Chapter 7
Sorik
The Skybond surged through me in a single, enormous wave of power.
Something that went to the bone. Deeper.
Something I had no defense against. Something that tasted entirely of her.
Her energy filled the spaces I had occupied and kept going — past the nodes, past the nerve clusters, into whatever lived underneath my biology.
My heart? My soul? I had no name for the core of me that was no longer my own. I was hers.
She kissed me the way I'd watched her do everything all day. With her whole self. No half measures. No hedging. The wall was gone. Her lips devoured mine. Made me forget my own name. My history. The fact that I stood separate from her in a distinct body. I ceased to exist and melted into her.
My hands moved from her face. I buried one in her hair.
The dark strands crackled with static around my fingers, alive with the charge that ran between us.
She made a sharp, breathless sound — unguarded and immediate and entirely involuntary.
It went directly into my bloodstream and took up residence alongside everything else I would carry for the rest of my life.
I wrapped my free hand around her waist. Lust echoed inside the oldest, darkest parts of me.
My need to touch her pulled a sound from my chest I hadn't known I was capable of making.
Something low. Not language. More primitive than that. Raw and instinctive.
Her hands came up to my chest. Both of them.
Palms flat against the nodes that ran along my ribs.
The contact — the living pressure of her palms against the most sensitive points of my electrical system, the warmth through my clothing, the deliberate placement of them, there, exactly there — drove every remaining coherent thought directly out of my skull.
I turned. Put her back against the obsidian wall.
She met it — not passive, not yielding, but met it.
Her spine pressed into the stone as I pressed into her.
The full-length contact of her body against mine — her warmth along my entire front, the geography of her, the way she fit against me with the particular rightness of something the planet had calibrated for longer than either of us had been alive — produced a sound from somewhere in my chest that bypassed language entirely.
Low and rough and involuntary. The sound of a man who had held something enormous at arm's length all day and had finally been permitted to set it down.
Her hands stayed on my chest.
I looked down where they rested — small and capable and glowing.
The Skybond energy had begun to thread through her skin.
Mark her. The lines were blue-white and delicate at the edges of her fingers.
Our bond traveled through her as if the planet had already decided to claim her.
The sight of her marked hands against the most sensitive points of my electrical system hit my body like a lightning strike.
The discharge that followed raced up my spine, across my shoulders, across my chest, and arced visibly across the surface of my skin. Jumped the distance to hers.
She felt the energy's arrival. Her breath left her in a rush.
"That—" she started.
"That is what I feel." My voice was not my voice anymore. It was gravel. It was the sound of the storm on the rocks. "Every time you touch me."
Her eyes went dark. She pressed harder.
The next energy release was not subtle. It went through me in a wave that lit every node simultaneously, silver-white and immediate.
I braced one forearm against the wall above her head and bowed into it, into her, my forehead nearly dropping to hers as the surge worked through my system and out through my skin in arcs that jumped to her bare forearms where her sleeves had pushed up — and she gasped, sharp and bright and hungry — because she felt those too.
Felt them the way the Skybond intended, the energy completing its circuit through her nervous system and back into mine in a loop that didn't stop, that built on itself, that would keep building until one of us broke entirely.
I was going to break first. She would break me. I had known and accepted this truth the moment I first saw her.
"Sloane." Her name in my mouth was a warning and a plea and something else entirely — something I had no name for in any language, something that was only this moment and this woman and the impossible fact of her against me.
"I know," she said. Breathless. Her hands slid — deliberately, her eyes on my face as she did it — from my chest to my sides. The touch of her bare hands against my skin was—
There was no adequate comparison.
The nerve clusters ran the full length of my sides.
I knew this. Had known the physiology of my own body for thirty years.
What I had not known — could not have known — was what it felt like when those nerve clusters made contact with someone the planet had designed them to recognize.
When the bioelectric signature in her fingertips matched the resonance pattern locked into every node of my spine.
It felt like completion. It felt like the first breath almost drowning. It felt like the storm, finally, arriving.
My control vanished.
Restraint simply faded, burned off like morning mist. What remained was just this. Just her. Just the Skybond running white-hot between us. I’d obsessed over the shape of her all day. Finally, finally I would be allowed to learn it properly. To touch. To explore. To claim what was already mine.
Her jacket hit the ground. She tugged at my hair with hands that were not as steady as the rest of her usually was, and I found that devastating in ways I had not anticipated — the slight tremor in her fingers, the way she bit her lip in concentration, the sharp triumphant exhale when she kissed me.
Her hands were on my bare sides. The energy flow was immediate and enormous, and she arched against the wall with a sound I felt in the marrow of my bones.
Pleasure. Release. Need as out of control as my own.
"The nodes," she breathed.
"I know," I said. It was all I had.
"Does it hurt?" Her hands moved over them, traced the ridge of each one with the pads of her fingers. Every pass sent a visible arc of electricity racing across my skin where she touched. She watched it happen and her eyes darkened with desire. Curiosity. Longing.
"No." I turned my face against her temple. Her hair crackled with static against my cheek. "It feels like—"
"Like what?"
I pulled back enough to look at her. At the flushed reality of her face, her lips, the darkness of her eyes that had nothing clinical left in them. "Like you."
Something broke open in her expression. Her emotional walls were already rubble. This was something deeper. Something she’d been hiding. Protecting. Something I wanted more than I had ever wanted anything. Her heart. Her trust. Just her.
“This is crazy.” She made a small, undone sound and pulled me down to her mouth and the kiss was nothing like the first one. The first one had been recognition. This was claiming.
Her hands in my hair — short and sharp, pulling me closer — and the small pain of it went straight to my nodes and amplified outward as pleasure, as heat, as a surge that went through both of us simultaneously.
I lifted her.
Her legs wrapped around me and the full contact of her body against mine — the heat of her, her heartbeat pressed against my chest fast and insistent and perfectly synchronized with mine in a way it hadn’t been an hour ago.
I pressed her back into the obsidian. Shifted my hips.
Rubbed my hard, aching cock over her body exactly where I wanted to be.
"Sorik—"
"I have you," I murmured against her throat. Her pulse beat under my mouth — fast, frantic, alive — and I felt it in my lips. The Skybond responded. The current between us shifted. Intensified. Became all consuming. "I have you."
"I know." Her voice was wrecked and she said as if her trust in me surprised her. "I know you do."
Her hands moved over the nodes along my spine.
I pressed her harder into the wall. Outside, the storm raged, the lightning came in sustained pulses.
The thunder rolled through the stone beneath us and through us.
The charge in the cave air built and built until the Skybond was everywhere — in my palms, in her skin, in the arcs of electricity jumping between contact points.
The bond created a feedback loop of energy that ran from my nodes, through my hands, into her body, and back into mine.
A current that had stopped being two separate beings and become one.
She was everywhere. Inside me. Around me. Touching me. Her energy fused with mine.
Her warmth. Her scent. The sounds she made when the Skybond discharge moved through each point of contact between us. I understood in that moment I would never be the same. Never be what I was before I met her.
Did not want to go back.
The energy exchange had been continuous since the first contact, built with every touch, every point of contact between our bodies feeding the circuit.
The Skybond amplified and returned every current in waves that crested and built and crested again.
Our bond gave me access to her desire, her pleasure, her surrender.
Her need was as complete and undeniable as my own.
She could feel me, too.
I knew because her breath changed every time the feedback crested.
Because she made sounds that corresponded to nothing I did externally and everything that moved through the current between us.
Because when I looked at her face her expression was completely and devastatingly open — every layer stripped away to reveal the woman underneath, the sensual, needy female who had been watching me all day, hiding behind the scientist.
I stared at my mate.