Page 47 of Bonded By Stone & Blood

My arms crush around her. My wings explode open behind me, full span, involuntary. I growl directly into her face as my hips begin to jerk upward in violent, uncontrolled pulses, and she swallows the sound with her mouth against mine. The kiss doesn't last because she starts screaming into it as her own body breaks apart, her inner walls convulsing around me in waves.

And then I pour into her. Completely. Knees jerking. Wings snapping. Every spasm wringing my composure loose thread by thread.

"Don't let go," I manage.

"Not going anywhere." She grips tighter, squeezing the last of everything out of me, and I jerk once more and finally go slack, my face dropping forward onto the warm, soft weight of her breasts.

She rests her chin on my head and her fingers find my horns and stroke them slowly, mindlessly.

"Your horns," she says eventually, still stroking, "are genuinely absurd handles."

A sound escapes me. Low. Startled. Suspiciously close to a laugh.

"Strategically placed," I say into her chest.

"Mm." Her fingers keep moving. "Evolution had plans."

"Don't." But there is nothing threatening in it.

She hums. Warm and satisfied and entirely too pleased with herself. Her heartbeat is slow now, steady, and I feel it through every place our skin touches.

Outside, the war waits.

Inside this stone chamber, in the dark, held together by what we just surrendered to each other — nothing can reach us yet.

I let it stay that way for one more minute.

Then I lift my head. "We should move."

"I know," she says.

We emergefrom the secondary passage into grey twilight.

The cold hits first. Then the smell of smoke and unwashed soldiers and the distant, low percussion of Tharros's encampment spreading across the valley below like a wound that hasn't finished bleeding.

Sabine stands beside me at the tunnel's mouth, her shoulder against my arm, and we look out over what is waiting for us together.

I feel nothing that resembles fear.

25

SABINE

The mountain air hits my face like a blade the moment we clear the tunnel mouth.

I pull in a slow breath and let it anchor me, because I need anchoring. My body hasn't fully returned to me yet. Even now, moving through the dark tree line with Tovian a half-step behind, I can still feel him — the phantom weight of his hands braced against my hips, the low, wrecked sound he made.

I press my thighs together without thinking and feel the answering ache hum through me like struck iron cooling. A secret carved directly into my skin that no amount of cold mountain air will touch.

I force my attention forward.

The enemy perimeter glows amber through the treeline, campfires in loose clusters, too bright and too spread out. Tharros's scouts are watching the sky and the main pass. They're not watching the ridge.

We find Vorgrym and Velka crouched beneath a collapsed spruce forty yards from the tunnel exit. Both of them are filthy, scraped raw from digging through rockslide debris, but neither looks broken. Velka's jaw is set like she is personally furiousat the mountain itself. Vorgrym's single working eye finds Tovian first, then drops to me, and what moves through it is complicated enough to read as a full sentence.

"The human is still breathing," Vorgrym says flatly.

"So is yours.” I say. “We can't all be lucky.”