Chapter 12 #4
Heat floods me in pulses. His cock throbs, each spasm releasing another rush of warmth that fills me, overflows, drips down where we're joined.
He comes and comes, his body emptying into mine, and his knot holds every drop inside me.
There's nowhere for it to go. I'm sealed around him, stuffed full of his cock and his cum, and still he keeps pulsing.
His knot grinds against the spot his fingers found, the spot his cock has battered with every thrust, and the pressure is relentless. Constant. Inescapable.
His orgasm triggers mine. My spine bows off the mattress and a scream tears from my throat, overlapping with the sound still rumbling from his chest. My walls clamp down on him, milking his cock while his knot locks us together.
I'm coming so hard I can't breathe, can't think, can't find my name beneath the white-hot flood of pleasure that keeps crashing through me.
He's still pulsing inside me. Each throb grinds his knot against that spot and triggers another aftershock, another clench, another helpless moan that spills from my lips.
I'm drowning in it. Drowning in him. The fullness, the heat, the inescapable reality of being tied to this male who has ruined me for anyone else.
We're tied. Locked together, his knot holding him inside me, neither of us capable of moving apart.
He collapses over me, bracing his weight on shaking arms, his face buried in my throat.
“How long will it last?”
His lips brush my throat. “My knot won't release until my body decides we're finished.” His hips shift, and his knot moves inside me, pressing against over-sensitized flesh. “And I'm nowhere near finished with you.”
His arms wrap around me, crushing me against his chest. My fingers dig into the muscle of his back, my face pressed to the curve of his throat, his pulse hammering against my lips.
His knot holds us locked together, his cock still buried inside me, and I don't want it to end.
Don't want to return to a world where we exist as separate bodies instead of this single shaking creature we've become.
Minutes pass. Maybe longer. I lose track. His knot softens. The pressure inside me eases by degrees, the impossible fullness shrinking into what my body can release. He groans against my hair as his cock deflates, and I whimper at the loss before I can stop myself.
“Easy.” His lips brush my temple. “I have you.”
His knot slips free with a wet sound that makes my face burn. His cock follows, sliding from my body in a rush that leaves me hollow and aching and empty in ways that make me want him back inside me already.
I don't have time to mourn the loss. He grips my hips and rolls onto his back, settling me on top of him.
My thighs fall open on either side of his hips, my knees bracketing his waist, my palms splayed against his chest to steady myself.
His softening cock rests trapped between us, slick and hot and still twitching.
His release spills from my body in a warm flood, sliding down to pool where I press against his abdomen.
I should be embarrassed, should want to hide the evidence of what we’ve done.
His nostrils flare as our combined scents bloom around us, musk and salt and the unmistakable signature of sex.
His dark eyes grow darker still, and his hands tighten on my hips.
“Every Draveki who comes near you will understand.” His words carry a weight that lodges beneath my sternum. “The marks. The scent. They'll recognize you're mine.”
The bruises his hands left on my hips throb with confirmation. The claiming scent that saturates my skin broadcasts his ownership to anyone with senses sharp enough to read it. News will spread through the compound that House Draven's heir took his human property to bed and knotted her.
I should worry about the implications. Should consider what Lord Vorath will think, what the enforcers will whisper, what my position becomes when everyone recognizes I'm more than debt collateral.
“Good.” The word emerges soft, carrying acceptance I didn't expect to give.
His expression makes my heart stutter. Vulnerability and possession and wonder, the expression of a male who has stopped fighting what he wants.
“You're trouble.” His thumb traces along my cheekbone. “The kind of trouble I stopped wanting to avoid days ago.”
“I believe your brother said the same.”
A huff of breath escapes him, the closest approximation to a laugh I've heard from this male in eight days. “Samai sees too much.”
“So do you.” I press my palm against his chest, against the heart that beats in a rhythm I'm learning to recognize. “You see everything. Notice everything. You observed I use three shades of yellow before I mentioned it. You remembered I forget to eat.”
“I can't stop noticing you.” His thumb traces my jaw, following the line of bone to the soft skin beneath my ear. “Every room you walk into. Every time you breathe.”
“Do you want to stop?”
He answers with his mouth instead of words, kissing me softer than before. The hunger has banked into warmth, and the tenderness terrifies me more than his violence ever did. This I don't have defenses for. This cracks me open in lost places.
He traces my hip, my shoulder, the dip of my waist. His fingers map the terrain of my ribs, the curve beneath my breast, the ridge of scar tissue on my forearm that he lingers over before pressing his lips to it. Learning me. Committing me to a memory he'll carry when I'm not beside him.
“Stay tonight.” The words brush against my hair, his breath warm on my scalp.
“I wasn't planning on going anywhere.”
His arms tighten, pulling me closer until no space remains between us. His breathing slows toward sleep. The amber light dims toward night cycle, casting long shadows across stone walls, and I let myself sink into the impossible. This moment, this bed, this male who stopped being my captor.
His breathing has slowed to the rhythm of near-sleep, but his arm stays heavy across my waist, anchoring me against warmth I've stopped trying to resist.
I trace the darker striations that mark his ribs, the pattern I've glimpsed but never touched. The texture surprises me. Raised slightly, smoother than the surrounding skin, and hot beneath my fingertips. Everything about him runs warmer than human.
His chest rises and falls beneath my palm, and the double-beat of his hearts pulses steady against my touch. His stillness is permission.
I trace over the ridge beneath his shoulder blade, scar tissue nearly invisible against charcoal skin but present when I search for it. He’s been wounded too. Has healed. Has carried the evidence beneath the surface where no one thinks to look.
He returns to my forearm, tracing the shrapnel scar with a touch so light it barely registers. Mapping me while I map him. We learn each other without words, and the quiet asks nothing of either of us.
The amber light dims toward darkness. Minutes pass, or hours. The compound could burn around us and I wouldn't notice. I press my lips to the scar I've discovered, and his arm tightens around me in response.
I didn't know I needed this. Now I don't know how I'll let it go.
I'm half-asleep when the alert tears through the compound.
Drazex moves before my mind catches up. One second he's wrapped around me, his warmth a blanket I've burrowed into.
The next the bed is empty and he's on his feet, reaching for clothing, every line of his body braced to kill.
Red emergency lights pulse against stone walls, painting his charcoal skin in shades of blood. The wail drills into my skull.
He pulls his shirt over his head, shoves his feet into boots. Dressed in seconds, muscle memory from a lifetime of responding to crises. “Stay inside. Lock the door. Don't open it for anyone but me.”
I sit up, clutching the sheet to my chest. “What's happening?”
His jaw hardens as he checks the comm unit on his wrist, scrolling through data I can't see from here. Whatever he reads there makes his fangs extend, white points pressing past his lower lip. “Another attack. I have to go.”
He's at the door before I can respond, his hand on the panel. Then he stops. Turns. The emergency lights wash his face in crimson, and I won't forget the look in his eyes. Fury and fear and an anguish that is everything to do with me, alone in this room, while he walks toward danger.
“I'll come back.” The words land heavy between us. “Wait for me.”
Then he's gone, and the door seals behind him, and the silence that floods in is worse than the alarm.
His scent layers over every inch of my skin, musk and mineral and the unmistakable signature of claiming. Marked. Visible in ways I can't wash off even if I wanted to.
If the traitor understands what happened in this room, they'll understand I can be used against him.
The thought propels me upright. I reach for my clothing, pulling on pants and shirt with fingers that want to tremble.
The emergency lights continue their pulse, red-black-red-black, and the wail has faded to a distant drone that tells me the crisis is elsewhere in the compound.
I should stay. He told me to stay.
The sound of footsteps in the corridor stops me cold. I freeze, one boot half-laced, my breath caught in my throat. These footsteps are deliberate. Measured. Spaced too evenly, too carefully. The pace of someone who doesn't want to be heard.
Then they stop outside the door.