Chapter 121: Xelvyn’s Knot

Hours had passed, and neither of them could have said how many.

Time had gone soft somewhere along the way. It blurred at the edges and then stopped mattering altogether, until there was nothing left in the world except the table under Yvaine’s hips, the hands locked around her waist, and the rhythm Xelvyn had set and kept and refused to break.

The candles had burned down to stubs at some point. The hall had gone from gold to grey and back to gold as the flames guttered and caught again, and the shadows had moved along the walls without either of them noticing. Still Xelvyn was taking her, thorough and unhurried, in the way that only a person who had already lost count could be.

They had gone through the whole table by now. Yvaine had been on her back at the start, then over the edge, then pulled up and turned and bent forward until her stomach lay flat against the wood and her legs had to work to hold her upright.

There had been a stretch where she could not hold herself at all and Xelvyn had simply held her up by the hips instead. There had been another stretch where she had lost the ability to speak and had only managed sounds.

Twice she had come so hard that she forgot where she was, and the second time Xelvyn had not even slowed down for it, and somewhere in the middle of that Yvaine stopped expecting any mercy at all.

Her position had not been her choice. Xelvyn moved her the way she moved everything else, without asking and without needing to, and Yvaine went where she was put.

Her hands were flat against the runner now, fingers spread, and her hair had come loose and hung down in damp strands across her face, and every time Xelvyn drove into her, the table scraped a few inches across the floor and her breath left her in a rush.

She was loud. She had been loud for hours and had long since stopped caring. The moans came out of her without permission, and the crying with them, and the pleading, and none of it was dignified in the slightest.

Underneath all of it, buried so deep that she only caught it in the gaps between one thrust and the next, there was a small tight fear that had been sitting in her chest since the beginning. That this would end.

That the moment Xelvyn pulled out and dressed and went back to being the cold Alpha who answered questions in three words, everything would fold itself up and go away, and Yvaine would be left standing in an empty hall with the candles burnt down around her. So she kept begging. She kept making noise. As long as she was loud, she could pretend the moment was not about to close.

"Haah! Ah! Yes, alpha! Please... Please... Ah!"

Her eyes had rolled back behind her head, and her jaw had dropped open, and the pleasure had taken her over so completely that she could not have said her own name if someone had asked. Her knees buckled once and Xelvyn’s grip caught her, hauling her back up against the table’s edge without breaking stride, and Yvaine sobbed her thanks into the wood.

Behind her, Xelvyn watched it happen and felt something pull tight and low in her stomach.

There was a version of her that would have been embarrassed by how much she wanted this. The cold one, the one who kept her hands behind her back in council rooms and never let anyone see her want anything. That version had not been seen in hours.

Right now she was sweating through her clothes with her coat still on and her sleeves shoved up past the elbow, and her thighs were burning from the work of it, and she could not remember the last time she had wanted anything as badly as she wanted the omega under her to keep making those sounds.

She had left marks without meaning to. There were fingerprints pressed red into Yvaine’s hips, and a bite on her shoulder from an hour ago, and a scattering of smaller ones along her spine that Xelvyn did not even remember making. She looked at the line of them and felt the want roll over again, and had to grit her teeth and keep the pace steady.

"Say what you need, omega," she commanded, and drove in harder to make the point. "Say how much you need and want this."

Yvaine tried to answer and got about halfway. "I— ah— I need—"

"Words, Yvaine."

"Ah~ Thrust harder... Please harder. Thrust harder, alpha, please! Make me forget everything."

Make me forget everything.

Xelvyn turned the words over while her hips kept working. Forget what, exactly? Yvaine had never said, and there had been no room between one release and the next for her to ask. But she heard the weight sitting underneath the words, plain as a stone in a shoe, and she decided she would find out later. For now she would simply give the omega what she had asked for.

She gathered Yvaine’s hair in one hand and pulled her head back, and bent down close to her ear.

"Good girl."

The sound Yvaine made at that was different from all the others. Softer. Almost wounded.

Xelvyn leaned forward and set her teeth into the slope of Yvaine’s shoulder, not hard enough to break anything, just hard enough to leave another mark in the body under her. The sting went through Yvaine like a struck bell, and she arched and shuddered, and Xelvyn licked over the place she had bitten before straightening and picking the pace back up.

The dining table shook under them. It had been shaking for a while. Somewhere behind them a chair had tipped over and nobody had bothered to right it, and the plates and papers they had been working all day had all been shoved to the far end, and the mixed traces of everything they had already done together had run down and pooled on the floor beneath their feet and stained the edge of the table where they were making love.

The sounds of it filled the hall. Skin and breath and the scrape of wood on stone, and every so often Yvaine’s voice rising above all of it and cracking against the walls, and somewhere further off in the castle the night staff had given up pretending they could not hear.

"Oh! Alpha! Please~ mark me~ mark me now~ please~"

Xelvyn smiled and leaned in and nipped the shell of Yvaine’s ear, gentle, just enough to make her flinch.

"So impatient? What’s the rush, omega?"

It was meant as a tease. It should have been harmless. But Yvaine’s eyes filled again, and the tears spilled over and ran down her cheeks and dripped off her chin onto the wood.

"B-Because... I... I want... To belong to you~ I... I don’t... I don’t want to be alone anymore, alpha~"

Xelvyn’s hips stuttered for half a beat before she caught the rhythm again.

The words were plain. There was nothing clever in them — no wit, no angle, none of the smirking games Yvaine played with everyone else. Just the raw, uncovered thing underneath all of it. I want to belong to you. I don’t want to be alone anymore.

"You’re not," Xelvyn said, before she had decided to say anything at all.

Yvaine made a small broken sound and pressed her forehead against the table.

Xelvyn had not known that a feeling like this existed in her. The surge came up so fast that it nearly knocked the breath out of her, hot and possessive and entirely unreasonable — the sudden, absolute certainty that this omega was hers.

That she had been hers since the moment she shoved her against this table, and that anyone who tried to take her would have to answer for it. She had spent her whole life being told what an Alpha was supposed to feel, and none of the descriptions had ever mentioned this.

She pulled out just far enough to turn Yvaine around, and pulled her into a tight hug, and pressed a kiss to her shoulder.

"Shhh~ no more weeping. I’m here now. Forgive me if I am cold to you."

Yvaine went quiet against her. The shaking slowed, and then stopped, and she turned her face into Xelvyn’s neck and breathed her in and let the alpha’s warmth do the work.

"It’s okay..." She mumbled against the collar. "It’s not like we’re formal lovers hehe."

The little giggle at the end of it broke something in Xelvyn.

Because Yvaine had said it as a joke. As a way of letting her off the hook, of lowering the stakes so that neither of them had to admit to anything too large. And Xelvyn stood there with the omega in her arms and understood, all at once, that she did not want to spend one more second letting Yvaine feel alone. Not one.

So she made the decision.

She tilted Yvaine’s head to the side, bared the line of her throat, found the pheromone glands with her mouth, and buried her teeth in.

The taste of it flooded her — something warm and close and alive, and underneath it the faint answering pulse of a body that had already decided to open. Yvaine stiffened for one heartbeat, and then she screamed.

"AHHHHHH! ALPHAAAAAAAA!"

The scream went through the whole castle. Xelvyn winced, half at the noise and half at the flood of sensation that came with it, and then she felt it — the release she had been holding back turning over into something else, thickening, swelling, until her body was no longer behaving the way it was supposed to. A knot.

She had not planned for that. She had not planned for any of this, if she was honest with herself.

Yvaine was gasping in short, broken bursts, and Xelvyn held her by the hips and stayed where she was and let it grow, and the pressure of it was so much that her vision went white at the edges. Then, because pulling out was no longer an option and because Yvaine was already writhing back against her, she decided to keep thrusting anyway — short, deep, fast, with the knot still lodged inside.

"Haah! Haah! Ah! Ugh! Nghh! No! Agh! Argh! Yes! Haah! Aaah! Alpha!"

Yvaine’s voice climbed and cracked and came apart. Her nails dug into Xelvyn’s arms hard enough to leave crescents. Her whole body clenched, again and again, in a rhythm that belonged to neither of them anymore.

"You’re mine now, Yvaine."

Xelvyn did not stop. She increased the pace once more.

The knot made everything tighter. Every short thrust dragged along nerves that had already been wrung out and kept finding new ones, and Yvaine sobbed against Xelvyn’s shoulder and clung to her and came again, hard, her body locking down around the knot until Xelvyn could not have pulled free even if she had wanted to. Xelvyn followed a moment later, burying her face in Yvaine’s throat while her hips jerked and slowed and finally went still.

They stayed like that, joined, breathing.

The hall was quiet for the first time in hours. The candles had burned down to almost nothing, and the first grey light of morning was coming in around the shutters, and Xelvyn’s legs were shaking and Yvaine had gone boneless in her arms. The mark on Yvaine’s throat had gone dark and neat, and Xelvyn looked at it and felt the possessiveness settle into something steadier, something with weight.

"...Alpha?" Yvaine whispered eventually, small and hoarse.

"Mm."

"Does it hurt? The knot."

Xelvyn huffed a laugh against her hair. "That’s what you’re asking me?"

"You winced."

"I winced because you screamed loud enough to wake the whole castle." She tightened her arms. "You can scream like that whenever you want."

Yvaine laughed — a real one this time, weak and wet and genuine — and pressed closer.

Xelvyn held her and did not let go.