Chapter 10 The Bonding Battle
THE BONDING BATTLE
ELARA
I’m once again on my knees before him and Lucien’s fingers slide back up my spine, claws lightly grazing the glowing sigil. Its veins pulse faster, writhing like it senses what’s coming—what he is about to make me feel again.
“Shackle-Soul,” he murmurs against my skin, voice thick with possession and promise, speaking its name for the first time. “Time to come out and play.”
His breath is fire down my neck as he moves behind me, and I feel his cock rise, a steel pole seeking my raw and swollen sex as his body fits to mine with shocking inevitability.
“It wants your joy and love and your fear, Elara,” he growls, fisting one hand in my hair, and yanking my head back to bare my throat to the promise of his fangs. “And it wants my agony.”
He drives into me with one hard, slow thrust that punches a scream out of my lungs. “Well, then,” he purrs, lips grazing my throat, “let’s drown it. In us.”
The sigil flares, violent and molten, answering him with a shudder that rocks me forward. My hands grip the sheets, knuckles white, breath splintering as he begins to move. Each thrust sends the magic screaming through me, pleasure twisted sharp enough to sting.
I feel a shivery drag against my mind. Like a steel broom brushing across my senses.
Light enough to feel benign. Dark enough to command. To devour.
Let me in, a whisper into my thoughts.
Let me see it. Let me break it.
I jerk in Lucien’s hold, gasping at this new sensation, beautiful and obscene in the way his voice echoes inside my skull, his body claiming mine—and it rips a cry from my throat. “Y-you can speak into m-my mind? H-how…?”
“How?” His voice curls around the question like a hand at my throat. “By drinking you. By fucking you. By calling you home. And this is only the first surprise, little one.”
Heat spirals low and wild, the beginnings of an orgasm already clawing up my spine.
Then—
I hear another voice.
A slithering whisper that’s not mine and not Lucien’s.
He cannot save you. You are mine.
The sigil burns. I gasp.
Lucien snarls. “There you are.”
He thrusts harder, deeper, dragging a strangled moan from me.
Show yourself, he commands, even in the privacy of my mind. Face me like a real predator instead of hiding inside what’s mine. “She is not yours!”
The creature answers Lucien’s growl with a hit of scorching pain across my spine that almost folds me in half.
Lucien catches me, pulling me upright against him. His hand clamps around my throat, a restraint, a welcome anchor and a vicious claim.
“Don’t you dare lock yourself away,” he rasps, lips brushing my ear. “You belong to me. You give me every sound, every tremble. Let it feel you choosing me.”
He bites my neck in a fast, brutal, claiming. I scream, pleasure exploding through my veins as he drinks. And then…liquid erupts into my own mouth.
It takes a moment to realize that I’m tasting Lucien.
His blood floods my mouth from the punctured wrist he brings to my lips.
With a rabid moan, I latch on, feel instinct takes over. Then deep, pure magic.
Lucien groans into my skin. “That’s it, my love. Drink. Take everything.”
The bond snaps open like a star going supernova. Images of his hunger, his fury, his devotion pour into me.
So do the creature’s.
A vision of chains.
Of an altar.
Of witches chanting as they poured their coven-soul into me.
Of them whispering: If he comes for her again, we take him.
Lucien sees it too because now we are merged.
His roar is wordless, primal and annihilating, and it tears through our joined mind. Over my dead eternity.
The creature screeches, my spine arching violently as the sigil lashes outward like tentacles of molten light. Lucien tightens his grip around my hips, grounding me, keeping me tethered, to his body, his mind, his raging cock.
“Come for me,” he orders, voice shaking with the effort of holding back the storm inside my soul. “Come hard. Let it drown in you.”
His hips snap forward, a brutal rhythm meant to burn the Shackle-Soul out with pleasure.
I convulse—once, twice, three times—each orgasm ripping through me harder than the last, each one making the creature recoil, weaken, unravel.
Lucien leans in, forehead pressed to the back of my neck.
Now, Elara, he hisses inside my mind. Push it out. Will it out. Condemn it to the hell it belongs.
The final orgasm crashes over me so violently I nearly black out—white-hot, bone-deep, a full-body shudder that throws the creature into a psychic scream.
And in that moment, Lucien reaches for the dagger.
The blade hums.
My sigil twists.
The Shackle-Soul writhes, desperate, cornered.
Lucien lifts the dagger to my spine.
And my entire world narrows to one single, burning truth…
He’s going to carve this thing out of me and, holy gods, I will let him.