Page 28 of Rook Takes Queen
It’s waking me.
“Oh,” I breathe, and it comes out wrong, comes out wanting, my skin too tight and the room too hot and his hand the only thing in the universe I can feel.
“The clasp took.” Scar’s voice, somewhere behind me, fast and tight. “Both of them, look at them…it’s a full claiming, it’s happening now.”
“This should be impossible,” the med tech says, “but…but his readouts say he’s perfectly healthy. I’ve never seen anything like this. He needed another hour in the shield, but now his stats are fine.”
“Get the holosuite.” Chief, already barking orders. “Program it, the forest, now, we can’t put them in the open jungle with the perimeter still down—move?—”
Hands, voices, the family surging around us, but all of it’s at the far end of a long tunnel, because Maxon’s fingers have laced through mine and he’s sitting up off that berth like he was never dying at all.
And every careful, guarded, calculating part of me—the part that built the wall, that ran the math, that kept its own king alone in the corner for three years—goes quiet at last.
I’m done guarding. I’m done running.
Come and get me.
Chapter 11
Hallie
Idon’t remember the walk to the holosuite.
I remember pieces of it…Chief’s voice giving orders, Roxy’s hand on my back steering me toward a specific destination.
The night air was fresh. Maxon was a wall of heat at my side that I couldn’t stop reaching for. The world had narrowed to him and to the thing burning under my skin, the fire in my veins his bare hand started when I clasped it in the dark to save his life.
By the time the brothers got us to this private suite at the holosuite complex with the door sealed behind us, I’m shaking with it.
Maxon quickly disappeared.
The floor changed under my bare feet into wet grass. The whole suite has changed from gray grids to a wild setting so real I truly feel that I’m off planet. The fog rolls back and the walls are gone and I’m standing in a forest that looks straight out of Chronos. It’s not Timbur’s jungle, not exactly…it’s wilder, older, a programmed dream of a forest with trees that vanish into a green-lit sky and two moons hanging low and a stream I can hear but not yet see. Someone made this for us. I have a fractured thought that the family chose this, programmed itwhile I was busy keeping his hearts beating, and the tenderness of that almost levels me. They built us a place to do this.
I’m in a loose tunic I don’t remember changing into. It falls to my thighs and I’m bare underneath. My feet are bare on the cool grass. The fever rolls through me in waves. I’m so ready to have sex with Maxon it’s embarrassing. How can one single hand clasp do this to me? My nipples are tight points and my pussy is wetter than wet. I mean, I’ve been on edge all week, having to masturbate most nights, simply to fall asleep, thinking of Maxon in his bedroom, next to mine. But this is different. This is flaming hot. I could literally jump this male right now and impale myself on his thick erection and cry out with joy.
What the hells is wrong with me?
This is what the women told me about. The clasp goes both ways. I did this to myself when I chose him. And wow, I’d choose it again.
A branch cracks.
He comes through the trees.
And it isn’t the male who poured me traq this morning and let me cheat at Karrec. This Maxon is a wild version of my soon-to-be-husband, something the fever built. He’s bigger somehow, his fangs drop past his lip, his claws are longer and his chest heaves. Every muscle in his enormous body strung tight.
He’s naked.
And he’s magnificent.
And he is, gods help me, fully hard, his luscious erection juts out from his body in a way that makes my mouth go dry.
His eyes find me across the clearing and they’re lit from within. Under the fangs and the fever it’s still Maxon, my Maxon, the one who saw the whole board and put himself in the only square that mattered, and he is looking at me like I am the only piece left on it.
He starts to speak.
The words aren’t words I know. They’re old…older than the mining colony, older than the language the universal translator long ago implanted in my brain was built for. It’s dense, rolling and archaic. I catch fragments.Bind. Two into one. For all the rotations of a life.A vow in a tongue his people have used for longer than humans have been off the original planet. I don’t understand most of it and I don’t need to. I understand the shape of it. This is Maxon’s version of a human wedding ceremony. We’re getting married right now. He’s promising me forever in the language of his ancestors, and my eyes are stinging.
I stand still and patiently let him finish this formal ceremony because I would not interrupt this for anything in the Four Sectors.
