Riven’s hand, the one that had just been at his mouth, went to the fastening of his trousers. He didn’t push the blanket off her, just slid it aside, exposing her from the waist down. The cool air hit her damp skin, and she flinched. His other hand pressed flat against her lower belly, holding her still. The sound of his zipper was obscenely loud.
He positioned himself. The first press of him was a blunt, impossible stretch that stole her breath. Her whimper was a thin, broken sound in the dark.
He sank in slowly. Agonizingly. His ice-blue eyes were locked on her face, his own expression a rigid mask, the muscle in his jaw jumping. She could feel every inch, the hot, hard slide of him, the way her body yielded and burned. He didn’t look away. He made her watch him watch her take it.
When he was fully seated, he went still. Buried. The fullness was a shock, a claiming that went deeper than the bite on her shoulder. He let out a long, controlled breath, his forehead nearly touching hers. Her legs were hooked over his hips, her fingers twisted in the blanket beneath her.
“Breathe,” he said, his voice gravel.
She hadn’t realized she was holding it. The air she pulled in shuddered. Her body clenched around him involuntarily, and he hissed, his eyes squeezing shut for a second before they opened, darker now.
He didn’t move. He held himself there, letting the truth of it—the irreversible, physical claim—settle into the marrow of her bones. This was different from the wall. That had been frantic, a breaking. This was deliberate. A sealing.
“Mine,” he said, the word not a question but a low, vibrating fact against her lips.
Her nails dug into his shoulders through his uniform shirt. She didn’t deny it. Couldn’t. The stretch was becoming a deep, radiating ache, a heat that pooled and spread. Her hips shifted, a tiny, seeking rock.
A groan tore from his chest. His control fractured. He withdrew, almost all the way, the drag making her cry out, then drove back in with a single, devastating thrust.
He set the rhythm and it was brutal. A punishing, possessive cadence that drove the air from her lungs on every thrust. His hips snapped forward, burying himself to the hilt each time, the force of it shaking the bunk frame. There was no gentleness, no seeking of mutual pleasure—only the raw, physical enforcement of a claim already made in blood.
Lena’s head tipped back, her dark hair a tangled mess against the thin pillow. A broken sound escaped her with each drive of his body into hers, part gasp, part sob. Her nails scored deeper into the fabric over his shoulders, seeking anchor in the storm he was making of her.
“Look at me.”
The command was guttural, ripped from him. Her storm-grey eyes, glazed and wet, dragged up to meet his glacial blue. He held her there, his gaze a trap as unyielding as the pace he set. Watching her come apart was part of the claiming.
He shifted his angle slightly, and the next thrust hit a place inside her that was pure, white lightning. Her back arched off the mattress, a sharp cry tearing from her throat. The heat pooling low in her belly tightened, coiling toward a precipice she hadn’t seen coming.
“That’s it,” he growled, his breath hot against her mouth. His control was gone, burned away, but the possession was absolute. “Take it. You feel that? That’s where you belong.”
She could only nod, a frantic, helpless motion. Her legs tightened around his hips, her heels digging into the small of his back, pulling him deeper with each punishing stroke. The stretch had melted into a devastating fullness, a friction that built a wildfire in her veins.
He fucked her through the climb, his rhythm never faltering. The slap of skin, the creak of the bunk, the ragged symphony of their breathing—it filled the dark room. Her world narrowed to the heat of him inside her, the sweat-slick press of his uniform shirt against her chest, the agonized clench of his jaw above her.
“Riven—”
His name was a plea and a surrender. The coil snapped. Her orgasm ripped through her without warning, a violent, shuddering wave that clenched around him, milking the length of him deep inside her. She cried out, the sound raw and endless, her body bowing under his.
It triggered his. A ragged groan tore from his chest as he drove into her one final, devastating time and held, his body locking rigid above hers. She felt the hot pulse of his release, the intimate flood of it, and the low, animal sound that vibrated through his chest and into hers.
For a long moment, there was only the heave of their lungs, the frantic hammer of two heartbeats slowly decelerating. He was still buried inside her, his weight a solid, anchoring press. The scent of sex and sweat and their mingled heat was thick in the air.
Slowly, carefully, he lowered his forehead to rest against hers. His breath gusted over her lips. He didn’t move to withdraw. He just stayed there, sealed inside her, as the aftershocks gently trembled through them both.