Page 46 of The Delver
Ignoring the pain and discomfort, Urkot kept moving, repeating the same pattern until, finally, he reached the far wall.
He produced more rope, passing it up to his hands and attaching it to the cavern roof with an overabundance of sticky silk. Once it was secure and he’d given it a few good tugs to test its hold, he wound some of the rope around his hands.
“Hold tight, Callie.”
Her arms and legs squeezed him. “I am.”
Urkot slipped his middle legs free of the rope, and his body bowed.
The new diagonal slant made Callie slide down his torso. She sucked in a sharp breath and clung to him, but she hadn’t moved even a handspan before her thighs hit the upper segments of his forelegs, halting her.
Once again, her core was so close to his slit, and after that friction, that tantalizing slide of her body against his, he?—
By their eightfold eyes, even now? Even in this place, with all that had happened, and despite his pain and exhaustion, he could not deny the thrill of having her pressed against him so intimately. Without meaning to, without trying to, she could rouse such heat in his blood, could stir his stem.
“Sorry.” Callie’s face warmed against his hide.
No matter how tempted he was to discover how it would feel if she used those soft, full lips to trail kisses over his neck and chest, he did not allow his thoughts to stride that path.
And he could not allow himself and Callie to remain in this position indefinitely.
“Are we—” Her mouth snapped shut and her arms squeezed his neck as he tightened his claspers around her thighs and dropped his forelegs from the strand above.
“Still have you.” The increased strain on his arms was instant as they took all his weight.
He and Callie dangled there. No more than a single moment passed, as fleeting as a beat of his hearts, but it came with the sense that the two of them were floating in nothingness. No stone to grasp, nothing above or below or to any side except air thick with darkness.
That should’ve been unsettling, even frightening, but with Callie holding him, with her being the only solid thing he could feel…it was almost soothing.
Slowly, he lowered himself along the hanging strand, using all three hands to ensure he maintained a firm grip. He extended his hind legs into the opening. As soon as they touched the floor of the passage, he reached out to grasp the tunnel wall with his lower hand and pulled himself inside.
Stumbling away from the cliff’s edge, he braced his right arms on the wall and sagged against it. He felt like the weight of all the surrounding stone was collapsing upon him.
“Urkot.” Callie drew herself more upright, one hand clutching his hair as she embraced him and pressed her cheek to his. “Let’s fuckingneverdo that again.”
Chittering, he wrapped his left arm around her and breathed in her scent gratefully.
CHAPTER 11
Though Callie hadn’t beenthe one to climb across a ceiling over a bottomless pit, her legs were unsteady as she released Urkot and planted her feet on solid ground. Heights had never bothered her much in the past. Hell, she lived in a tree house a couple hundred feet off the ground, and she walked across swaying rope bridges on the daily in Kaldarak.
But hanging over a dark chasm with nothing more than sticky rope holding you up was a whole new level of terrifying. She trusted Urkot, and knew he was unimaginably strong, but she’d felt the strain in his body. She’d felt the trembling in his limbs and the roughness in his breathing as he’d pushed his endurance to its limits and beyond.
That his body hadn’t given out before reaching the other side was nothing short of a miracle.
With fingers stiff from clutching onto Urkot, she untied the silk rope binding them together and let it fall to the ground. Shrugging off her pack, she opened it and withdrew the waterskin.
“Drink,” she said, holding it out to him. “I won’t take no for an answer.”
With a gentle chitter, he accepted the waterskin. “Bossy.”
“Damn right I’m being bossy right now. Drink.”
There was a gleam in his sapphire eyes before he tipped his head back and poured water into his mouth. After swallowing, he let out an appreciative sigh and offered the waterskin back to her. “Thank you.”
Callie closed it and returned it to her pack. As tempted as she was to drink, they needed to conserve their supply for now. There was no way to know when—or if—they’d find a safe water source to replenish it.
When she looked back at Urkot, she couldn’t stop a chuckle from escaping her. The crystal was still stuck to his headcrest, lighting up his face quite dramatically. She swung her backpack onto her shoulders, stepped close, and reached up to remove the silk from around the crystal, carefully prying the stone free.
