Zumi's hand lingered against her jaw, firm and unyielding, tilting her face toward him until their eyes locked. His touch was not harsh; it was decisive, an anchor that steadied and claimed in the same breath. The room seemed to shrink around them—light pooling at the edges, air gathering in the narrow space between his body and hers.
His voice was a command wrapped in raw yearning, a deep growl that sent shivers down her spine."Say my name."
Bia's lips trembled, her breath shallow, her aura quaking around her like a storm breaking against the shore. For a heartbeat she tried to breathe the way she once had—expansive, holy, untouchable. Old habits rose like a tide: the instinct to float above, to radiate rather than receive, to be a horizon others worshiped from afar. Being seen had always meant being distant. But Zumi did not worship. He witnessed. And he drew her down from the sky.
Finally, her voice spilled out, hoarse but certain:"…Zumi Kogane."
The moment her words touched the air, something inside him deepened. Zumi's golden eyes darkened with a hunger that could have devoured worlds, yes—but there was a steadiness in that hunger, a center she could feel even in the tremor of her own pulse. His grip tightened—not enough to hurt, but enough to make her aware of the undeniable power in his touch. It was the pressure of a promise: you are safe; you will yield. She gasped, her chest rising and falling rapidly, as though every breath had to pass through his permission first.
"Good girl," he purred, his voice dripping with dominance. The sound threaded through her bones. It was an endearment and a verdict all at once, a name he set upon her in a language made of breath and intent.
His other hand slid down her neck, trailing fire across her skin, slow and precise, mapping her from throat to collarbone as if the path itself belonged to him. When his fingers caught the hem of her sweatshirt, the world made a soft sound—fabric whispering, air catching, the hush before a storm breaks. With one swift motion, he peeled it away, tossing it aside. Her breath hitched as cool air met warm skin. Vulnerability rushed in like winter air through an open door, bracing and bright. She felt the faint tremor of being revealed, not as an icon, not as a distant light—just a woman held in a man's singular focus.
His gaze traveled, unhurried, reverent in its certainty. A wicked smirk ghosted along the edge of his mouth, but beneath it was something quieter, something that said he recognized not only her surrender, but her bravery in offering it. His hands framed her ribs, a steadying hold that neither begged nor bargained. He claimed, and he supported—the paradox that kept her from splintering.
"Bia," he breathed, and the syllables folded around her like a cloak.
He did not rush. He moved in that patient cadence that told her he could draw this moment as long as he wished, that time itself would obey if he asked it to. His mouth traced a path to her shoulder, heat and breath and the occasional press of teeth that made her mind blank and bright. She arched into the pull without thinking, and immediately felt the flare of doubt: Am I too easy to take? Too eager to be led? The goddess in her recoiled; the woman in her unfolded. She clutched at his shoulders for balance, for proof that she could lean and not fall.
His mouth shadowed her ear. "So ready for me already," he murmured, and the words slid beneath her skin, softer than silk and heavier than iron. "You've been wanting this—needing me to dominate you, to make you mine."
Her answer came as a quake through her body before it found her voice. She did not want to hide the trembling; it felt almost like truth working its way free. "Y-yes, Zumi," she moaned, her voice breaking. "Please… I need you."
He chuckled darkly, a velvet sound that promised inevitable things. "Oh, you're going to get exactly what you need."
He rose, bringing her with him, guiding rather than dragging. He turned her with practiced certainty, pressing her back to his chest. The space between command and care was narrow enough to stand upon; he balanced there easily, and she let herself be guided. His hands gripped her hips with a decisive possessiveness, a pressure that said: be here; belong here. She felt the breadth of him, the press of his body like a brand at her spine. Heat gathered low, and her breath caught on a small, helpless noise that felt like confession.
"Take these off," he ordered, voice low and final.
Her fingers obeyed before the rest of her caught up. She could track each second as the last barrier slid away: the elastic sigh, the skin's quick intake of cool, the rush of awareness that came from standing bared to his command. She stepped free, the room a hush around her, her pulse a drum within it. She didn't feel small; she felt distilled, essential, as if he had stripped her down to something truer than the titles she carried.
He groaned softly, the sound dragged from a place he kept otherwise perfectly contained. His hands shaped her, thumbs digging into muscle like he was tuning her to a key only he knew. "You're mine, Bia. Every. Inch." The words came like knocks on a door that was already open; she felt them inside her chest more than heard them in her ears.
She wanted to be certain, and the wanting scared her. The old fear rose—if she surrendered, would he love the myth and not the mortal? Would he hold the legend and leave the woman starving? But Zumi's hands answered what his eyes had already told her: he wanted the woman who shivered, who needed, who looked for his direction and found relief in it. He wanted her here, in the messy human place where breath stuttered and choices were made and remade.
"Please, Zumi," she whispered, the plea raw, uncloaked. "I'm yours."
He spun her, and the movement felt like a spell. The floor met her back in a cool, steady press. He followed, his shadow folding over her until the world narrowed to angles of him—shoulders that carried, eyes that commanded, a mouth that marked. His hands made quick, ruthless work of every remaining restraint, not because he was careless, but because patience itself knew when to yield to purpose.
He positioned himself above her. The air between them thinned to a filament. "Look at me."
She did. She met his gaze and let him see the tremor in her, the flicker of fear, the blazing want. He did not flinch. He took it all in, and what looked back at her was not triumph but a ferocious tenderness—the kind that made a sanctuary out of the body's most vulnerable angles.
"When you come undone, I want you to scream my name. Do you understand?"
The words struck a chord she had kept walled off for years: undone. Not destroyed, not diminished—released. Unbound. Remade. Her throat worked around the answer. "Yes, Zumi."
When he came to her, it wasn't a clash so much as a claiming. She felt the give of her body and the certainty of his, a rhythm hammered out in breath and whispered orders, in the catch of her moans, in the way his hand tightened when she tried to retreat from the intensity and then gentle when she leaned into it. There were no crude declarations of what belonged where; there was only the knowledge of a fit found and deepened, a lock turned by the key it had been waiting for.
The room learned their cadence. Air moved in tides. A low sound—half growl, half praise—curled from his chest whenever she obeyed instantly; a sharper note cut through when he stopped her hands from grasping at the edge and commanded her to stay open, to receive, to trust. He set a pace that was more than motion; it was a conversation of will, and in it she found a language older than her divinity.
He bent close, his mouth at the hollow of her throat, words pressing there like heat. He told her what she was—his—and what she would remain—his—and she felt the panic of certainty rise. Certainty had always frightened her. It meant no escape hatch, no distance to hide in, no pedestal to retreat to. But as his body drew her deeper into the rhythm, the panic softened, reshaped itself into a clarity that tasted like relief.
She tried to think, to catalog, to understand the exact second it happened, that shift from fear to devotion, but thought could not live in this weather. He asked for her attention and had it. When instinct clawed for control, he tethered it with a palm against her sternum, with a command shaped like her name. When shame tried to surface—old, useless, learned from places that treated surrender as smallness—he crushed it with praise, unflinching and spare: "Good girl." The words threaded through everything: through the burn in her limbs, through the shaking in her breath, through the white edge of wanting that she approached and retreated from on his order alone.
And Bia, who had been bowed to all her life, bowed. Not to a kneeling crowd, but to one man's steady, relentless claim.
He shifted her, testing how she took him best, where her body opened the most, where her breath broke into music that pleased him. When she stiffened with the instinct to hide, he held her steadier; when she tried to rush to meet what crested within her, he controlled the tempo ruthlessly until her eyes found his and surrendered their last little resistance. "Look at me," he reminded, and in his gaze she did not see victory over an adversary. She saw recognition. She saw a man who wanted all of her—the sparks and the shadows—and who refused to let her flee her own tenderness.
Her thoughts flickered—sharp, then blurred. She saw snapshots of him she had gathered without meaning to: his jaw when he made a decision, the way his hands curled when he fought not to touch her, how his voice lowered when he promised things and then kept them. She remembered her own voice, earlier, saying his name. She wondered if that had been the true beginning: not when she obeyed, but when she chose to be commanded by him.
A low rumble pulled her back. "You're mine, Bia," he snarled, though the word was less violence than vow. His hands gripped her hips tightly, holding her in place as he rode the crest with her, refusing to let her meet him halfway or retreat into control. "Say it."
Her throat burned with the need. "I'm yours!" The words rushed out of her like light through a cracked dam, flooding the room, flooding them. She felt the resonance of it in her bones, in the ache pulling taut along her limbs, in the way her heart slammed against her ribs as if to affirm the oath.
He answered with a command that came like lightning, precise and inevitable. "Scream my name when you come undone." He changed the rhythm; the world pitched with it. He hit that electric place inside her—the spot that turned the room into a bright, soundless field—and the fracture line became the whole landscape.
"Zumi," she gasped, climbing, the syllables a touchstone she clung to.
"Zumi," again, desperate, as if his name were the only word she had ever learned.
Her body broke and reformed in his hands. The unraveling took her with the ferocity of a storm and the mercy of rain, and she went willingly, because he had told her to, because she wanted to, because every part of her—child, goddess, woman—understood that this was how she wanted to belong. She cried out and did as he demanded, his name a litany, a vow, a release. The wave crashed through her, and he held her steady, his own control fraying as her surrender scorched him open.
He followed with a low, ragged sound that belonged to no one else, the kind of sound that made her feel the earth under them and the sky pressing down and the certainty that he was not taking from her; he was taking her—to himself, into the place he had made and was still making for her in the center of his life.
After, the storm quieted, but the air remained thrummed with power. He did not leave her empty. He collapsed beside her, gathered her with a sure arm, and pulled her into the shelter of his chest. The steady beat under her ear anchored her to the world and to him at once. His breath was rough along her hairline, and then gentled as he claimed her again with a kiss to her forehead, a benediction. The kind of ordinary gesture that felt like a miracle.
"You're mine," he murmured, his voice filled with a possessiveness that made her shiver. "Always mine."
She wanted to say something bright and effortless and teasing, something to deflect the enormity of what had just passed between them, but the words wouldn't come. What came was quiet and holy, the simplest truth. "Yours," she whispered, her voice soft and reverent. "Always yours."
Her body curled into his without thinking, an instinct of creature and creed. She felt the fine tremor that sometimes came after profound release, and felt it vanish as he stroked her shoulder, the motion unthinking, habitual. She realized with a start that the pattern of his touch was not new; he had been soothing her like this for longer than she cared to admit, in moments small and large—guiding her down from fury, drawing her back from loneliness, steadying her when she flinched from being human.
Time stretched. The ceiling gathered shadows and returned them as softened shapes. She breathed with him, letting her lungs learn his cadence again. Past the thundering of their bodies, past the fierce taking and giving, she found the quiet that mattered: the sense of being kept.
The doubts crept back, softer this time, like a lingering ache in muscles well used. She thought of the way people knelt when they said her name; she thought of how easy it had been to belong to an ideal and how hard it had been to belong to herself. She did not want to be adored the way someone adores an eclipse—distant, unholdable, remarkable precisely because it leaves. She wanted to be held in daylight, seen in ordinary hours, fought for, laughed with. A woman. A woman with a pulse and limits and choices she sometimes got wrong.
"Bia," Zumi said, as if he had caught the turn of her thoughts. He tilted her chin so she had to look at him. The command in the touch was no less present in the tenderness. "Here," he said simply. "Stay here."
She swallowed. "With you?"
"With me," he agreed, no hesitation, no caveat. And then, as if he could see the last fragile thread of pride that made her want to pull away and prove she could stand without anyone's arm around her, he added, calm and inexorable, "Because you choose to. Because you like the way I hold you. Because I love you." He didn't flinch on the last word; he didn't lower his voice, didn't gild it. He said it the way he said everything that mattered—like a decision already carried out.
Her eyes burned. She had been loved before, or at least she had been told she was. By crowds. By supplicants. By those who loved the idea of her more than the living, complicated self.
And there had been Wukong—the Monkey King—whose love had been fierce, unyielding, and undeniable. She had never doubted that he cared for her, that his devotion was real. Wukong loved her as one warrior loves another: with respect for her strength, with awe for her defiance, with the unshakable loyalty of a king who saw her as his equal. His love had been wild and protective, full of fire and chaos, a love that wanted to see her burn brighter, stand taller, conquer the world at his side. With Wukong, she had felt powerful—untouchable—like a goddess sharpened by the heat of his devotion.
But this—this was different.
Zumi's love carried some of the same strength, the same refusal to waver. Yet his devotion was not about her battles or her titles. His love pressed deeper, quieter, stripping away the armor she wore until nothing remained but her bare, trembling self. Where Wukong had lifted her higher, Zumi drew her down into the earth—into the human core she so often denied.
It wasn't worship. It was stewardship. It was leadership. It was him taking responsibility for the space he demanded in her life and asking her to take responsibility for the space she asked for in his. It was mutual, and it was not gentle in the way water is gentle; it was gentle in the way a strong hand at the small of the back is gentle—directing, possessing, protective.
With Zumi, she did not feel like a goddess, radiant and unreachable. In his hands, she felt like a woman—soft, fragile in places, but held as though every flaw was sacred. She didn't want to burn brighter or stand taller. She wanted to melt, to give herself over entirely. She wanted to rest her head against his chest and know that she was safe there, not because she was untouchable, but because he would not let her fall.
It was a love that asked for nothing but the truth of her, and in return gave her everything. And in this moment—wrapped in his command, his certainty, his devotion—Bia surrendered not as a goddess adored, but as a woman deeply and irrevocably in love with a man. With her whole heart.
She thought of the moment he'd said "Good girl," and how some old, reflexive shame had flickered. She'd feared it meant smallness. But held here, after, with her breath aligned to his and his body heavy against hers in an anchor's blessing, she understood: it was not diminishment; it was acknowledgment. Of what she had given. Of how fully she had given it. Of how well she had obeyed, and how safe she was in the obedience, because he was the one she had chosen to obey.
"Say it again," she whispered before she could stop herself, ashamed of the want in her voice. "Tell me."
His mouth softened into a smile that was almost dangerous in its tenderness. He obliged, of course he did, because when she asked like this, he never denied her. He said it slowly, like a mantra made solely for her ears. "You're mine." He kissed her temple; she felt the words seal there. "Always mine."
The last defenses dissolved—not with fanfare, but with a sigh. She realized she had been carrying a thousand small armors: jokes, evasions, the habit of floating when things got heavy. One by one they fell. She imagined laying them at his feet, then realized she already had, there on the floor between the ruin of clothes and the wreckage of their breath. What remained was not bare; it was whole. And it belonged.
"Zumi," she said, testing the feel of his name in the quiet after the storm. It felt different now—less a cry and more a claim. "You—" She faltered, not because the words were difficult to find but because they were so simple there was nowhere to hide in them. "You love me."
He held her gaze so she would not doubt. "I love you," he confirmed, and his tone made it sound like a contract signed in the presence of witnesses. "Not as a Goddess—though I know what you are and I respect it. As a woman. As this." His fingers tapped her sternum lightly. "As Bia."
The part of her that had been all glittering edge and invulnerable altitude faltered, then found a different way to stand—a stance that allowed leaning. She thought of surrender as an action: not something done to her, but something she performed, deliberately, as an offering. Not an abdication of power, but an assignment of it: I will let you lead; I will let you hold; I will let you claim. I will meet your command with my consent and make it sacred.
She shifted, draping herself fully over him, the splay of her weight a declaration that she no longer needed to hold herself apart. He welcomed the weight as if he'd been waiting for it, arms tightening almost imperceptibly. He could carry her; he was telling her that with the small adjustments of his hands, with the lazy strokes along her spine. She didn't need the sky tonight. She needed the ground he gave her.
"Zumi," she said again, quieter this time. She let her eyes close, not to flee him but to keep him closer. "Take it." He didn't ask what she meant. Of course he didn't. He knew. Love, life, soul—the words felt dramatic until she realized she had already given all three in a hundred small increments: in the way she let him decide the pace, in the way she came when he commanded and held when he told her to hold, in the way she trusted the aftermath to him without once reaching to rebuild the distance.
He hummed his acknowledgment, low and content, as if she were a problem finally solved. He didn't say a grand thing. He didn't swear a new oath. He just did what he always did—what he had just done—what he would keep doing: he kept her. With a hand firm at her back. With a mouth that could command and bless in the same breath. With a presence large enough to shield and precise enough to direct. With a love that saw the woman first and the legend second.
Minutes or hours slipped. Neither of them seemed interested in measuring. At some point he shifted, and she made a sound of protest that he soothed into stillness with a word. She didn't catch the word; she didn't need to. Obedience had become not a performance but a resting place. When sleep tugged, she resisted out of habit, then relented when he told her to. Later, she would tease him about that—about the way he could tell even sleep where to go and when. Later, she might rise and become again the bright, terrible thing the world needed. But not now.
Now, she was simply a woman in a man's arms, claimed and cherished in equal measure.
Before the dark gathered fully, he spoke again, a final command softened into a vow. "Bia," he said, and her name sounded like the first word of a prayer and the last line of a promise. "When you doubt, remember this." He didn't specify the this: the moment her voice obeyed, the fire he drew from her, the sanctuary of his chest. He didn't have to. "Remember how I look at you."
She opened her eyes enough to meet his. He held her with the same gaze that had made her body tremble and her will settle—dominance without cruelty, possession without erasure. In that gaze, she saw the exact parameter of what he owned and what he protected: everything.
"Say it," he prompted, the faintest edge of the earlier growl tucked into the tenderness. He wanted the words again, not because he doubted but because he understood the power of repetition, of choosing aloud, of turning the interior into the spoken.
She smiled, small and true. "Yours." She kissed the hollow of his throat and felt his breath catch. "Always yours."
He exhaled like a man who had finally come home. "Good girl," he said for the last time that night, and in those two words she heard ten thousand: I see you, I want you, I take care of what is mine, I love you, sleep.
She did. And the last thing she felt was not the fading echo of the storm, but the steady measure of his hold—unyielding, certain, and endlessly, impossibly gentle.