Page 172 of Faeling
Scraping her nails along his scalp, Ravenna bore it, headthrown back on the pillow. He hooked his chin over her shoulder, his warm exhale reaching down to tease her erect nipples.
“That’s it, sprite, just like that, now. Just a little more and I’ll be home.”
The breath hissed out of her lungs as she bared her fangs at the darkness. The need to snap her hips back against his, to take him to the hilt in one fell thrust, consumed her. She held out and held on, her other hand reaching down between her thighs to feel his invasion. She shuddered at the burn of his shaft beneath her fingertips, how he was already coated in slick with more gushing between them to ease his way.
Ravenna teetered on the edge, her need cutting deep. There was only a shiver of relief when she felt his root push flush against her cunt. She pulsed around him, stuffed full, pinned there in agony and ecstasy both.
Vallek trembled against her back, his big body beginning to move. At first his thrusts were gentle, introductory. The slide and withdrawal were as delicious as they were maddening, each making her want to claw and pull at his mane. He drew her knee further up and back, creating more room for his rolling hips.
The muffled, wet slap of their bodies echoed dully in the tent, the darkness filled with the scents and sounds of their lovemaking.
He held her still, just where he wanted her. His cock drove up inside her in a relentless rhythm, his thrusts gaining power and speed. Unable to bear it, she rolled her hips, meeting his every upstroke with her own downstroke. They groaned together at the new layer of friction and sensation, and soon, they were nothing but mindless motion, chasing down their orgasm.
She gasped and moaned sweet things, nonsensical things.She wept his name and begged for his mercy. Rumbles and whispers teased her ear, but he had no mercy. Even as his hands trembled, even as she pleaded, he was ruthless, keeping them both at that knife’s edge for as long as he could.
There were some things even a king had to bend to, though.
Hurrying to cover her hand with his, he used both their fingers to pinch her clitoris to his thrusting shaft. The unbearable pleasure seared her from the inside out, and Ravenna took flight. With a gasp, she came apart, giving him his prize.
Vallek soared with her, hips pumping in a brutal claiming. His spend lashed and overfilled her, spilling across their fingers.
Even as she came apart at the seams, the tension snapping inside her, Ravenna could feel their bond weaving another thread between them. Strong. Unbreakable. It glowed golden in the dark of the tent, visible in the breath they shared and their harmonized heartbeats. As tangible as it was ethereal, Ravenna held onto it and her mate, heart fuller than it had ever been.
Anazai. A future. More than a dream and beyond wildest hopes.
They were hers—and she would never let go.
After and later, with Vallek feeling strong enough to dress and meet with Mattias to discuss the aftermath of the battle, Ravenna found herself surveying the damage with Leita. With the loyal, watchful Thalia trailing behind, they made their way to the ruined citadel, not straying much past the doors.
A room of broken floors and windows, it couldn’t even be called a shell. It was just…ruined.
“Perhaps fitting,” Leita mused.
“Will you rebuild it?”
The new Fae Queen shook her head absently. “I don’t know. There’s so much…”
Ravenna understood. As they passed from one part of the palace to another, all they found were things that needed fixing. Not every room was empty or ruined. Some were merely abandoned. Some were stuffed full of furniture and other artefacts from when the palace had once been a home. A whole room of paintings. Another of statuary. Just one after the other of the unused, forgotten detritus of another life.
Leita regarded it with a sort of detached sadness. The woman said little, her arms almost always folded across her narrow chest.
Although she’d been proclaimed Queen, she looked no different from the homespun-clad wildling woman by the stream. Ravenna had no familiarity in what the natural course of power passing from one royal fae to the next looked like, but it didn’t surprise her to know that after centuries of corrosion, the magic of the faelands wasn’t immediately taking to Leita.
Although caring for Vallek meant that Ravenna had missed much of the formal process of anointing the new Queen, she did witness Leita’s brief address to her stunned people.
Many fae had long since fled Fallorian, wishing to be out from under the suspicious eye of Amaranthe. Those who remained gathered in the palace grounds, astounded to learn that not only had a royal heir survived, but that she was here to claim the queenship.
“My aunt was a sickness. A blight. It will take time to heal what she has wrought,”Leita had said.“It starts with returning to the old ways. The magic must be allowed to renew and heal, and so the fae must learn to live as we used to.”
Ravenna hadn’t been able to tell which the fae found most surprising—a new Queen or being told they would have to eat and drink again. There was no denying that Amaranthe had disrupted the order of the world, but the fae would now have to contend with a far more difficult truth. Individually and together as a people, they had all become too reliant on magic. It hadn’t started with Amaranthe, but it’d only made her usurpation more complete and more devastating.
Every fae would have to bear the consequences of that.
Most of all Leita, the one who now would lead them through it.
The faelands and the fae themselves were at a reckoning.
Ravenna didn’t envy her at all. Destruction was painful, horrible, but it was also easy. Surviving, rebuilding, healing, that was the difficult bit.
