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"You're tense."

"Because you keep talking instead of fucking," I snapped, trying to mask the sheer panic rising in my throat.

"We're not fucking," Gunnar growled back, his patience visibly fraying as his weight pressed down on me. "We're copulating."

"Then cop the fuck inside of me."

Gunnar hesitated for a second. His body clearly warring with his mind. He withdrew slightly—just half an inch—before pushing firmly back in.

I squeezed my eyes shut behind my dark glasses as a blinding wall of fire spread through my core. It felt like being impaled on a red-hot iron stake. I couldn't handle another fraction of an inch, let alone the rest of his massive length.

Gunnar felt my body shudder beneath him. "That's it." He shifted his weight back onto his knees. "We're stopping."

"Don't you dare!"

I couldn't fail this. If we didn't consummate this marriage tonight, if there was no blood on the sheets, my mother would know. The alliance would be questioned, my cover would be compromised, and my entire carefully laid trap would crumble before it even began.

I snapped my legs up, wrapping my calves tightly around Gunnar's waist, locking him to me with every ounce of strength I had.

Gunnar cursed violently under his breath. The desperate clamp of my thighs and the slick friction of my heat pulled at his instincts. His wolf snapped forward, and his hips rocked into me involuntarily, driving him another brutal inch into my tight channel.

A high, helpless whimper broke from my throat.

"Fuck, Rosalind, that's enough," Gunnar rumbled, his voice thick with a mix of primal lust and genuine distress. He grabbed my hips with his massive hands, his fingers digging into my skin as he tried to pull his cock back out of me.

Panic overwhelmed my logic. I dug my nails into the thick muscles of his back, tearing through the fabric of his tracksuit, and angled my hips up to trap him inside me.

"Rosalind," Gunnar warned, a dangerous growl vibrating in his chest as he fought against my grip, pulling back again.

He was going to retreat. He was going to leave me unclaimed, incomplete, a failure.

Nope. Not happening. Failure was not an option. I was not going back to my mother's den. I was going to get my freedom. If that meant being split in two, so be it. If the brute wasn't going to claim me, I would claim him.

I lunged upward, throwing my head back, and let my wolf take over. My upper lip pulled back, my incisors lengthening into sharp, lethal fangs, and I slammed my teeth deep into the heavy junction where Gunnar's neck met his shoulder. My fangs sank through muscle. The metallic tang of hot, copper blood exploded over my tongue as I marked my husband with a claiming bite.

Gunnar let out a raw, guttural howl that echoed off the high ceiling of the dark bedroom. It wasn't pain. When a wolf marked their mate, it was better than sex. Or so I was told.

The pleasure of the bite shattered his control. His wolf exploded to the surface, wild and untamed. In one single, blind, territorial reflex, Gunnar drove his hips forward with brutal, crushing force—shoving his massive cock all the way inside me to the root.

His cry of pleasure mixed with my cry of pain. A loud, piercing scream tore from my lungs as he filled me completely, splitting my innocence wide open in the dark.

CHAPTER SEVEN

GUNNAR

The sweet pain of her bite tore right through my lingering control. My wolf roared, taking over in a split second of pure, untamed instinct. I slammed my hips forward with everything I had and filled her to the root.

Rosalind's impossibly tight sheath clamped down around my shaft. To call her virgin pussy a vice was too loose for context. She was a fucking tourniquet. Her sweet heat was a hydraulic clamp engulfing every single inch of me.

Compassion vanished.

Logic fled.

It was bliss. Pure, unadulterated, blinding bliss like nothing I had ever known in my twenty-five years of existence. I wasn't even sure I was alive anymore. If I was dead, this was the way I wanted to go—with my wife’s fangs buried in my neck and her tight cunt choking the absolute life out of my dick.

The same body I'd been terrified of breaking had stretched around mine and let me in. Every inch of my cock was buried inside my wife, surrounded by impossible heat and wetness, her muscles gripping me so tightly I could feel every involuntary contraction of her body around mine.

My brain knew exactly what was happening. Pelvic muscles contracting. Nerves firing. Blood flooding tissue. A series of predictable biological responses I'd studied and understood.