Chapter 218: You Fucked Me Like A Man

Chapter 218: Chapter 218: You Fucked Me Like A Man

**

The wet sound of the thrusts filled the room. His mouth found my throat, then my breast, teeth grazing, and I arched into it and told him harder without caring how it landed.

He gave it to me harder.

The bedframe knocked the wall. My cunt clenched around him on every pull-back and he groaned like it hurt in the best way. One of his hands pinned my wrist above my head. The other gripped my hip hard enough to bruise and held me where he wanted me while he drove in to the hilt again and again.

"Missed this," he rasped against my ear. "Missed being inside you. Watching you run the yard and the dens and that mountain girl and knowing I couldn’t put you on your back until the fucking day ended."

"Then don’t stop."

He didn’t.

He hooked my knee higher and changed the angle and the next thrust hit deep enough that I cried out. Pleasure stacked fast and mean. I came around his cock with my free hand fisted in his hair and my cunt pulsing so hard he had to fight through it, cursing, hips snapping. He fucked me through the whole of it and only slowed when I was shaking under him and trying to drag air back into my chest.

He pulled out. Before I could complain he turned me onto my hands and knees, dragged my hips back, and sank into me again from behind in one thick push that made my arms threaten to give.

Raw. Open. His thighs slapped against mine. One hand spanned the back of my neck—not forcing, holding—while the other reached around and found my clit. He rubbed in time with his thrusts until I was pushing back onto him as hard as he was driving forward, chasing a second peak I could already feel building at the base of my spine.

"Magnus—"

"I know. Take it."

I came again with my face in the furs and his name broken in my mouth. He followed a handful of strokes later, buried deep, cock kicking as he spilled into me with a groan that sounded dragged out of the bottom of him. Heat flooded. His weight folded over my back for a long moment, both of us slick and breathing hard, his mouth open against my shoulder.

We stayed like that until his pulse slowed against my skin.

---

He eased out and rolled us onto our sides. Seed ran down my thigh. He watched it with a possessive stillness that should have felt primitive and only felt true. His hand settled on my bare hip, thumb stroking once.

The room smelled of sex and woodsmoke and the cold that still clung to the stones beyond the fire’s reach. My body hummed in the emptied, used way that made thought slower and cleaner.

"You’ve been patient," I said.

"I’ve been climbing the walls." His voice was rough. "Every time you walked past with your mind on Astrid’s letter or Karin’s shale or Hermine’s ditch I wanted to put you against the nearest surface and remind you that you’re not only the work."

"I know I’m not only the work."

"Do you." He shifted closer so my thigh draped over his. His cock, half-soft, rested against my stomach. "Because you carry the keep like if you set it down for an hour the walls fall. They don’t. I checked."

I huffed a breath that was almost a laugh. His hand slid from my hip to the small of my back and stayed there.

Something in my chest that had been held at a practical distance moved closer to the surface. Not a sudden revelation. A recognition.

This man had stood in the yard and the hall and the map room beside me through quiet days and hard ones, had stolen food off my plate and argued about yearlings and waited until the door was barred to take me apart like he meant to live there.

The bond between us was already real in practice. What pressed up now was the want to name it in the old way—mate, household, a public sealing that matched what we already did in the dark and in the daylight both.

I did not say the word yet. I put my palm on his jaw and made him look at me.

"When Astrid walks back through the gate," I said, "and the Eidsmark string is settled, and the keep is not inventing a crisis for sport—I want the binding. Proper. Not because the pack needs a show. Because I’m done pretending this is only arrangement and appetite."

Magnus went very still. Then his mouth found mine, slower than before, deep enough that I felt the answer in his body before he gave it in words.

"I’ve been waiting for you to say it without the keep in the middle of the sentence." His forehead rested against mine. "Yes. When you’re ready in the light the same way you’re ready in this bed. I’ll stand there and I’ll take the mark and I’ll keep doing what I’ve been doing—except the whole den will have to stop pretending they don’t already know."

Heat pricked behind my eyes. I refused to call it tears. I kissed him again instead, and his hand slid down between my legs where I was still wet with him, fingers stroking through the mess he had left, not starting something new yet, only claiming the evidence.

"Again," I said after a minute, quiet.

His cock stirred against my thigh. "Greedy."

"You fucked me like a man who’d been denied. I’m answering."

He growled soft and rolled me under him and pushed back into my cunt with a single thick thrust that made us both hiss. This time it was slower, heavier, the kind of fucking that looked at you while it happened. He watched my face when he bottomed out.

I dug my heels into his back and took every stroke until the pleasure turned molten and wide and I came a third time with my mouth open on his shoulder and his rhythm breaking as he followed, flooding me again, locked deep, breathing like he’d run the ridge.

Afterward he cleaned us with a cloth from the basin, clumsy and careful, and pulled the furs up over our hips. The lamp had burned low. Frostfang’s night sounds moved beyond the door—distant boots, a single laugh, the settle of old timber.

I lay with my head on his chest and felt his heartbeat under my ear, steady and claimed. The binding was no longer a vague future shape. It was a decision with a time attached: after Astrid, after the string, in the light.

Magnus’s fingers combed once through my hair.

"Sleep," he said. "If you get up for a slate I will drag you back by the ankle."

"Threats."

"Promises."

I closed my eyes. His seed was still a faint slick between my thighs. My body held the ache of being well and thoroughly fucked. Under that, cleaner than any list, sat the knowledge that I had asked for the old words and he had not hesitated.

Outside, the keep remained a keep. Inside the barred room, the queen of Frostfang was simply a woman who had finally said what she wanted in the dark and been answered.

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~Thorne~

They came on foot in the thin hour after frost burned off the strip.

Two adults, one child on the man’s shoulders, a handcart with a broken brace held together by rope and hope. The woman walked with a midwife’s straight back and eyes that had already measured the bowl before she spoke. The man had carpenter’s hands. The child—five or six—watched our forge smoke like it might vanish if she blinked.

Marta reached them first. I came down from the beam stack with Tuva at my shoulder and Einar somewhere in the tree line out of habit rather than alarm.

"We’re not a charity road," Marta said, not unkind.

"We’re not asking for charity," the woman answered. "I’m Alma Moen—no relation to your eastern names, before you ask. He’s Kasper. The small one is Liv. We had a place two valleys south until the roof went and the cousins who owned the ground decided blood only ran one direction. I catch children. He frames walls. We work. We heard this bowl had both."

Kasper set Liv down. The girl immediately tried to count the ewes the way Liam did. Tiril, at the byre rail, watched without smiling and did not send her off.

I looked at the cart, the tools lashed under hide, the absence of anyone behind them on the path. "We have a half roof, a strip that might feed us, and more work than backs. If you stay, you work the same as anyone who already sleeps here. No special claim because you walked far."

"Wouldn’t respect you if there was," Kasper said.

Tuva’s glance at me was quick and private. I nodded once.

"Corner in the side lean-to until we know you," I said.

"Share of the pot. Alma helps Ingrid’s kind of work when it’s needed—Sofie will show you the dens that still need hands. Kasper, Bjorn and Alfred can use a man who knows joins. Liv stays out of the forge and off the beam ropes." I finally said.