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Full isn’t a big enough word—it’s not even close. He fills me until my thoughts scatter, until my legs lock harder around his furred hips, until my spine bows off the tree and his arm has to drag me back against him. The ridges sit deep inside me, pressing in places that make my whole body shake.

His cock pulses, the hidden sheath at the base flexing against me, and the sensation of being held there, stretched around his first body in the middle of the forest, burns every lonely night out of me in one brutal wave.

Onyx stays still for one breath—only one. Then I move my hips, or try to, and he takes it as permission.

The first thrust slams me back into the tree hard enough that bark bites my shoulder blades, and my breath leaves in a broken cry. His arm keeps the impact from hurting, but not from registering.

I feel all of it. The scrape, the weight, the stretch, the drag of his ridges as he pulls back and drives in again. My head falls back, mouth open, and the sound that comes out of me belongs to someone far less concerned with dignity than I used to be.

Onyx makes a low, satisfied noise against my throat.

Yes, he sends, and the word is dark enough to make my body clench around him. There. That is the sound I crave. That is my mate with bark at his back and the beast inside him.

My legs tighten around him, heels digging uselessly, and I hold on because there’s nothing else to do. Every drive of his hips lifts me slightly, pins me, fills me, pushes me back into the rough trunk until the world narrows to nothing more than sensation and the bond blazing between us.

This isn’t gentle. It isn’t careful in the soft way. It is careful in the Onyx way, where his strength is everywhere and so is his restraint. He is rough because I asked. He is wild because I need him that way. But underneath every brutal thrust, he’s still tracking me with terrifying precision.

My breath catches too sharply when the angle changes, and pleasure detonates inside me.

I moan loudly, not caring who hears, and the forest answers with a rush of wind through the leaves. Onyx growls, repeating the angle, each thrust driving the ridges over that deep place until sparks race down my legs. My cock is trapped between us, rubbing against the coarse fur and hard slate of his lower body, and every movement sends more heat through me.

I’m going to come too fast.

The realization barely forms before Onyx catches it.

Spend for me. I have waited through weeks of emptiness for my mate to break open around me again.

That shouldn’t make me emotional while he’s fucking me against a tree, but of course it does, because nothing about us comes cleanly separated. Want, grief, fear, love, anger, relief—it’s all one thing now, one terrible, perfect, Gordian knot that no blade could slice through.

I press my mouth to the side of his skull because I need to kiss him and can’t reach him properly any other way.

“Missed you,” I choke out. “Fuck, Onyx, I missed you so much I hated the whole damn forest for havin’ you when I didn’t.”

I feel his pain as the bond convulses, enormous under the hunger. The guilt of being taken. The rage at his brother. The memory of fighting his way back through whatever dark had held him away from me. His cock drives into me repeatedly, and his mind wraps around mine with one brutal truth.

I came back to you.

My eyes sting. “Yeah.”

I will always claw my way back.

Relief rips a sob out of me. “Fill me,” I whisper, wrecked and shaking. “Fill me. I want it. I want to feel you after.”

Onyx lets out one last earth-shattering growl, and my orgasm hits on a thrust so deep I nearly scream. My body clamps around him, cock pulsing, pleasure ripping through me in hot, blinding waves that leave me shaking against the tree.

He snarls my name through the bond, through his chest, through the forest itself. His hips snap forward once, twice, and then he buries himself as far as I can take him and holds there.

“Lu…cas—” he says out loud, and his release comes with a sound that doesn’t belong to anything human. It rolls through his chest and into mine, into the tree, into the ground.

His cock swells inside me, and the first pulse of him is hot and heavy, and my body locks around it. He fills me until the last of the months apart feel burned out of the space between my ribs. Until the only thing left is him. His claws tear down the cedar beside my shoulder, bark splitting under the force he refuses to put into me.

Even at the height of it, even while his body is clearly trying to keep me, he holds the danger away from harm. His claws stay in the tree. His arm stays under me, grounding me, telling my body how to receive what he gives. I feel the old instinct in him, huge and wild, but I also feel the choice wrapped around it.

Me.

Always me.

I cling to him through it all.