Chapter 41 #2
I meant it. I licked her like I'd been starving for her—because I had.
Weeks of watching her, wanting her, holding myself in check.
Every stroke of my tongue was deliberate, calibrated through the magic that told me exactly how much pressure, exactly where, exactly when to ease off and when to push.
I brought her up the curve with my mouth on her clit and my fingers working inside her, and when I felt through the thread that she was right at the edge—trembling, desperate, her thighs shaking against my shoulders—I held her there.
"Draven, please—"
"Not yet." I eased the pressure. Licked her slow. She whimpered and her hips tried to roll up into my mouth. "I want to feel you break."
I held her at the edge for ten more seconds. Fifteen. Until she was making sounds that weren't words, until her hands were fisted in my hair hard enough to sting, until the thread between us was taut and vibrating, a pressure heavier than magic building in the tension of it.
Then I sealed my mouth over her clit and sucked hard, curled my fingers, and let her fall.
She was louder this time. A full-throated cry that echoed off the walls, her back arching, her thighs clamping around my head.
I pinned her open with my forearm across her hips and worked her through it—tongue flat, fingers pressing, the magic channeling every wave of her pleasure back through me until I was shaking with it.
"That's it," I managed, my voice wrecked. "That's my girl. You're so fucking beautiful when you come."
Her thighs were still trembling when I started again.
"Draven—I can't—it's too—"
"One more." I didn't stop. I didn't ease off.
The magic made sure none of it hurt—every overstimulated nerve ending registering as pleasure instead of pain.
"One more for me, love. I want you dripping for me before I give you my cock.
I want you so open and so ready that all you feel is how good it is. "
She made a sound that was half-sob, half-moan. Her hand found mine on her hip and her fingers laced through mine and held on.
Her body was wound tight, oversensitized, every touch amplified.
I was unrelenting. Tongue on her clit, fingers deep inside her, the rhythm steady and unforgiving in its devotion.
My own cock was throbbing so hard I could feel my heartbeat in it, pressed painfully against the mattress.
I was not going to come from grinding against the linens.
But it was close. It was so goddamn close.
It hit her again—deeper this time, like a wave breaking.
Quieter—the kind that stole her voice. Her whole body locked, every muscle rigid, her mouth open in a silent cry.
Then she came apart. Shaking. Trembling.
Her cunt pulsing around my fingers in long, deep contractions that I felt in my own body through the thread.
I worked her through every second of it. Gentle now—slow strokes, soft pressure, easing her down. "I've got you," I murmured against her thigh. "You're safe. I've got you, love."
When I finally pulled back, she was wrecked.
Hair stuck to her forehead. Eyes barely open, glazed, the gold of them almost swallowed by black.
Her chest rising and falling fast, her skin flushed from her cheeks to her tits, her lips swollen from biting down on her own sounds. Spread out on the red linens.
Completely undone. And the incubus in me—the part that had spent thirty years cataloging every encounter as transaction, as control, as careful restraint—looked at her and didn't feel hunger. The restraint I'd carried my entire life released. The clenched thing at the center of me went open.
"Come here," she whispered. Her voice was raw. "Come up here."
I climbed up her body. Kissed her belly, her ribs, the valley between her breasts. Settled over her on my forearms and kissed her mouth—slow, deep—and let her taste herself on my tongue. She moaned into it, her hands sliding up my arms, over my shoulders, nails dragging down my back.
I positioned myself between her thighs. The head of my cock pressed against her entrance—slick, hot, swollen—and I had to close my eyes and breathe through the urge to push in hard.
"I'm going to go slow," I told her, my forehead against hers. "You're going to feel every inch of me." I pressed forward. Just the tip. Her breath hitched. "And you're going to love it."
The stretch. Even with how thoroughly I'd taken her apart, even with her body still trembling and open from everything I'd given her, even with the magic converting every sensation to pleasure, I was big and she was tight and the slow push of me into her was a thing that required patience.
I fed her another thread of magic—pleasure blooming where the stretch would have burned—and watched her face go slack with it.
"Oh." Her nails bit into my shoulders. "Oh, that's—"
"I know." Another inch. Slow. "You're taking me so perfectly, love. So good." Another inch. Her walls gripped me like a fist and I clenched my jaw hard enough to crack. "So tight and wet and perfect around me."
"More," she breathed. "All of it."
I gave her what she asked for. Slow. Relentless. Inch by inch until I bottomed out and my hips were flush against hers and I was buried so deep inside her I could feel her heartbeat around my cock.
I stopped. Forehead to forehead. Both of us breathing hard.
And the thread between us—it wasn't gossamer anymore. Wasn't a thread at all. It was thick and warm and alive, a pulse between us like a second heartbeat. Less like magic. More like inevitability.
"Tess." Her name was the only word left in my vocabulary.
"Move," she whispered. "Please."
I moved.
Slow. Deep. A roll of my hips that dragged me almost all the way out and then pressed me back in to the hilt. The friction was devastating—hot, slick, impossibly tight. The magic fed me her pleasure in real time and it layered over my own until I couldn't tell where I ended and she began.
This was different. I'd been inside women before—more than I'd ever admit, fewer than anyone assumed.
And every single time, the incubus had been there.
Watching. Measuring. Calculating the exchange.
But right now, buried inside Tess, the hunger wasn't just quiet.
It was gone. In its place was fullness, completeness—I'd been hollow my entire life and hadn't noticed until she filled me.
My magic wasn't taking from her. It was circulating between us, hers and mine, flowing back and forth like breath. Like a tide.
"You feel so good," I told her, and my voice was barely holding together. "So good around me. Like you were made for this." I thrust deep and held. Her eyes fluttered shut. "Like you were made for me."
"I was," she breathed, and a fracture line that had been building in my chest all night finally gave way.
I kept the rhythm slow. Deep. Deliberate.
Every stroke designed to hit the place inside her that the magic had already mapped.
Her legs wrapped around my waist. Her hands moved over my back, my arms, my chest—like she was trying to memorize me through her fingernails.
I watched her face—the way her brow creased, the way her lips parted, the way her eyes kept finding mine and holding.
"This is forever, right?" I asked her. Low.
Barely a question. Because I already knew.
I could feel it in the thing between us—no longer a thread, no longer magic, but ancient and certain and terrifying in its permanence.
I was asking because I needed to hear her say it.
Because the incubus who'd spent his whole life refusing to need anyone was lying on top of the only person who'd ever made the hunger stop, and he needed to hear her say it.
Her hand came up to my face. Thumb tracing my cheekbone.
"Yes," she said. "Forever."
And the thread caught fire.
Not the gossamer thing I'd been feeding her all night.
Not the humming, thickening cord that had been building between us with every time she came apart under me, every kiss, every whispered word.
It blazed white-hot through my chest, my bones, my magic—fusing where it touched, locking into place with a resonance I felt in every cell of my body.
My tattoos flared hot. The magic between us didn't just connect—it fused. Her heartbeat became mine. Her breath became mine. The incubus hunger didn't just go quiet. It transformed. Became a bond demanding to be kept.
One breath. That's all it took. One breath where everything I was rearranged itself around her.
And I knew—the way you know your own name, the way you know gravity—that this had always been there. Waiting for us to stop fighting it.
I saw it land on her face. Her eyes went wide. Her hand pressed flat over my heart and I felt her feel it—the bond settling into her the way it had settled into me.
"Draven," she whispered. Awe. Recognition. Home.
The next orgasm started to build—but this one was different.
I felt it through the bond before I felt it around my cock—a rising tide of heat and pressure that was hers and mine simultaneously.
The bond pulled us together. What she felt, I felt.
What I felt, she felt. Pleasure circuiting through both of us in an infinite loop that built and built and built.
I started moving harder. The discipline cracked. I couldn't hold the slow rhythm anymore—not with her pleasure and mine feeding into each other, not with the bond singing between us, not with the way she was looking at me like I was the only real thing in the world.
"You're mine," I told her, and the words came out raw, stripped of every wall I'd ever built. "You're mine and I'm yours and this is—"
"Yes." She pulled me down. Kissed me. Bit my lip. "Yours."
I brought her over the edge with me.
Her orgasm hit first—clenching, pulsing, her whole body arching into mine—and the bond slammed it into me and mine followed a heartbeat later. I came so hard my vision went white.
My face buried in her neck. Her name in my mouth, broken and reverent.
"Tess. Tess. Tess."
Her arms tight around me, her heat milking my cock in waves, the bond locking fully into place at the peak—permanent, unbreakable, ours—and the world dissolved into heat and light and her.
I didn't pull out right away.
I lowered myself onto her. Careful with my weight, but not careful enough to leave space between us. My face in her neck. Her heartbeat against my chest. Both of us shaking.
The bond hummed. Steady. Settled. Like it had always been there, waiting.
When I finally moved, it was to roll us so she was on my chest. Her cheek over my heart. Her body warm and loose against mine, her breathing already slowing. I pulled the linens up over her bare back and pressed my lips to the top of her head.
She made a soft sound. Nuzzled closer.
"Stay," she murmured. Already half gone.
I tightened my arms around her. Felt the bond pulse once—warm, golden, permanent.
"Always," I said.
She was asleep before the word finished leaving my mouth.
I turned my face into her hair.
She smelled like my soap and the sweet warm smell of her own skin underneath.
The thought I had never let myself think about anyone in my entire life arrived in the dark.
I love you.
I didn't say it out loud. She was asleep. I didn't need to. The thought was enough, the fact of it, the simple terrible yes of it, the way it landed in my chest without resistance because there was nowhere left in me that was still trying to keep it out.
I love you.
The incubus who had spent two centuries afraid of what he would take from someone had, in the end, given everything he had.
And she had taken it. And she had given it back.
I love you, Tess.
I closed my eyes.
I held her.