7. The Storm Inside #2
Clothes came off with a speed that was partly Canyon's inhuman efficiency and partly Jace's desperate fumbling, thermal torn over his head, jeans shoved down, the cold air hitting his cock like a slap, the shaft already rigid and leaking, the head dark and slick, standing from his body in a straight, urgent demand.
Canyon stripped himself in a blur of motion, and then they were skin to skin in the flickering candlelight, the storm hammering the walls around them, and the heat between them was a furnace, their bodies radiating into each other with an intensity that made the cold irrelevant.
Canyon lifted Jace, literally lifted him, hands under his thighs, pressing him back against the wall with Jace's legs wrapped around his waist, their cocks trapped between their bodies in a slick vise of skin and heat.
The position was pure dominance—Jace elevated, suspended, entirely dependent on Canyon's strength, his weight nothing to the creature holding him, and the vulnerability of it, the surrendered control, sent a surge of arousal through Jace so intense his vision blurred.
Their cocks ground together with each movement of Canyon's hips, deliberate, rolling thrusts that slid their shafts along each other, the heads bumping and sliding in the shared lubrication of their combined precum, the thick veins of Canyon's massive shaft pressing against Jace's sensitive ridge with each stroke.
The sounds were wet and rhythmic, underscored by the storm's percussion, thunder and rain and the creak of logs under pressure, and Jace's moans rose to meet the wind, the two voices tangling in the dark.
"Your cock is so hard against mine," Canyon growled, his mouth at Jace's ear, his breath scorching.
"I can feel every vein, every pulse, your blood is singing, Jace, it's singing right under the skin, and I can hear it everywhere, in your throat, in your chest, in this—" He rolled his hips harder, grinding their cocks together with a pressure that made Jace cry out.
"Right here, where you're hardest, where the blood is loudest—"
Lightning flashed. In the strobe, Jace saw Canyon's face: feral, beautiful, the silver eyes blazing with a light that had nothing to do with reflection, the canines fully extended now, gleaming with saliva, and the expression on his face was not human control or predatory calculation but something in between, the face of a creature at war with its own nature, wanting simultaneously to devour and to worship, to consume and to protect.
The edge approached like a wall. Jace could feel it building, the tightening of his balls, the clenching of muscles deep in his pelvis, the gathering wave of pressure that was going to break through him like the storm was breaking through the mountain.
Canyon felt it too—Jace could see it in the tension of his jaw, the quickening of his hand, the hips that had abandoned rhythm for urgency.
"Bite me," Jace said.
The words left his mouth before his brain could veto them. They hung in the candlelit air between the crashes of thunder, and Canyon froze, his hand stilling, his body going rigid, the silver eyes blowing wide with a shock that looked almost like pain.
"Jace—"
"Not to feed. Just, the teeth. I want to feel them. I want to feel what you are while I come."
He lowered his mouth to Jace's neck. The canines pressed against the skin, not breaking it, but there, sharp points of pressure on either side of the carotid, the danger absolute and intimate and somehow, impossibly, more erotic than any other sensation Jace had ever experienced.
The teeth were smooth and hard and slightly cool, and they pressed with a precision that spoke to centuries of restraint, exactly enough pressure to dimple the skin without puncturing it, to let Jace feel the sharpness without the blood.
Canyon's hand resumed its stroke. Faster now, urgent, the grip tightening, their cocks sliding together in a slick frenzy of heat and friction, and the teeth pressed at Jace's throat, and the storm slammed into the lodge with a sound like the world ending, and Jace came.
The orgasm was the most intense of his life.
It started in his toes and swept upward like a brushfire, every muscle contracting in sequence, his cock erupting in powerful jets between their bodies, cum splattering Canyon's chest and stomach and hand in thick, hot pulses that seemed to go on forever, each one accompanied by a sound torn from Jace's throat that was half shout and half sob.
Canyon's teeth pressed harder at the peak, not breaking, not breaking, not breaking, and the danger of it, the razor's edge between pleasure and perforation, amplified the orgasm to something transcendent, something that went beyond physical release into a territory Jace had no map for.
Canyon came seconds later, his body surging against Jace's, his cock swelling and erupting in massive, thunderous pulses that painted Jace's stomach and groin in hot, thick ropes.
The sound he made was not human—a roar that vibrated the wall at Jace's back and rattled the cans on the shelves and resonated at a frequency that Jace felt in his bones.
His teeth withdrew from Jace's neck at the last second, replaced by lips and tongue that sealed over the imprinted marks with a tender, sucking kiss that tasted of restraint and devotion and a hunger that had not been sated but had, for the moment, been honored.
They slid down the wall together, ending on the floor in a tangle of limbs, the cold wood beneath them, the storm above them, their combined release cooling on their skin.
Jace's legs were trembling. His heart was doing something arrhythmic and wonderful.
Canyon's arms wrapped around him with a protectiveness that felt absolute, the embrace of something that had decided, on a cellular level, that harm would reach Jace only through its own destroyed body.
"Are you okay?" Jace asked.
"Yeah."
"No one has ever asked me that. Not once. In three hundred years."
Jace turned his head and pressed his lips to Canyon's jaw. "Maybe no one else knew it was what you needed to hear."
Canyon made a sound that might have been a laugh or might have been a sob—a compressed, broken exhalation that carried the weight of centuries of isolation, the cosmic loneliness of a creature that had existed among humans for three hundred years without ever being truly known by one.
His arms tightened. His face buried in Jace's hair.
And for a long time, the only sounds were the storm and their breathing and the slow, ancient heartbeat that Jace was beginning to feel as a second pulse inside his own chest.
***
Reed glanced up as they entered. His eyes moved from Jace to Canyon and back, and the corner of his mouth twitched, not a smile, but the acknowledgment of a man who recognized what he was seeing and had decided it was none of his business. Milo was too absorbed in his cards to notice.
The storm raged through the night. Jace sat by the fire with the others, Canyon across the room, and the distance between them was charged—a live wire, humming with the memory of teeth at his throat and the sound Canyon had made when he came, the sound that was not human, the sound that Jace wanted to hear again and again until it became as familiar as his own heartbeat.
When the storm finally broke at three in the morning, the silence it left behind was so profound it felt like a new kind of sound, the sound of the mountain settling back into itself, reclaiming the spaces the wind had invaded.
Jace stood at the window and looked out through the shutters, and the world beyond was washed clean: the trees glistening, the ground dark and saturated, the air sharp with ozone and wet pine.
Canyon appeared beside him. Not touching, but close enough that Jace could feel the heat.
"The storm is over," Canyon said.
"Something tells me it's just starting."
Canyon said nothing. But his hand found Jace's in the dark, and their fingers interlaced, and they stood together at the window while the mountain dried and the pines dripped and somewhere in the forest, voices that were not wolves and not human spoke to each other in a language older than the storm, discussing the scent of a human and a vampire who had, despite every rule of nature and every law of the mountain, chosen each other.
The group dynamic was shifting. Jace could feel it—a tension building between himself and the others, the awareness that his relationship with Canyon had moved beyond the professional boundary of guide and client into territory that made the retreat's premise feel quaint.
Reed accepted it with his characteristic equanimity.
Milo watched with wide eyes and a growing fascination that looked uncomfortably like worship.
But beyond the clearing, beyond the perimeter, something else was shifting too.
Canyon had mentioned it in passing, the territorial imbalance, the wolves' unusual aggression, the sense that the mountain's politics were in flux.
He'd framed it as a management issue, the kind of thing an immortal apex predator handles as a matter of routine.
But Jace had seen the way Canyon's eyes tracked the treeline during the storm, not with the confidence of a creature in control, but with the vigilance of one that sensed a threat it couldn't yet identify.
Something was coming.
And the mountain, which had kept its secrets for millennia, was beginning to whisper.