The pain hit her in waves.

Not the clean, localized sting of a wound — the total, systemic, wall-to-wall invasion of a body receiving something it had never received, every nerve from her split entrance to the base of her spine lighting up simultaneously, reporting back with the frantic urgency of systems that had no protocol for this.

"It hurts—!" Her voice was still coming out fractured, syllables breaking apart before they could form words, her throat raw from the scream that had preceded this. "You— pull it out, I’m telling you to pull it—ngh—AHHH—!"

He pulled back a single inch.

She gasped.

He pushed it back.

"Hnngg—!"

Slow. Deliberate. The same unhurried certainty that had carried him through her arch, through her guards, through every barrier she’d assembled in this room and in the years before it — his hips rolling forward with surgical precision, his cock seated fully inside her with the wet, obscene fullness of a man who had decided to stay there, the thick shaft of him stretching her walls around a circumference they had never been asked to accommodate.

Her hands scrabbled at the edge of the control panel.

The crystal surface was cold and the rest of her was not — the pheromones were still running through her, the involuntary heat building beneath her skin the way fire builds under poorly sealed doors, spreading upward through her belly, through her chest, into her face, making her cheeks flush dark against her pale skin.

She hated it.

She hated every inch of it — the warmth, the spreading, the way her body had stopped consulting her before making decisions.

"You—" She tried to make her voice carry authority. It came out shaking. "I am the Mercenary Queen, I have killed Diamond Body cultivators with my formations, I have—ngh—"

He rolled his hips again.

"GhhaaAHHH—!"

Her back left the panel entirely — arching up, shoulders slamming back down, the involuntary animal response of a spine that had been asked something new and had answered with its full vocabulary — and for a moment she just breathed, her chest heaving, her fingers curled around the panel’s edge like the edge was the only fixed point left.

His hands moved to her waist.

Both of them. His palms curved around the narrowness of it — the lean, built waist of a woman whose upper body had spent years doing everything her lower body could not — and the grip was not the grip of someone steadying a person, the warmth of it pressing through the remaining fabric of her dress with calm finality.

He lifted her.

Off the panel.

Her weight came up easily — completely, effortlessly, the panel falling away beneath her as he brought her up off the crystal surface — and the shift in position drove his cock a devastating inch deeper, the angle changing, his head pressing now at a slant that found something inside her she had not previously been aware of possessing.

"Wh—no—wait—" Her hands flew to his forearms, her powerful arms locking around his for purchase, the only fixed point in a situation that had lost all of its fixed points. "Put me down, you—AGHH—!" 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝚠𝕖𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝕖𝚕.𝚌𝗼𝗺

Throb.

His cock pulsed inside her as he lifted her — the heat of it registering against walls that were still adjusting, that were stretched and aching and wet with the proof of the barrier she’d lost, thin rivulets of blood running from her entrance along the shaft of him, dripping in the amber light of the mechanism room’s screens, falling.

Her black hair hung.

It fell around her face and neck in loose, disordered curtains, the bun she’d kept it in completely destroyed now, everything down, the black length of it swaying with his movement, catching the screen-light as it shifted.

She was entirely off the panel.

Held only by his hands at her waist. Her thigh stumps at his sides. Her arms around his forearms. His cock buried inside her.

She hung there, shaking.

"..."

He looked up at her.

At the iron-colored eyes, wide now, the pride in them fractured along lines that had been developing since he walked through her arch — still there, still iron, but running through with cracks she was working very hard to pretend weren’t there.

"Still hurts?" he said, with the gentle, clinical interest of someone asking about a cultivation technique.

"I—" She pressed her lips together. Drew a breath. Tried to reconstruct. "Of course it—you’re—you’re not—"

He lowered her.

Slowly. An inch. Just enough for gravity to work with him, for the weight of her to push her down onto the shaft of him, for her body to receive him again with the wet, tight clench of walls that had been refusing to accept the reality of his dimensions and were losing that argument by increments.

Her head went back.

"Haaaahhh—hnngh—"

He raised her again.

A single, deliberate stroke — up, and down — using her weight, his hands at her waist, the gentle, devastating assistance of gravity doing what his hips had done against the panel, and the sound of it filled the mechanism room with the specific wet report of two bodies in contact, echoing against a hundred screens.

Pah.

Her mouth opened.

Her teeth caught nothing. She just — breathed. Shaking, involuntary, the sound catching in her throat.

He did it again.

Pah.

"Nnnghhh—! Stop—stop, I—"

Pah.

"AaaANGHH—!"

The rhythm established itself — slow, relentless, each stroke using the full length of him, pulling her up until only the head of him was inside her and then lowering her back down, the descent always finding the same resistance, always pressing through it, the tip of him knocking against the deepest point of her and registering there with a blunt, pulsing force she could feel in her lower stomach.

Her hands moved.

Without her permission — without any conscious instruction from the part of her that was still assembling arguments, still cataloguing offenses, still adding line items to the account she was running of everything that was happening to her — her hands moved from his forearms to his shoulders.

Not pushing.

Just — resting. The powerful hands of a woman who had spent years hauling her own body weight finding the broad surface of his shoulders and settling there, the grip of her fingers curling slightly.

He noticed.

She saw him notice.

Her face went several colors in quick succession.

"Don’t—" she started.