Chapter 7 The Fever
The Fever
Cora
Heat ate through my veins like acid, dissolving everything I’d ever been. My skin burned. My bones burned. My thoughts had been incinerated, leaving nothing behind but raw animal instinct.
“Cora, don’t be afraid.” Damon’s voice cut through the haze. “Focus on me.”
I tried to obey, but my vision swam, refusing to focus. Everything blurred together, shapes and colors bleeding into meaningless chaos. “Can’t… Can’t think.”
My body arched and twisted on its own, a puppet pulled by strings of raw biological command. It pressed against the sheets, against him, against anything that might offer relief from the inferno consuming me.
When Damon’s fingers brushed my cheek, pleasure-pain exploded through my nervous system. I screamed, the sound torn from somewhere primitive and desperate.
“I’ve got you,” he said, his voice unfaltering. “Let it out.”
I found the silk of his shirt, ripping the fabric in my compulsion to reach skin. I clawed at whatever I could reach. Cloth, flesh, it didn’t matter. I needed contact. Needed him closer. Needed everything.
“Hurts,” I whimpered against his chest. “Everything hurts.”
“I know it does.” He wrapped his arms around me, holding me through the convulsions. “But fighting makes it worse.”
I couldn’t stop fighting. Couldn’t surrender to what my instincts demanded. My mind screamed at me to resist, to maintain control, to not give in.
But my control was already gone. There was no world beyond the rough scrape of his chest against my nipples and the scent of dark earth that filled my lungs. There was only him above me, a shadow blocking out everything else.
My body begged shamelessly, rubbing, writhing, my nipples hard and aching. It was a demand, one that Damon heard without me saying a word. He lowered his mouth over a tight peak. Pleasure shot through me so violently I cried out, my nails scoring lines on his shoulders.
Damon groaned, sucking harder when my back arched off the bed. He claimed my other breast, squeezing, rolling my nipple between rough fingers.
More. Please. Now. My desperation was everywhere all at once, in my throat, in my head, on my tongue. I spoke and I didn’t, out of my mind with lust.
The partial claiming mark on my neck pulsed with each frantic heartbeat, an incomplete promise that tortured rather than satisfied. I shoved his hand against it, needing him to understand. Complete it. Finish it. Make it real.
“This is what’s driving you insane.” His thumb traced the marks, sending shockwaves through my system. “The incomplete bond.”
I guided his hand harder against the burning skin, whimpering. “Finish it,” I pleaded, past shame, past pride. “Please just finish it.”
“I will,” he rumbled. “But not yet.”
Damn him. I prayed Hades came out of his infernal realm and took Damon back. He’d fucking deserve it, a million times over.
His mouth trailed down, licking a hot path across my sternum, lower, lower. Finally, his breath fanned over my slick heat. I nearly came undone at the anticipation alone.
“Fuck, you smell like heaven.”
Then his tongue was on me, broad and unrelenting, lapping up my slick. My hips bucked violently, and I flailed like a mad thing. “More,” I begged, my hands fisting in his hair. “Please, Damon, more.”
He dragged his tongue up my folds, then closed his lips around my clit and sucked. I let out a hoarse cry, my thighs clamping around his head. If that took him aback, he didn’t show it. He took his time tormenting me, feasting on my juices like it was the only sustenance he needed.
When I shattered, it was messy and brutal. I jerked against his mouth as my orgasm tore through me. But even as I writhed, he held me down, extending every aftershock until I thought I’d break apart entirely.
Only when I collapsed back into the mattress did he rise over me, his mouth slick with my release.
“You taste like mine.” He pressed our mouths together, forcing me to taste myself on his tongue. His cock nudged my thighs, thick and demanding.
“Please,” I whispered. “Please, I need it.”
Damon growled, grinding his length against my swollen folds, coating himself in my slick. The blunt head caught at my entrance but didn’t push in. He teased me, dragging it over my clit again and again until I was sobbing with frustration.
I wasn’t Cora Ellis anymore. I was hunger, longing, and desperation in human form. And at this point I wasn’t beneath humiliating myself to get what I wanted. “Fuck me, Damon. Alpha. Fuck me.”
Something vicious flashed in Damon’s eyes, a darkness that I should have feared. But I couldn’t bring myself to question it. The next thing I knew, he was filling me. Slow and relentless. Brutal in its perfection.
A raw cry escaped my throat, a sound I didn’t recognize, that I had no power to stop. My inner muscles gripped him desperately, as if afraid he’d stop before I was fully consumed.
His cock stretched me, inch by relentless inch. His lips twisted into a snarl, and he grabbed my hips, holding me in place. My legs locked around his waist, and I hauled him closer, deeper.
The moment he entered me fully, I almost came on the spot. My bones melted, and my blood boiled. Nothing existed beyond the perfect fullness.
“Keep your eyes open,” Damon ordered. “I want to see you break.”
I couldn’t have refused him to save my life. Even with my mind hazy and lost, I forced myself to look straight at him.
“Good girl.” The approval in his tone sent heat flooding through me. “So good for me. Perfect.”
His scent enveloped me, dark and earthy and utterly male. It invaded my lungs, my pores, my brain. In that moment, I lived only for this, for his scent, his possession, his cock driving into me over and over.
My own submission coated my tongue, and I swallowed the taste of it, wanting more. His eyes burned in the dim light, a reflection of the fever that consumed me. Glowing, primal, utterly dominant. They never left mine as he thrust, each push plunging me deeper into the inferno.
I counted my heartbeats in the rhythm of his hips.
Our bodies made music together, the primal music of claiming, of mating.
His teeth grazed my throat, a promise of more marks to come.
I welcomed the pain. I deserved it for what I’d become, an animal in his arms, a mindless, desperate creature driven by need.
“You’re mine now.” He punctuated the words with a particularly deep thrust. “Say it.”
“Yours,” I cried out. “Yours.”
Take me. Break me. Claim every piece until nothing remains but you.
His hips slammed into mine, but the pain was just another sensation in the overwhelming flood.
I met his dominance with greedy desperation, my soaked pussy clenching around him, demanding more.
His grip on my hips bruised my skin as he pounded into me, claiming me as his own.
I didn’t care. Nothing mattered but the feeling of him inside me, breaking down every barrier I’d ever known.
I sobbed from pleasure, my body raw and wide open for him to take.
My power rose to meet him, a wild heat coiling in my gut.
It was a raw surge of life so potent it felt like it could sprout roots and tear through me from the inside out.
It had no direction, no form. It was just pure, chaotic energy, a storm inside me that only he could contain.
Demeter’s ancient bloodline screamed inside of me. The plants that had tried to push Damon away vibrated, their primal knowledge demanding his closeness.
His shadows answered, pouring from the corners, reaching for me. The living cold they emanated clung to my feverish skin, a chilling counterpoint to the fire he was driving into me.
The lines blurred. Between his body and mine, between the searing heat in my core and the chilling shades on my skin, between the pleasure and the utter annihilation of self.
I wasn’t just losing myself. I was being unmade, every defense I’d ever built dismantled with each perfect, punishing thrust.
I was losing myself, melting into him, consumed by the primal need and the brutal beauty of my own surrender.
This wasn’t like any fantasy I’d ever had.
It was messy and desperate and real. This was what it meant to be claimed by an Alpha like Damon Blackwood, to be stripped bare of everything but need and want and the knowledge that without him, I would shatter into a million pieces.
The vines coiling around the bedposts tightened in response to my mounting pleasure. Swirling darkness clung to each thorn, dripping from the greenery like blood.
He locked his hands on my hips as he fucked me into the mattress, plunging deeper with every stroke.
When he angled his hips, he hit something inside me that made stars explode behind my eyes.
My entire nervous system lit up like lightning as our bodies collided over and over again.
“Right there,” I cried out, clinging to him. “Don’t stop, please don’t stop.”
“Not stopping.” He was vicious and relentless, hitting that spot again and again. “Not until you’re ruined for anyone else.”
The taste of magic coated my tongue like ambrosia laced with ash, bitter and sweet all at once. The shadows slithered across the walls, closer, always closer. It was almost ironic. They were just as drawn to the maelstrom raging within me as I was to their master.
In his eyes I saw a reflection of everything I feared yet desired most. I was someone who could strip away the lies I told myself and see the truth beneath.
I was a woman desperate to be claimed by an Alpha like him.
Despite my better judgment or station in life or any other excuse I could conjure up, I couldn’t deny the truth.
I wanted him more than I’d wanted anything in my life.
And then I felt it. The base of him thickening, swelling as he drove closer to his own release. It was the most natural thing in the world, something that was supposed to happen to every Alpha when claiming their Omegas.