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Not dying or broken.
Taking.
Wanting.
Alive.
My hands grip his thighs and push them higher, opening him beneath me. His body folds willingly, strong arms hooking around my shoulders, fingers fisting in my hair as I begin to move with the roughness he asked for. Each thrust drives him into the furs; hard enough that his breath breaks on every stroke.
My hunger finally rises without shame.
Lucas loves it. I feel it, and the knowledge makes me wilder.
His half-Cervari body answers mine; the new markings at his ribs glow stronger when I hit deep. His mark pulses. His eyes flash green-white when pleasure catches him hard enough to make his mouth open without sound.
I grip him hard enough that he feels held down, claimed, known. He spreads wider for me, and the bond fills with fierce satisfaction that almost belongs to my kind now.
Mate. Mine. More.
His answer is a broken moan, no cleverness, no defense. Only truth through the bond. “Yes, yours! Want all of you!”
The beast in me answers when I lower over him, caging him fully, and thrust harder.
His cry fills the den, and the sound breaks the last shard of terror in me. I press my mouth to his, swallowing the next one, and he kisses me back with desperate, open heat. My hips snap into him again and again, deep enough that his hands scramble for purchase along my back.
His changed body gives me everything I need to take him like this without hurting him. The knowledge feeds something primal and reverent both. Aestrata made him to survive me. I do not know whether to thank her or curse her for the price, so I bury the thought in Lucas’s throat and take him the way he asked.
“Mine,” I growl aloud, and the word finally fits my mouth.
Lucas’s eyes snap open.
The sound of it spoken, not sent, goes through him like a strike. His body clamps so hard around me I nearly lose rhythm. His hands seize my face, dragging me close, and his forehead presses to mine as he breathes through the shock of pleasure.
“Say it again,” he whispers, wrecked.
I drive deep, saying each word as I thrust. “Mine. You. are. MINE.”
His cock jerks between us, untouched except by the drag of our bodies, and he spends with a cry that sounds more stunned than anything, as if pleasure has found a new path through him and taken him by surprise. The bond bursts open with gold and green-white light, and for one terrible, beautiful second I feel his life everywhere.
I break with him.
My hips stutter once, then drive home. I hold him open beneath me, buried to the root, climaxing with a sound that tears through my chest. Release floods through me, through him, through the bond in heavy pulses. I spill inside him while his body grips and shudders around me, taking every wave, drawing me deeper as if the new part of him knows how to keep what is mine there.
My forehead drops to his shoulder. I sob once, not from grief this time, but from the unbearable relief of being inside a living body that was almost taken beyond reach.
Lucas holds me through it. Even shaking beneath me, he holds me.
He wraps his arms around my neck, fingers tangled in my hair, mouth pressed to my temple while the last of our pleasure moves through us in fading waves.
The den settles slowly, roots creaking softly above us. My breath comes hard against his skin. I am still inside him, and I do not want to move. Moving feels too much like leaving. Too much like the first inch of absence.
Lucas knows. His hand slides down my back, slow and sure. “Stay,” he whispers.
I close my eyes.
The word is a mercy I did not know how to ask for.
I stay buried in him, careful with my weight, one hand under his thigh and the other over his heart. It beats beneath my palm, strong and strange and alive. His body flutters around me, sensitive after release, but he does not push me away, and he keeps breathing.
