Caged Warrior

TWENTY-THREE

With one strong buck of his hips, Leto filled her. Nynn cried out, arched, surged back to take more. She couldn’t remember a man before him—that’s how deeply he stroked, how the pulsing cadence of his body overwhelmed thought. It was all she could do to brace her hands against the wall at the head of the bed. He held nothing back. She’d seen him fight and seen him hold his temper. Both required strength. Different kinds of strength.

Now he used that strength to drive into her. Every withdrawal made her want to weep. The loss of his hard length stole the air from her lungs. He didn’t leave her for long. A half heartbeat later, he was back where he belonged, where she needed him—flush, hip to hip, buried to the hilt. She ached. Slick. Greedy. Each thrust pushed her higher and closer to an animalistic release. She wanted to be that mindless. She wanted Leto to make her scream.

Bowed over her, he pulsed hot flashes of sensation across her back. His chest hair scraped a gentle tease over her skin. His breath was harsh, fast, matching the rhythm of his thrusts.

He pressed his mouth against her temple. “Say my name.”

“Leto.”

“Say that you love this.”

“Dragon dammit, Leto. I love this.”

“Say that you want more.”

“More,” she gasped.

“I broke you once.” His pace increased, bodies straining. “I’m going to break you again.”

“Wrong, wrong, wrong.” The chant felt right. Matched their desire. “My turn. Going to break you, sir.”

He shifted to kneel upright. One strong hand grabbed her damping collar and pulled. She had no choice but to arch her spine. That position left her more vulnerable. What little control she’d had to toss her head was taken. For Leto, to Leto, she was actually eager to give over that control.

Even that wasn’t enough for him. He released her collar with a harsh curse and clenched her hips with both hands.

She looked back over her shoulder to see his face twisted in a grimace of absolute rapture. He stared at a point on her lower back. The tense way his arms arrowed down to her pelvis bunched his pecs together. They gleamed with sweat. His mouth was open. Each drive of his thick, weighty shaft wrested an exhaled grunt from his wide chest.

“Look at me,” she said between bouts of sensation that gathered and built. She was a living embodiment of her gift—glowing, ready to explode. “Leto.”

Maybe she had learned some of his techniques, because her sharp command snapped his gaze toward hers. His pupils were dilated. He looked like a god bent on laying waste to cities. Their kind had done as much. That they could fuck with such intensity stole her mind.

He was beyond speech. She was nearly there. But she wasn’t going to let him make good on his boast.

“Break me. Try. It won’t happen. All you’ll do is come before I’m satisfied.” She moaned sharply when he reached around to circle two fingers over her clit. “You’re too proud for that. You won’t let yourself.”

“I can.”

“Then come first. You can—” Another gasp when he pressed his fingers deeper as he rubbed her clit. “You can think about it afterward. Shame, like losing. Or you can make me beg for you. I want to.”

“Beg. For me.”

She shook her head and dipped it down into his pillow. Smelled of him. The whole room smelled of him and of sex.

“Give me that,” he rasped.

Fuck, she wasn’t going to last much longer. His fingers were clever, strong, unyielding, even as his prick slammed home, stealing everything but need. But she needed this, too. To own him. “You want to hear me beg more than you want to come.”

His frustration became a bodily force. “Yes. Yes. Do it, Nynn.”

It wasn’t a game now. Wasn’t difficult. She gave herself over to the mass of sensations. Colors blended with sounds blended with the knowledge that he surrounded her. They couldn’t stop now if they wanted to. “Please—ah, bathatéi. Leto, please. Make me— I want to—”

Her voice was broken when she screamed. That shrieking release throttled down to a low, low moan as pleasure scorched her nerve endings and whirled thought into feeling.

Just feel.

Leto’s strokes became tighter, shorter, less controlled. His hands were vises digging into the meat of her hips. She looked back in time to see him point his chin toward the ceiling. That gorgeous expanse of masculine beauty strained. His release was a groan and a string of deep, truncated curses. He ground his pelvis against hers, wringing the last sparks of sensation from them both.

Still panting, he withdrew and sank heavily onto the mattress. With one agile movement—how was he still capable?—he swirled her body down and along his. They were glorious, shimmering with an afterglow that was nearly palpable.

Nynn smiled against his chest, licked his salty skin. “See? Now I’ve broken you.”

He rumbled something inarticulate and pulled her flush, chest to chest. “We both knew you would.”

“Did we? I doubt that. Stubborn man.”

“In that regard,” he said, kissing her crown, “I’ve met my match.”

♦ ♦ ♦

Leto awoke with a shiver. Some dream. Remnants stuck to his thoughts like having walked into a spiderweb. Two children. One slightly grown, in pain. Another just born. Small, red-faced, yelling at the world.

His skin was cold. Nynn still slept across his chest, but his feet, legs, and one arm were bathed in an unnatural chill. Her heat had only so much power to keep the worst at bay.

He wanted to hold her tighter, or pull a tangled blanket off the floor and wrap it around them as surely as they held one another. He did neither, unwilling to wake her.

Bright and beautiful, her gift was the most amazing thing he’d ever seen. Yet every day, she gave him more of herself.

Break her. What a lie. She’d taken everything thrown her way and absorbed it like he could absorb the force of a punch. He was staring at the shadows on the ceiling, wondering when he’d lost his way.

She was becoming even more of a slave to the Asters, just as she was prying his mind apart.

He touched his collar, suffering through another bone-deep shiver of dread.

Leto of Garnis, what would you be without this?

The skin along the edges of the collar was scarred by callouses. He wondered what he would look like without it wrapped around his neck. He couldn’t think back far enough to remember, and even then, the face in the mirror would’ve been that of a young man. He’d been eager to follow the path forged by his father, even though that path had meant suffering, sacrifice, and ultimately death.

Leto would live and die in the Cages.

He shook his head, closed his eyes, but nothing eased the truth: He didn’t believe that anymore. What’s more, he didn’t want to believe it.

For the first time in two decades, he remembered wails of agony—his mother’s voice, shredded into hoarse strips of sound. The crowd had cheered as it always did when strong men fell. His father had been made to look defenseless, slaughtered like a sacrificial lamb. He’d been made to look weak when Leto had never known a stronger warrior. A stronger man. Not himself. Not anyone. For years, he’d endured match after match, guiding his wife through multiple pregnancies until they had what few Dragon Kings could claim: a new family.

Who else could’ve bid that family good-bye, kissing wife and children perhaps for the last time, every time he entered a Cage? Who else could’ve delivered the whip marks that still scored Leto’s back, all in the knowledge it would make his son a more resilient fighter? When faced with the same prospect now—of whipping Nynn to make her tougher—his skin tried to peel away from his muscles. The idea was that revolting.

His father had been the epitome of honor.

What Leto felt, lying there with Nynn, was selfish and ugly by comparison. His pride had been humbled, which was not necessarily a bad thing. He’d been riding too high as the Asters’ champion for too long. This infection of greed and petty wants was deeper.

He wanted out of the dark.

The single person who might be able to lead him free of such a place was in his arms—and she wasn’t even a real person. She was a warped version of the woman who’d once been more determined than the passage of time.

Somewhere out there, held in a box or a cell by Dr. Aster, was a little boy named Jack MacLaren. Leto had helped erase the one person who would walk through hell to save that child.

Nynn stirred, which added another layer of unease to the cold wrapped around his exposed limbs. Cold wrapped around his heart.

He’d known it was wrong from the beginning. Hadn’t he?

No.

She’d been right. Brainwashed, she’d called him. He wished he could scrub it clean, start over, sink back into that numb, rote place where his misgivings didn’t bite his insides. He should’ve been sated, having won a tough match and fucked a lush woman.

Instead, he was beginning to wonder what sort of man he would be if Nynn snapped. If she became Audrey again. If she burst into pieces as violent as the fireworks thrown off by her gift. Living in the dark was one thing. Knowing it surrounded him and defined him was another. He could endure that darkness, even contentedly, had Nynn been his partner for good. His mind touched on Silence and Hark. That sort of comfort. That sort of light and promise.

But what kind of man would he be if he kept Nynn from her child?

“You’re really out of it,” came a sleep-soft voice.

“Hm?”

“I’ve said your name twice.”

Leto opened his eyes and found Nynn propped on her elbow, looking down at his face. She touched his brow. He inhaled deeply. Soaking in her lax, rested beauty was as much a pain as it was a balm. He shouldn’t have cared. He should’ve let her training be harder, meaner, more selfish—to protect his family. Nothing more. He hadn’t known that his capacity for selflessness extended beyond them.

“What’s going on in that head of yours?”

Leto forced a small smile. “Have you changed so much that you think I have anything in this head of mine?”

“Changed?” A frown tipped her brows together. “For the better, I hope.”

He gave in to that need to cover their cooled bodies by grabbing the tousled blanket off the ground. “Changed,” he said softly.

“No, no.” She shrugged out of the blanket and stood up from the bed. “I want to see my tattoo. I remember at least that much.” Another pause. Another frown. “I keep . . .”

Leto sat up. “What?”

“I keep losing time.”

“What do you remember?”

“Glimpses of you.” She ducked her head, then pulled on her wrinkled cotton shorts.

Unable to resist that seductive call, he joined her standing in the middle of his small room, holding her from behind. Her dragon seemed to glow in the scant light. “Which glimpses?”

She turned her face and grinned against his inner arm. “How about glancing back at you as you came? That was a good one.”

“Wicked,” he whispered against her hair. “Tell me another.”

“You held my face as Lamot seared my back. I want to see what he put there. I think I’ve earned it, don’t you?”

There was no putting off the inevitable. He nodded.

Although the room had only one mirror, there above the sink, he retrieved a breast plate from the wall. It was polished to a shine that was nearly as revealing as a mirror. Nynn held the breast plate and shifted. Recognition came in the form of a soft inhale.

“That’s not a serpent.”

“No.”

She peered closer. “A . . . Leto, what does this mean? Did Lamot do this?”

“No,” he said again, as grim as delivering news of a death. “I told him to.”

Whirling on him, she thrust the breast plate into his hands. Stark, strong anger shone from her face. In the last twelve hours, he’d seen her determined, depleted, triumphant, panicked, and ravished. Now she looked ready to steal his skin and sew it into the leather of her armor.

“And why was that? It was easy to joke about being a champion alongside you, but now it’s not so funny.”

“What does that mean?”

She jabbed her forefingers against both of his temples. “This, you Dragon-damned bastard. You commit sacrilege on my skin and keep the Asters’ symbol from me. Am I still such a neophyte that I don’t deserve what I’ve earned? I fought for them the same as you did.”

Leto wanted to smash his mace against everything he could see. Then he’d start again, catching what he missed the first time. He’d kept her from wearing the permanent mark of the family that had ruined her life, and she’d turned it into some sick competition. The irony was strong enough to punch through his resistance to change.

Change wasn’t going to let him be. Walking into the training cell where Audrey MacLaren was held prisoner had been the first step toward this moment. Nothing that significant could be recognized as it happened.

Tell her the truth.

Keep her safe from the truth.

Muscle and strength weren’t enough for him to solve this puzzle. But they might be enough to keep her alive and honor the goal she’d forgotten. No matter what he did, he wouldn’t hold Nynn again. She would become his enemy; her furious expression said as much. That knowledge wedged needles into his joints, until every movement—forward, backward, even standing perfectly still—was agony.

The safety of her mind and, eventually, the safety of her son depended on becoming her rival. She would despise what remained of her year of captivity, but stubborn woman, that bitterness would keep her strong.

“Yes,” he said heavily. “I told him to withhold the family symbol.”

A flare of her nostrils was her only reply. Hair a spiked tangle, breasts still bare, she looked more like a wild Pendray than a woman of royal Tigony lineage. “Then we do this the hard way, you lonayíp piece of shit. I’ll fight beside you, champion, but don’t expect any warning next time. You’ll know I’ve used my gift when it throws you to the ground and you lie there like a steaming heap of shit.”

She deserved her anger. He deserved his anger, too, although he didn’t know where to aim it.

Crossing his arms, he retreated to the old ways. The old places. He’d lived in the complex long enough that he almost convinced himself he welcomed the homecoming—rather than hating the creature he was becoming.

“What does that mean, neophyte?” he asked, needing the distance of that old insult.

“It means that the next time we step into a Cage, you’ll be fighting me, too.”