“Even though you could? You are armed now, Atlanta, and I am not. You could kill me right now, before I could even move to disarm you.”
“Even though I could,” she repeated softly as she lowered the dagger. It clattered to the floor, forgotten the moment it left her hand.
I took her face in my palms and caressed her skin. It was soft, like fine silk. I knew flesh well enough to know that hers was better than anything I was ever meant to touch.
“I was so scared, Apex.” She let out a ragged breath as she moved against me. She laid her cheek against my chest and I stroked her hair. An ocean of vibrancy. Another thing too impossibly soft. My blood-soaked hands felt unworthy of it, but I smoothed it down beneath my fingers still. “First, of them…”
“And then of me. I am sorry. I know.”
“What am I supposed to do, Apex?” Her eyes were shining with tears when she turned her face up toward mine again. “Everything here feels so treacherous. I’m always performing, always having to watch my back. I’m always afraid here, even when I don’t show it. But you…you’re never afraid. How do you do it?”
“I was afraid too, precious thing.” I wiped the tears away from her eyes with my thumbs, then raised one to my mouth. They tasted of salt, yes, but gentle terror, too.
“You weren’t.”
“I was,” I assured her. “Not for me, but for you.”
It was hard to say how our clothes ended up on the floor, how we moved to the bed. It happened in brief little acts, one shifting to the next with no intermission. One moment, she was crying against my chest. The next, we were toying with the fastenings of each other’s tops. The next still, we were nude together on the bed we had been sharing for so many nights now. Only this time, we were not lying chastely side by side.
This time, her thighs parted for me, and my hips slipped between them like they had found a new home.
“I want you,” Atlanta breathed onto my ear. Her fingers twined into my hair, then tightened, twisting, curling against my scalp. “Take me, Apex?”
“You have never done this before,” I reminded her. As if she needed reminding. Likely, it had been on her mind for some time. Likely, it was especially on her mind as my cock throbbed against her slick, hot cunt. “Are you certain?”
“I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t want it.” She stole a kiss from my lips, then nodded. “I want you. I’m ready. Don’t make me wait any longer, Apex. Please.”
I moaned greedily as I shifted my hips downward. Now, my cock did not just throb against her. It leapt upward, then settled against her entrance, hard and desperate and full of need.
“It might hurt.” I tested her with a slow, gentle thrust. Immediately, I sensed her tightness. No matter how wet she was for me, this would not be an easy fit. “It will almost certainly hurt.”
“You’re used to hurting people though, aren’t you?” She moved her hands to my jaw and cradled it as she smiled up at me. How she could be so insufferably teasing in this moment, I would never understand. “At least this time, I’m asking for it.”
“They were all asking for it,” I told her. “But never so sweetly as you are now.”
She cried out when I entered her. I had suspected she might. Her nails dug into the skin over my jaw. I hoped they would leave marks. I quieted her little scream with a kiss, then another, then another still, until it turned to a moan as I slipped deep enough inside her to find her pleasure spot. The source of all her heat. Her core.
“Yes,” she gasped as I withdrew and found her spot again. “Oh—oh, fuck, yes.”
“Mine,” I growled back at her, suddenly possessive. It was not her lips I kissed the next time, but her throat, then the tops of her breasts, then her nipples, rosy pink and erect. “All mine.”
“All yours,” she breathed. “Only yours.”
“You like that, my precious one?” I slammed my cock into her, relishing the way she squealed and tensed at the sensation. “It does not hurt too much?”
“It hurts,” she admitted, closing her eyes. Reclined on the bed like this, once again I could not help but think of her as a goddess. A queen. “But I like it. I love it. I want more.”
I nearly shook with how much those words moved me. I did shake when I realized how savagely I wanted to act on them. It would have been so simple to fuck her hard and rough, like a war prize, like a whore. She was sweet and delicate and completely at my mercy, and I was a killer, a brute. A taker.
She was defenseless to my desires—willing, at that—and I was a bad, bad man.
It would have been just as easy to make love to her so achingly slow that we lost hours to the sensation of each other’s bodies. Spending myself in her cunt immediately would have been easier still. It was like warm velvet wrapped around me, so tight and wet and ceaselessly throbbing that I could have shot my seed deep inside her in an instant if I had allowed myself.
I settled for something in between it all. Slow, but hard. Fast, but sensual. Brutal and gentle, married together all at once. My hands pinned her wrists down like I was her conqueror, but my lips claimed hers in a way that was almost chaste in their hesitancy.
I did not want to steal kisses as I rocked into her, my cock delving deeper into her slick folds with every thrust. I wanted to be rewarded with the soft, willing sweetness of her lips, even as I took her virginity and made her body mine. Her lips were the sweetest things I had ever known,
