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I backed off before she could climax.

Then gave her more.

Then less.

Then more.

Nell was shaking by the time I moved up her body. My weight settled on her. Her legs wrapped around me with a grip that communicated her feelings about the pacing in precise physical terms.

I lined my cock up with her swollen entrance. Her chest moved fast. Her nails dug into my shoulders. The sharp points of them nearly made me give up the game.

"Tell me to stop," I said, one last time.

Her eyes were open. The hazel blown almost entirely dark. My mind was playing tricks on me, or I was seeing my wolf reflected back in her eyes, because there was a flash there. A spark of gold, like a cat flashing a warning.

I realized then that it didn't bother me that she was human. It didn't matter that she would never shift and run with me. This woman was my perfect match in every other way.

"Please."

That was all I needed from her. She reached up and pulled me down. I thrust inside her, deep, fully seating myself inside my queen.

We moved together with the ease of two people who had known each other's rhythm from the beginning of time. There was no urgency. No more pleas. No more demands. Just connection.

I brought her up slowly. Taking her higher than I had taken her before. Reading every signal. Every change in her breathing. Every shift of her hips.

I stopped holding back. She stopped pushing me away. The room held all of it; her voice, my name in it, climbing and breaking and open.

She arched off the bed. Her hands gripped my ass as I pushed even deeper. Her voice broke wide open. What came out of her was raw and unguarded and real. It was not stop or no or fuck you. It was a surrender, in only the way that Nell could offer it.

Her legs shook. Her core clenched. The contractions yanked my own climax from my balls, holding my dick in a chokehold. I would've begged for mercy, but I wanted more.

I held her through it. My face in her hair. My arms around her. The wolf finally, completely, profoundly sated.

After the knot settled down, I reluctantly withdrew from her. She was limp on the bed. Eyes closed. A half-smile on her lips. I pulled her back to my chest. She came willingly. All the fight had gone out of her.

I swiped the long locs of hair away from the nape of her neck and ran my lips from her shoulder blades, trying to decide exactly where I'd leave my mark. That's when I discovered the raised skin.

There was already a mark there.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

NELL

Iwas running again. My body moved through the dark of the dream with an ease and speed I had never had in waking life. My feet barely touched the ground. The air was warm and dry. Iron-rich and sun-drenched with the smell of that incense resin my grandmother used to burn. The scent was dark and slightly sweet.

Beside me, the wolf ran.

I had seen Magnus's wolf twice: in the park the night everything changed, and in the garden when he had shifted back and stood in the moonlight. I knew the color of him. Gray, almost silver, enormous, with those amber eyes that held too much intelligence for an animal.

But… this wolf was black.

Not dark gray. Not the gray of storm clouds or old pewter. Black, the way the sky between stars was black. A deep, complete, absolute darkness that absorbed the surrounding light rather than reflected it.

Its eyes were different, too. Not amber. They were a gold so deep it was almost bronze. But familiar.

The face was different from Magnus's wolf. The shape of the skull, the line of the jaw, the way it moved. It was not the rectangular power of a wolf. It was something longer, more fluid, the kind of grace that came from a body built for climbing as much as for running.

I had dreamed of this wolf before. Not once. Many times. So many times that the dream had the worn quality of a path used so often it had become a road. I knew the feel of it before I was fully in it, the way you knew the layout of your childhood home in the dark.