Then, I nudged the tip inside.

Suvi and I moaned in unison. I tried to go slow, but my mate was nearly feral, weeping and bucking and begging. I angled my hips slightly, so that I could have greater control over the upper cock’s movements instead of driving the lower cock harder, and I slid it further and further inside.

Her insides shivered, milking me from root to tip. Her cunt clenched needily, and my knot swelled to the point of pain in response.

“Not yet,” I whispered heatedly, splaying my hand across the heart-breakingly perfect sway of her lower back. “I want you like this for a while.”

Thinking I would last “a while” turned out to be a pathetically arrogant sort of optimism. The reality was that once I started thrusting into her, slow, measured, shallow, my control disintegrated extremely quickly. And when Suvi squirmed, all her words evading her except one which became a desperately chanted command, “knot, knot, knot!” I could no longer wait.

With a groan that felt as if it split my very spine, I thrust as deep as I could go, jamming forward until my mate’s wet body swallowed my aching knot and both shafts were hotly buried to the hilt.

Suvi’s cunt around my knot had always been a mind-splintering experience. Having her squeeze my knot and take my other cock at the same time was something I was not entirely sure I would actually survive. The world-ending pleasure of it burst over me, burst over everything, like the destructive crash of a blazing star. Everything brightened, my vision going spastically white, as Suvi shuddered and screamed through her climax.

I came so hard that I almost didn’t feel it begin. My whole body beat like a swollen heart, every nerve split and singing, each cell and scale trembling in tandem. I felt like I was entirely inside Suvi, as if even the parts that did not touch her were in her, caressed and milked by her, soaked in her sweetness. When my climax crested, it crested everywhere, turning every part of me, from wing to tail, into a spasming erotic organ, every limb twitching tight pleasure, my spine coiling, until with a rush it all moved down. Down, into the star-smashed pressure of my groin, where it swelled into my cocks and then burst forth from both at once.

I roared, and Suvi came again, crying out beneath me. Her skin was so soft beneath my hand, her insides silken and tight around me, all of her beautiful and so powerful she stole all thought from my head, all breath from my lungs. I was so overwhelmed by her, by the cataclysm of our joining, that I did not even know that I was speaking to her at first, grinding out words between the bellowed bouts of pleasure.

“I love you, Suvi. I will love you until every other star has fallen and you are the only one left to light the dark. And I want to marry you. Truly. Mark you as my wife before the world and, and, and...”

And then the words were gone, obliterated by a shattering second round of exquisite release that left me reeling, reeling, until I thought that, no, I did not reel at all, because I was anchored here. I was anchored by Suvi, by her body, by her love, and if I only held fast to her I knew that I could never be lost.

And so I held her and I locked my knot tight inside her like I’d never let her go.

Because I did not intend to.

CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

Suvi

It was too hot today to wear even the thinnest cotton. I stretched out on my chaise longue in the back courtyard – one Skalla had crafted for me from river rushes and a soft, leather cushion – and I sighed dreamily in the sunshine. I wouldn’t be able to lie out here much longer without burning, but for now, like a lazy, happy cat, I had absolutely no interest in moving. I listened to the sound of the cracked-but-mostly-repaired fountain, water bubbling over its stone, luxuriating in the honey-like sweetness of the afternoon. Behind me in the house, Skalla was puttering away on some project or another. All the damaged parts of the house had been completely rebuilt, but there was always something that man wanted to work on when he wasn’t busy feeding or massaging or fucking me, often in that order but not always.

Lately, all his projects had been baby-related, carving cradles and designing ingenious little toys, and if I’d thought I couldn’t love him any more than I did before, it turned out I’d been dead wrong. Because when I’d first stumbled across the baby items he’d been working on in his quiet secrecy for the nursery, I’d burst into tears and then immediately jumped his big berserker bones.

Maybe it was just the hormones. Or maybe I’d just gotten my human hands on the best damn husband in the universe.

Lying in the courtyard, I wondered if it would be this hot for our wedding. It was only two days away now, and I couldn’t very well go as naked to our ceremony as I was right now. Although, technically, I supposed I was wearing something. It was a long, glimmering, looped chain of metal, hanging from my neck over my chest. It was jewellery that Skalla had created himself from the Shara plant threads. I cracked my eyes open, smiling at the sight of the sparkles against my heavy breasts, darkened nipples, and round stomach, then closed them again. I tossed one hand over my eyes to shade them, and started nodding off...

Only to be woken by the sound of my name. Except it was my name spoken in a deep, male voice I did not recognize.

I ripped my hand away from my face, hoping I’d heard wrong and that I’d find Skalla standing before me.

But it wasn’t him.

And oh, oh my fucking God, I knew this creature. I recognized the snow-white sheet of his hair. I’d seen those black, bat-like wings, with those lights like blue flames flung across them.

It was him. The one who’d crashed into the world of our first mission. The one who’d killed half the crew and my friend Torrance, too.

Panic gripping me in a vise so cruel I couldn’t breathe, I tried to scramble up into a seated position, but my stomach got in the way. Realizing that fleeing was stupid, because this guy was obviously faster than me, I instead gasped and then let out a blood-curdling scream.

“SKALLA!”

Skalla burst out of the house like a bomb going off. He arched through the air, colliding with the other male with the force of an entire planet’s gravity. I got shakily to my feet and ran as fast as I could into the house. I knew I should retreat further, to hide – I had our baby to think about even more than myself – but I couldn’t bring myself to let Skalla out of my sight as he grappled with the other male on the ground. I hid behind a wooden beam, chest on fire with fear.

Frankly, I expected to see another person get completely torn apart by Skalla right before my very eyes again. But strangely, the violence went out of my mate’s hulking body all at once, like a plug in a drain had suddenly been pulled from somewhere inside him. And then he spoke, sounding stunned.

“Wylfrael?”

That was Wylfrael?! That was Skalla’s cousin? He’d remembered more of the man over recent weeks, telling me stories about the two of them spending time together as boys, both on Wylfrael’s world Sionnach and here. Their fathers had been brothers. Sometimes, I’d find Skalla sitting up in the middle of the night, staring one-eyed at the wall, and I always knew he was contemplating the fact that he’d probably killed his cousin. There was never anything I could say or do for him in those moments. He couldn’t go to Wylfrael’s world Sionnach to check if the man still lived because he wouldn’t bring me through a sky door and he also wouldn’t leave me here alone.