. “Do you know what this is?”
Her eyebrows rose as she rolled her eyes upward, as if she could see his hand where it rested against her hairline. “A good way to get your hand bitten off?”
If she thought he’d frown on biting, she’d be surprised. But that wasn’t the current point. He let his hand fall away and gestured to the space between them. “This is your danger zone. My arms are significantly longer than yours. When you’re in this area, I can hit you, but you can’t hit me back. A smart fighter will try to keep you here.”
In retrospect, he should have seen it coming. He knew she was fast. But she didn’t give herself away with so much as a flexed muscle, and his first clue was the blur of foot flying toward his groin. He wrenched himself to the side just in time to take the blow on the hip instead of in the balls.
He snatched for her ankle, but she was gone just as fast, dancing out of reach with a barely contained smile that radiated false innocence. “My legs are longer than my arms.”
Hunter burst out laughing, and he didn’t even try to hide it. “Kora would’ve been so mad at you for landing that shot.”
“I wasn’t gonna really do it,” Ana retorted.
Ashwin allowed the misconception to stand because she certainly wasn’t going to come that close to landing it again. And hopefully no one would damage his ego by telling Kora how close it had come. “No, but you would have on nearly anyone else. You’re fast and you’re smart, so let’s see what else you can do.”
Ana squared off with him, and Ashwin fell into the familiar comfort of physical exertion. He kept part of his attention focused on analyzing the strengths and weak spots in her fighting style, and he found himself mentally building a training plan for her. More upper-body work. Practice with locks and grappling. Something to hone her speed and focus her power—