55. Chapter Fifty-Five
~Kalo~
The realization came before I even opened my eyes: although darkness surrounded me, nothing about it felt cold or forbidding. No nightmares had haunted my sleep. There was only warmth and the steady rhythm of another heartbeat beneath my cheek.
Leo.
His arm remained draped securely around my waist, even in sleep, and I smiled to myself before cracking my eyes open.
Soft morning light spilled through the curtains, painting pale gold across the room. It caught the sharp lines of Leo's face, turning the man I loved into a work of art.
Loved. The word still felt fresh and new, but utterly true.
Perhaps sensing me watching him, Leo's eyes slowly opened. It took him only a heartbeat to focus on me before a smile spread across his face, sleepy and entirely unguarded.
"Morning," he murmured.
"Good morning."
He brushed a thumb gently across my cheek, as though reassuring himself that I was really there. I suspected I was doing exactly the same thing, because I couldn't seem to stop looking at him.
"What?" he asked quietly.
"I'm just remembering."
His expression flickered with concern. "I thought…"
"No. Not those memories."
The centuries I'd surrendered to the dragons remained gone, little more than an empty space I knew had once been full.
Perhaps surprisingly, I found that I didn't miss them at all.
It was like looking at a sealed door and knowing there had once been a room beyond it, without feeling any urge to step inside.
"I'm remembering how convinced I was that accepting our bond meant losing my freedom."
Leo's hand settled over mine. "And now?"
I turned my hand over until our fingers naturally intertwined, the familiar sparks dancing pleasantly beneath my skin.
"Now I think I never truly knew what that word meant."
He waited patiently, not rushing me to explain as I tried to find the right words.
"For so long, every choice I made actually belonged to someone else. Even surviving stopped being my decision when I could no longer die. But I chose to love you, and choosing to give myself to you is freedom.”
Affection and wonder flickered across his face before he leaned forward and kissed me, slow and unhurried, with none of the desperation that had coloured so many of our earlier embraces. At last, no countdown hung over our heads. We could finally take our time.
"Let me," Leo murmured, and before I could ask what he meant, he shifted our bodies, rolling me over and pressing me onto my back. His palm flattened against my chest, holding me there with gentle insistence.
In so many of our encounters up to this point, I’d been the one leading, but Leo clearly had something in mind. Methodically and unhurried, he undressed me before stripping just as carefully himself and settling his weight back over me.
The first touch of his cock against mine sent so much electricity rushing through me that I almost forgot how to breathe. He was already half-hard, and I was getting there fast, blood rushing quickly south as he wrapped one hand around both of us.
"Fuck," I breathed, and his mouth quirked in satisfaction as his grip tightened and he started to move with slow, measured strokes that made my hips urge to buck up to meet them. But his other hand pressed against my hip bone, holding me steady.
The friction was perfect, somehow too much and not enough all at once. I could feel every ridge of him in the way his cock slid against mine, slick with pre-cum. Watching my face carefully, he adjusted his angle with careful precision until I groaned from the perfection of the sensation.
"Leo…"
His name came out rough, and he leaned down to kiss me, swallowing whatever I was going to say. His tongue moved with the same thorough attentiveness of his hand, the combination taking me apart piece by piece until I could barely remember my own name.
His rhythm never faltered, each stroke building on the last as pressure mounted in my spine. I wasn’t used to being the one being catered to, but Leo had me pinned, physically and emotionally, and all I could do was let him work.
"That's it," he murmured against my mouth. “I’ve got you.”
That assurance, and the reverence in his voice as he said it, pushed me over the edge.
Pleasure crested suddenly, white-hot and overwhelming, and I came with a broken moan, spurting all over his fingers.
Leo followed seconds later, his whole body going taut and a low groan rumbling through his chest as he pulsed against me.
Still stroking gently, he worked us both through the aftershocks until I was shivering, oversensitive and sated. When he finally released me, he lifted his hand, covered with both our cum, as if unsure exactly what to do next.
That, I could help with.
“Let me.”
I repeated his earlier words with a teasing smile before bringing his fingers to my lips and sucking them clean, one by one. Leo’s mouth hung open as he watched me, his just-emptied cock twitching impatiently.
“When did you learn how to do that?” I asked as I pulled him back onto the bed with me, wrapping my arms around his solid frame. Jerking both of us off at once wasn’t something we’d ever discussed.
“I, uh… I told you I did some research,” he reminded me sheepishly. “I read about a lot of different things. This one sounded interesting.”
“I’m excited to see what else you discovered,” I teased as my lips found his.
We lingered together for a while longer, until eventually, other voices could be heard outside our door.
Leo sighed softly. “Speaking of time, I guess it’s time to get to work. There’s a lot to do before I start planning our ceremony.”
“Ceremony?” The word caught me off guard, and Leo frowned.
“The mating ceremony,” he reminded me. “We still have to make our bond permanent before the full moon tonight.”
Right. In the relief over surviving Death, I had nearly forgotten. “What do you need me to do?”
“I’ll make a list for you,” he promised, completely unironically.
“We can’t do it together?”
He shook his head in apology. “I can’t. The Alpha has put me in charge of a task force that needs my attention.”
“And you can’t take a day off?” I teased.
Of course, he answered me as if it was a serious question. “Well, I could. No one would stop me, but I have a duty to the pack.”
What he meant, perhaps without realizing it, was that he chose to put his duty to his pack above his own personal pleasure, just as he always had.
And that was a kind of freedom too, I supposed.
Freedom didn’t mean the absence of ties; it meant choosing the ones that mattered.
And as I watched my responsible mate pull himself out of bed to begin his day, already muttering about schedules and charts, I knew I would choose him that night at our ceremony, and over and over again, every day for the rest of my life.