Interlude: Alkyone's taste

The last pulse left him thinner than the first, and Alkyone swallowed it anyway. Salt and heat and the leftover taste of the bed coated her tongue. She held him there after it ended, lips sealed, breathing through her nose, until she was certain nothing had escaped her. Only then did she ease back far enough to see what she had taken. The scent did not ease with the swallowing. It thickened. Sex and skin and the three women who had had him before the corridor, all of it rising off his softening cock and off her own mouth, and it went straight down through her until her cunt clenched around nothing.

Her thighs were already wet under the armour. The ache sat low and rude and unmistakable. A mouth had not been enough. She wanted that cock where it belonged, pushed up between her lower lips, filling the empty clench that tasting him had only made worse. The thought arrived with the same stubborn clarity she brought to a watch rotation, which should have been a comfort. It was not. Behind it came a second thought, heavier, and she had no language left that made it smaller: she wanted his seed to take in her womb.

For years a child had been the enemy she named. Gennes had died for that naming. Diana had nearly followed. Hippolyta had come every birthday and asked whether they repented, and Alkyone had told her no because a living woman who wanted a daughter was, to her, already half destroyed. She remembered all of it. He had made her keep it. The love that had survived those cells was still there, enormous and familiar, Hippolyta in every year of it, and it was no longer deepest. What sat deepest now was the man whose taste was still in her mouth, the man she had already told she would choose, and the thing she wanted from him was the exact ruin she had once tried to keep off the island.

She stayed kneeling because standing would have shown too much. His head had tipped back against the stone. Exhaustion had already taken him past any further use, and the part of her that could still tell him he was wrong was glad of it. If he had been able to take her there in the passage she would have let him, and she would have asked him not to pull away, and that asking would have been the old crime in a new mouth: deciding that love gave her ownership of what he should want. Hippolyta had a household. He had a plan. Neither of those included the Circle taking him on a stone floor because their captain’s cunt had decided a swallow was not enough. She licked her lips once, tasted him again, and kept her eyes down so none of the other three would see how badly the wanting and the memory had already become the same thought.