Page 84 of Her Cruel Redemption

‘I can wield lightning, Draven. The fact that I’m a woman hardly matters in the face of that. What else did you think they’d do with me?’ He didn’t need to know that no one had actually wanted me out there today.

‘So no one will teach you to use magic but you’re happy to kill yourself with it to further their cause.’

‘I was wielding it just fine today.’

His grip on my hand tightened. ‘You’re not a soldier. You shouldn’t be on a battlefield.’

‘I wasn’t royalty either. That didn’t stop me from becoming a queen.’ I needed to cut the contact. His hands were too familiar to me, those calluses on his palms, the pressure of his fingers. My pulse was rising with the memory of what it felt like to be touched by him. Held by him. So unlike the death and terror and numbness of the day. We held tight to one another for a long, long pause, and the memories just kept turning over, becoming more vivid with every breath. I wanted to sink into them, into a time when this moment could have ended in his lips on mine.

‘Your rage is with me,’ he said softly. ‘This war isn’t your fight. Don’t get yourself hurt for it.’

His hand in mine moved as he brushed his thumb against my skin, and that tiny gesture, the tenderness in it, was almost too much to bear. I wanted him closer, wanted to dissolve and destroy and consume him. Wanted it all gone and undone and unsaid and unbroken. Wanted to go back to a time that had never existed, to a fancied moment where he hadn’t used me or betrayed me and I could have allowed myself to love him.

But finally, I withdrew my hand. ‘If you leave now, I won’t turn you in,’ I said, voice breathy and unsteady. ‘We can settle our differences on the battlefield.’ I needed to put an end to this. Before he realised how badly I wanted him. If he didn’t already know it.

He didn’t respond. Just stood there, face lit with only starlight, eyes locked on me in a way I recognised intimately. It was the way he had looked at me when I held a pin to his throat and he’d pulled me tight against him. The way he always looked when he was ready to brush aside all my attempts to arm myself against him. Like he would lean into the threat just to press his lips to mine.

I thought—alright, maybe Ihoped—that he wouldn’t let it end there. That he’d pursue me. When I turned my back on him, I thought there’d be an arm around my waist a moment later, a voice in my ear telling me I wasn’t going anywhere. That Ibelongedto him, the way he’d told me once before. That he would always catch me if I ran. But my footsteps were uninterrupted as I headed back towards the camp, and by the time I risked a glance behind me, I couldn’t see him anymore. What a stupid little idiot I was. I wanted him dead, not between my legs. No matter how bleak the day had been, or how much I sometimes, in the secret quiet of my mind, wished things could have been different. That could never be. Draven was who he was, he’d done what he’d done, and there was no undoing any of it.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

By 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, withneed, 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 soldiersrenewing their faith in lifewith 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, andgodshe 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 screamingquick! 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.

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