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She sorts through journals and maps and missives, focus tunneling at the parchment scattered across the table before her. Her fingers skim along paper, not quite finding what she needs. Alina doesn’t hear him. She doesn’t feel him until his breath is across her nape.
He has her now, pinned against the table.
He pulls her up and across the front of his body, stretching her out and toes barely touching the ground. She is disarmed, pinned under his arms, vice grip constricting her ribs. A blackened python, a nightmare made corporeal. She cries out, tries to lean away from him, lengthening her neck and turning her head towards the wall. He doesn’t need his shadows to drag her back towards him, his teeth tugging her earlobe—hungry, savage thing. A flash of heat shoots down her neck at the sensation.
“Shut up,” growled in her ear, his words clipped, “shut up and take it. This is retribution.” Aleksander covers her mouth with his hand, silencing her effectively.
Her world continues to bend, pain lancing up Alina’s spine at the angle Aleksander has her at, Her hips tipped up to the ceiling, shoulders fully pressed against his chest. She is prone against him.
“You wish to make amends? You’re going to have to prove it to me.” Quicksilver tongue, venomous and domineering, he licks a stripe up the side of her face just because he can. Just because he wants to.
Alina tries to scream again, determined to fight, fear flowing freely in her veins at his threat. She knows where this leads, she needn’t have a tether to know what he plans to do to her to make amends.
She tries to slap her hands at him, wiggle her shoulders free, and his free hand slaps her cheek, reverberating against the hand at her mouth. She thinks she sees shadows, but can’t be too sure. He slams her hand on the table, the ‘ leave it’ going unspoken. Her pants are pushed down next, her ass bare and her legs clenching together.
Alina thinks of the way he’d reverently kissed her all those months ago, when she’d worn a matching kefta to his, had felt pretty and precious, the most special diamond, refracting light on the walls. His hands had caressed her like she meant something, like she had the potential to be something.
His roughness now means she is disposable, right?
“I should have fucked you in your chambers back in the Little Palace, brought you to heel back before that whelp of a boy turned you against me.”
She feels him undoing ties on his own trousers, and she whimpers at the feeling of blood-hot and hard skin against hers.
“Savor this, honey, this’ll teach you what you're missing.”
He pulls back for a moment, though his hand never leaves her mouth, and she hears him spit, and she flinches before realizing where the saliva has gone. Her legs are kicked apart, and she takes a deep breath in, knowing what’s next.
The pressure nearly makes her pass out. He’s large, putting Mal to shame, and she isn’t ready like she is when she’d lay with Mal, her body still in fight or flight. A detached part of her mourns the inability to savor this. Aleksander’s chest rumbles behind her as he bottoms out. The spit had kept this from being unbearable, but only just.
“I’d have still called you Sankta had you not been Grisha, this cunt is divine. ” His voice is low, agonized. She can feel him pull out and push back inside her, carving into places she didn’t know she could feel.
It is his inability to shut the fuck up that affects Alina. His filthy words, back-handed praise, unfiltered water to a thirsty orphan girl.
There is nothing off-beat in the quick rhythm he sets. Little cries eke out of her at each thrust, and she regains her resolve when his hand at her mouth loosens and she pulls a deep breath.
She bites his hand, determined to get free. She drops back to her feet, tumbling forward to catch her balance before spinning back to face the General as he shakes out his hand, teeth marks fresh across his palm. His eyes meet hers and they glitter, potent wrath evident within his bottomless eyes.
She won’t let him win. She can get out of this cave.
“ Fuck— Oh, you’ll regret that, Little Saint,” he stalks forward, backing her up against the rough rock of the cave, “you’ll find that while I see you as equal, you’ll always be mine to dominate as I please.”
His hand is at her neck lightning quick, his body crowding hers. He’s the air she breathes and the scent she smells and he makes her heart beat within her chest, a hummingbird’s song. Her very existence is powered by him. She’ll never leech his presence from her body, not entirely. He’s intrinsically bound to her, each of them a side of a double helix, spiraling around each other all the way to hell.
His free hand grabs at her trousers and shoves them down her legs and she realizes with horror how he’ll find her when his hand works itself inside her. He can’t know—
“Out.” He barks, meaning for her to step out of the pooled pants at her ankles. She obeys, candlelight reflecting in his eyes, and she kicks the pants away from them. She never breaks eye contact, Alina too caught up in his thrall to think to look anywhere else, to break the connection off from him.
These meetings had always held certain undertones, want and lust running freely when she knew this wasn't real. Her lust hadn’t been real, couldn’t be if Aleksander wasn’t ever truly there. And yet—
Her eyes widen, a shiver of fear across her shoulders pushes her trachea harder against his hand. A whimper escapes from her.
“I said to be quiet, didn’t I, my Alina?”
She tries to nod, and he mocks her as he nods with her, eyes mean and smile condescending as he mirrors the sun before him. “Yes, I did, hmm? Then how is it that you’re still making noise? ”
Alina’s lips tremble, wanting to snap back at him, trying to dig into some space within her to push against the overbearing presence atop her.
“Look at what you’ve become, taking and taking from me when you called us balanced.” She grinds out, eyes narrowing, chest heaving against his. The stitching along his kefta is gold, she notices.
He spits in her face, tightening his hold on her throat as he leans close. Alina had closed her eyes in time to avoid havoc, and she reopens them with rage. She feels the wet from him slide down her cheek, warm and burning with humiliation.
“Have you not taken and taken from me? Have you not stolen my dead heart? Have you not driven me to the edge of madness with want?”
The uneven walls of the cave dig into her back, limestone embracing her. In a more perfect world it would swallow her whole, taking her away from the Heretic before her. Preventing things between them from combusting—a match and a puddle of kerosene.
She struggles against him, hands scrabbling at the one around her neck, and she feels blood vessels in her cheeks burst at her effort to be liberated.
Free me from this torment, from how his words poison my blood, my heart —
“I was a lonely boy once, only Aleksander then, and I’m a lonely man now, and you are the only person alive who can change that.”
Her leg is hoisted up, knee settling in the crook of Aleksander’s elbow as he fucks himself back into her, his hand falling from her neck and slapping the wall, trying to find balance as she squeezes down around his cock.
He does not reprimand her for the choked moan she cries out.
He is everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. He is Ravka and the Fold and every drop of the True Sea. He is the world inside of her, stretching her close to bursting. She cannot think of fighting, cannot think of war crimes, cannot think of anyone, least of all herself as he thrusts into her again, again.
“I—” Alina tries to say, eyes brimming with tears, hands clasped at the lapels of his kefta, it takes everything within her to just hang on.
He’d told her once they’d rebuild the world. This fucking is the cornerstone.
“You left me. You left me, and you think there’d be no consequence? You think I would let you go?”
“You were— fuck —dead!” Alina wails back, her heart shattering against his.
“This sweet cunt was never going to belong to anyone else, my Little Saint,” a piece of his hair falls into his eyes, a sheen of sweat on his forehead makes him glow in the candlelight. “You hear that? Hear how wet you are? How much you want this cock? You can tell me you hate me a thousand times but I’ll always know your heart.”
She sobs, cannot help herself, because he’s right.
She hates him. She hates him every day from now until her last breath. She hates him because he knows how she feels, those under-nurtured affections for the man who made her feel special —she curses the tether, this tie between them.
He picks her up, turning them towards the table again, and she digs her fingers into his hair, biting his bottom lip, scratching his neck. He will be wounded in battle this night. He drops her down on the table, some of the maps scattering down to the floor, the height better for him than with her standing, and continues his relentless pace. She hiccups, tears free flowing. Its too much, too—
“I’ll say when it’s too much. Take it. Take all of it.”
A warmth within her core, a tightening, pressure building. And she can’t, she won’t—
“Go on, honey—Solnishka—Alina, I know your Little Saint pussy loves this. Come on.”
“I don’t…I can’t—because if I do—” She tries to get out between sobs, between the pleasure blooming inside her, and she shouldn’t be on the precipice of orgasm, inconceivable—
“You think you can hide? I know you. I know you. My Alina, My Alina—” He loses his pace, the beat of his body moving against hers turning uneven, and she knows, with some sick horror, that they’ll finish in tandem.
“Al—”
Her eyes roll back, and her cunt flutters around him as her hearing morphs into a dull buzz.
Using her light made her feel whole, like she hadn’t been truly awake until she began summoning. The pleasure Aleksander had torn from her is a kindred sensation. She tries not to loathe it. Her soul is bare to him, her deepest secret exposed to the one person she hoped she’d never share it with.
She misses him. She loves him.
She hisses as she feels him slow down, his climax receding. She tries bucking her hips to push him out. He holds her arms tighter, pinning her against the tabletop.
“Ah-ah, Solnishka. You’re only making it better for me.”
Alina’s shoulders drop; her whole body going limp. Her efforts in searching for ways to be more powerful, seeking out the Sea Whip and to build on her own talents, as a means to bring down the Fold and Aleksander, have failed. What good is her cause if she can’t even put up a decent fight against him?
She had protested, yes, but had her heart been in it? She had loved Mal, yes, but had he ever made her come as hard as Aleksander did? She had fought her own desires, yes, but the time in these liminal spaces with the demon who claimed to be her equal, her partner, had won against her preservations.
She loses her fire, her light, in the sudden despair of what has grown within her. A want. She had been chased by the Second Army General, relentlessly pursued in both power and body, and here, in a space that wasn’t even real, she’d lost the race.
He leaves her draped across the table, legs hanging off the edge and maps sticking to her sweaty body. The perspiration will ruin them, and perhaps that’d been his plan all along. Ruin her to keep her close, keep her from becoming the weapon against him that she’s honing herself into. Love and hate are equals in passion.
“I’ll leave you as you left me within the Fold. Broken down and reeling. Perhaps a baby will take, and then you’ll know all that there is to lose in this world, and that only I can ever truly protect you.” Aleksander’s words cut through the haze of her cloudy-quiet perception, just on this side of making sense to her and her softened and fresh-fucked brain. “Perhaps then it will be you chasing me. Perhaps then you will understand the compulsion I have to be at your side.”
She swallows thickly, voice scratching as she tries to form words, tries to rebuke him. She feels his spend begin to drip down her thigh. Alina has been marked, and though she swears this is their bond, her cunt aches like it was real. Had it been real?
“Sa—Sasha,” She gathers her strength and turns her head to where he is standing, ready to beg for mercy. She cannot deny him. Not like this. “Wait.”
Her eyes sweep the cave, but he is gone.