Chapter 25
APEX
The roar is still moving through the territory.
I can hear it rolling through the canopy, bouncing back from the old towers to the east. My chest is still coming down from it. My lungs. All of me.
She's asleep.
Her weight on me hasn't changed. Same warmth, same fit against my chest. But her scent has.
I felt it shift while I was still inside her—the moment it happened, before she knew, before her body caught up to what mine had already done.
My hands went to her belly before I understood why. They're still there.
I don't move them.
The knot is softening. Still inside her—my cock still filling her, the vibration running lower than it has in three weeks. Not climbing. Just there. Warm. Her walls pulse around me in long slow waves she isn't choosing to make. Her body doing what it needs to do.
She smells like mine. She's smelled like mine since the first knotting. But underneath the salt and the warmth and three weeks of the rut on her—there's something else now. Something I don't have a word for. Something I'm going to be guarding for a very long time.
I'm hard. Of course I am. The urgency has gone out of it—three weeks of running and now it's finished. Still want her. Still feel her warm around me. Something settled under the wanting that wasn't there before.
My hands. Flat. I hold them still.
Outside, the territory is quiet. The birds went silent when I roared and haven't come back. I can smell the perimeter in every direction—wet stone, new growth, the river to the east, the ruins. All mine. And through my palms, the warmth that wasn't there yesterday.
She breathes. Her ribs expand against my arms. I feel every one.
Mine.
Hold still.