Chapter 27 Stark
STARK
Meryn takes off on Anassa like an arrow from a crossbow.
I leap to Cratos’s back, and we follow behind, speeding up as Anassa pushes herself faster and faster. Their bond is a loop, sending their tumult of anger back and forth endlessly.
I don’t know exactly what happened in that broken-down castle courtyard, but Meryn’s emotions are far too strong to stay contained. They’re leaking through the mate bond—a potent cocktail that makes my muscles tense up, eager to spring into action, eliminate the threat.
We speed past forests and farmland, up and down hills.
Meryn’s tangled, messy feelings start to manifest physically: dark tendrils of shadow wrapping around her, twisting and curling.
“Anassa’s rage is all-consuming,” Cratos shares. “She’s bearing what she can from Meryn, but they’re both close to the breaking point. We need to intervene.”
I send him silent assent, and he picks up his pace until we’re running next to Anassa and Meryn, wind whipping by us.
Out on the battlefield, I could sense her getting pulled under by her power. I don’t understand what happened next. But the door she opened in her magic somehow opened to me as well.
If I hadn’t helped her shoulder it, she might not have come back from the edge.
I haven’t wanted to think about everything that came along with it: the overwhelming connection between us and the insistent, excruciating desire that coursed through me like a sickness.
And now she’s teetering on that cliff once again.
Meryn turns her head toward me, her hazel eyes anguished.
“I’m here,” I tell her. “Don’t carry it alone.”
She isn’t opening up to me, though. When I test the boundaries between us, her mind is closed off, a walled garden.
Cratos guides us into dense woods, leaving the dirt farm paths and rolling hills behind. Anassa is still bristling, snarling as we slow to a walk.
We reach a clearing, and I slide down from Cratos’s back, turning to watch as Meryn dismounts. She stumbles toward me, then suddenly stops, eyes wide.
And lets out a ragged scream of frustration.
The sound tears through the woods, cracking the peace of this wild spot like the strike of a hammer. Birds rise from the trees around us and take flight, and Meryn’s shadow magic swirls and sparks after them, like an echo of their discontent.
Behind us, Anassa is just as worked up, hackles raised. She snaps at Cratos, who bites right back. The two of them circle each other and then bound off, working their aggression out their own way.
“Let it out,” I command, leveling Meryn with a look. I know there’s more there, raging. I know because I can feel it inside her, just barely caged.
The next sound that rips from her throat is a growl, almost animalistic. And then the shadows around her surge, shooting out in every direction.
Darkness rushes through the forest like a wave. All around us, tree trunks creak, a few crashing to the ground in a clamoring echo of Meryn’s pained cry.
The darkness flows right over and past me, but it whispers against my skin. A few tendrils linger as the rest of her magic expands and pulses. It murmurs in my ears, rifling through my hair, itching at my skin like anger embodied.
And still, it’s building in her, not fully released.
I’ve been trying so hard to be on good behavior.
I’ve stayed calm, controlled—for her. To help her, to be the quiet voice for her, the refuge in this storm.
But maybe that’s not what she needs.
Maybe she doesn’t need a steady, silent anchor she can moor herself around.
Maybe she needs to be met where she is, violence with violence. Maybe she needs someone who has the strength to ride the wave of her ferocity with her.
“Hit me,” I demand.
She steps toward me, neck craning to look up, eyes searching in their wildness. Her breath hitches, chest heaving. “What?”
I lower my face toward hers. Whatever she sees nearly makes her flinch.
My hand wraps around her throat, gentle but a warning all the same. I try not to stroke the tattoos I’ve marked so carefully into her delicate skin.
“I don’t like to repeat myself, princess. I am not a very patient man. Stop fucking bottling up your feelings. You need help to get them out? I’m going to tell you this one last time: Hit me. Hurt me. I can take it.”
In fact, I’m craving it. Her power on me, her fist on my face—the pain would be a great distraction from the torment of her presence.
She tilts her chin, always so fucking stubborn. “Or what, Alpha?”
I put my mouth to her ear so she can’t miss a single word, and she stills at the movement. “Or I’m going to take you over my knee and spank you like the obstinate brat you are.”
Meryn shoves me hard and draws back quickly, her lush pink lips popping open in surprise. It takes all of me not to stick a finger in her mouth and see how she’d react, if she’d close her wet heat around it or bite me viciously.
Several obvious emotions cross her face in quick succession: insult, outrage, and then wrath.
But her cheeks are flushed, eyes glazed with clear arousal.
Interesting.
Before I can provoke more from her with just words, she finally acts. Snarling, she flashes a hand in my direction, unleashing an impelling blast.
I dodge it, but the blow still hits my shoulder. My savagery rises to answer, my own power coiling like a predator inside me. I take a few steps back and lift my arms, giving her a moment to brace before my magic slams into her.
Her magic rises up to meet mine. The shadows from her shadebending power form a wall in front of her—acting on their own in response to her fury, I suspect. Our power collides, two waves of force impacting each other and crushing everything between them.
Her shadows explode outward, hissing up toward the treetops and streaking along the verdant forest floor.
Meryn’s lips curl into a menacing smile that lights me on fire. The shadows gather for another blow, and without hesitation, I lash out again and again.
The second blow is harder. The third, harder still.
Vibrations shake the trees around us, leaves and pine needles falling in a shower of green.
We circle each other, feet moving, stances ever changing. We attack from different angles, catching each other’s power and pushing back. The song we dance to is the pounding drum of our furious heartbeats, resounding in our ears.
The pulse is escalating, getting faster and faster with each clash until it’s a relentless onslaught of my magic slamming outward, hers meeting it blow for blow.
There’s a change in her face the moment before she pulls a dagger, darting toward me.
She winks in and out as she approaches, rifting like a Kryptos. I let go of my grip on my power and pull my own knife, waiting for her to step in close.
Meryn ducks under my last impelling wave and darts in. Her slash comes close to me, but I’m already spinning to the side. My body lights up with wicked satisfaction.
We both drop into fighting stances, just like in our hours upon hours of training in my office. Even as I relish the fight, some part of me catalogs her stance, her angles. Noting for later what she still needs to work on, how to guide her and make her better.
She slashes forward, and I bring my knife up against hers. Metal screeches on metal, glinting in the dappled forest light.
My body, my mind, is tuned to her. She’s so busy that she’s lowering her walls, and the mate bond connection from our wolves is seeping through. I sense her need for more, and I come at her with a flurry of blows.
She responds with a menacing grin. This beautiful, feral woman will either be the end of me or the start of a beginning that I don’t know how to face.
Our limbs meet, our daggers slash. I don’t hold back. She doesn’t want me to hold back. The sensation is electric.
We fight until we’re drenched in sweat and struggling through blows. I disarm her, dagger spinning from her hand, but in the same breath she draws another knife from her hip and strikes at me again.
I hiss as the blade skitters along my side, drawing a line of blood.
She hesitates, wondering if she’s hurt me. Taking advantage of it, I whip back toward her.
We exchange blow for blow, each of us landing one or two, dodging and blocking the rest.
Eventually, I have her on the back foot and get inside her guard. I disarm her again and press forward, aiming another blow. But I’m not anticipating her dirty tricks.
She hits me with an impelling blast from the back. It knocks me in the shins, and I stumble.
Meryn presses the advantage in half a breath, knocking me over and pinning me. Her hand presses into my throat, applying just enough pressure to declare victory. I swallow, her fingers on my neck. Her eyes follow the bobbing movement, then flick back up to mine.
Her body is pressed close, warm, her chest heaving as she pants. A bead of sweat rolls down her chin and falls to my chest. I want to lean up and lick the other beads from her skin.
Does she taste as sweet as she smells?
I stop straining against her hold, dropping my dagger. Then I wrest my hands from her grip and catch her waist, pulling her closer. Pulling her into me.
This is a dangerous fucking game I’m playing.
Meryn’s eyes lock onto mine, and electricity surges between us. “What was that yesterday, Stark?” Her voice is quiet but heated. “What happened between us, with my power?”
It takes all my strength to look away from her lips, moving so close to mine.
“I don’t know,” I admit.
Cratos didn’t know, either—the only thing we could agree on was that it existed separately from his and Anassa’s mate bond. It’s something that seems uniquely tailored to me and Meryn. And for the past twenty-four hours, I’ve been trying so hard not to fixate on it.
On the way it felt to be united in our minds and what it unleashed in both of us.
“Should we try it again?” she asks tentatively, and I nearly throw her off me.
I don’t know what I’ll do if that connection comes rushing back.
If it once again surfaces my fascination with her, the pull I’ve tried so hard to bury since the moment I first saw her fight.
When I saw the untamed fire in her eyes and hungered to free it.
I wanted to revel in its burn, just lucky enough to be in its heat.
I ache for her, and I hate her for it.
I hate myself for not being good enough for her, for bringing out the worst in her.
I absolutely fucking loathe the Sovereign Alpha for issuing a demand that I need to stand against. For putting me in a position where doing my duty—protecting Meryn—means denying myself the thing I want the most.
And despite all this, I open my mouth, and what speaks is my yearning. “Yes.”
She’s calmer now, and yet she doesn’t need her anger to trigger it. She must sense where the tie between the two of us lives, because I can tell the moment she lets her walls back down.
That dark connection between us reforges. Her power rushes in, my mind opening to receive it.
To receive her.
It’s intoxicating.
I’m inside every inch of her, while still at a remove, watching her through my own eyes. I sense the way the heat of my hands on her waist is affecting her. Feel the hitch in her breath as she studies my mouth, then raises her eyes back up to mine.
Sensation, everywhere. Power, too. Our minds are twined together tight.
And I can no longer hide the desire coursing through me.
I watch as she realizes the depth of it. Her heart starts to pound for a different reason, nipples hardening.
I know the moment she starts getting wet for me.
Gritting my teeth, I resist.
The only way to protect her from Siegrid—and from me—is to resist this pull.
Fuck, why did I let myself give in to this? In to my need to touch her, to hear her moans and know I’m the cause?
She squirms against my hold, as overwhelmed as I am. Her ass drags across my crotch accidentally, and as I grow half hard, I sense her registering it. The blood rushes down to my cock, and she senses that, too.
With a dazed moan at the back of her throat, she rubs herself against me again—intentionally this time.
And again.
Her face flushes that pretty pink again. I can feel her hot breath as she pants, the heave of her chest. Her arousal and mine intermingle until they’re at a fever pitch.
Slowly, Meryn lowers her face to mine, then pauses. Holding back, not crossing the line. I can almost taste her desire, hot and wild.
Her mouth falls open.
Fuck it.
I’m done denying myself.
I surge up, flipping us over so she’s beneath me, and bring my mouth down to hers.