Kane
Ihit the cabin door hard enough to splinter wood before my hand finds the handle. It gives, and I stumble through, my breathing ragged.
“Kate.” Even to my own ears, I sound frantic.
I don’t care.
I race down the hall of our cabin, into our bedroom, and I’m through the open bathroom doorway before the steam even registers.
Kate’s head snaps up, her hands freezing with the towel half-wrapped around her wet body.
I charge forward on pure autopilot. My right hand wraps her neck, walking her backward; my left finds her terrycloth-covered hip as her shoulders meet the wall. My forehead drops to hers. She’s shower-hot to the touch.
“You do belong here,” I whisper into the space between our mouths, staring into guilty blue eyes.
“I shouldn’t have said—”
“But if you leave, I will follow you.” I gentle my hold on her throat and tighten it on her hip.
“Don’t say dumb things,” she chides. “You couldn’t if you wanted to, and you know it. You’re the alpha.”
I cup the side of her face, dragging my thumb across her cheekbone. “I don’t care about any of it. The pack can live without me. My dad and Eli can have it back tomorrow. I cannot live without you.” The breath I pull feels less like breathing and more like gasping—for my life. For both of theirs.
“I don’t want fate’s version of us, Kate.
I don’t need you because the stars decided you were built for me.
I need you because you’re you. Your mouth, your temper, the way you look at me like I’m the best and worst thing that’s ever happened to you.
I’d hand you the whole world and then go build you a better one.
I’m sorry for all of it. For the words I spewed.
For ordering you to leave. Even if you’d never been my mate, I should never have treated you that way.
You did nothing wrong. It was mine, all of it, and I’m sorry.
Please don’t leave me,” I beg, and I am not ashamed.
My vision of her clouds over. My nostrils sting.
Let the tears fall. I want her to see exactly what she does to me. What a world without her in it does to me. I’ve spent my whole life being the one who never breaks. For her, I’ll shatter right here on this bathroom floor if that’s what it takes to make her stay.
I drop to my knees.
Both hands find her hips, and I bow my head, baring the side of my throat to her—the most vulnerable part of me, offered up to the only person alive with the right to tear it out.
I’ve never knelt. Not for my father. Not for fate. But for her, I’d stay down here forever. And the part that should terrify me isn’t that I’m doing it.
It’s how right it feels.
“Wh-what are you…” Her voice hitches. “Kane, what are you doing?”
“This pack is yours, Kate. I know it doesn’t feel that way yet, but you are one of us. You were born here, same as me. You belong here, same as any wolf on this land.”
“G-get up,” she demands, shock stumbling her words.
I tip my head back and lift my eyes. She’s staring down at me, lips parted, both hands clutching the towel to her chest as water drips off the dark ends of her hair and my mark just visible at her neck.
“I don’t know how else to say I’m sorry.
I don’t know how else to show you I know what I broke.
” My shoulders start to shake, and I let them.
“I’m sorry and not sorry for claiming you.
It should never have happened without asking.
My wolf had no right, but dammit, you’re mine, and I fucking need you to want me the way I want you. I want you, Kate. Not my wolf. Me.”
A whimper falls out of her, and I catch the smallest tremble move through her limbs before she locks herself still. Her gaze flicks over my head, then up at the ceiling. Her bottom lip wobbles.
And then her scent changes, and the growl that comes out of me starts somewhere below my lungs.
Her arousal hits the air, and every drop of blood I own reroutes south. I go hard against the zipper in the space of one breath, and the ache builds until it has its own heartbeat, until I can hear my pulse in my ears, in my teeth, in the seam of my jeans.
Weeks of sleeping one wall away from her. Weeks of cooking her breakfast and leaving before she’d let me see her face. The want has been living in my marrow so long I stopped noticing the weight of it, and now it’s awake all at once, and it is not patient.
I don’t move. She hasn’t said I can.
Kate shivers and drops her head, her eyes gone hooded. The blue looks as raw as I feel, orange flickering through it like a faulty bulb as her need fills the room alongside mine.
“You’re a Luna wolf, Kate. Whether you believe it yet or not. And a Luna doesn’t ask.” My voice drops into gravel. “If you want something, you demand it. Right here. Right now.”
She licks her lips, slow.
I don’t blink. I refuse to miss one second of her wanting me the way I want her, and I’ve been starved of the sight so long that watching her decide is its own kind of pain—sweet, pulsing, unbearable. I haven’t drawn a full breath in weeks. Maybe not in five years.
Her fingers flex. The towel slips.
I drop my hands from her hips and sit back on the heels of my boots, and I wait. However long she needs. My blood pounds in my ears loud enough to drown the ocean outside, and I wait.
Then my gaze lands on the small, round swell of her belly, and my throat closes.
A whimper claws up out of me, and I don’t bother swallowing it.
There he is. The proof I’ve been able to smell for a week but never see.
My son. Curled up safe inside the woman I’d burn the world down for.
I lean in and press my forehead to the curve of her, and I just breathe.
And I swear on every star that’s ever lit the sky, I will spend the rest of my life deserving the both of you.
I’ve known for a week he’s a boy. It’s an old alpha gift my father taught me. I can scent a pregnancy early, and further along, I can scent what’s coming.
My hands move on their own, palming warm, soft skin. I brush my lips across her belly, breathing her in, laying slow kisses beneath her navel, one side, then the other. Kate pulls a sharp breath through her mouth. My eyes lift, and I beg her, silently, for a command.
The ball is in her court.
“Fuck me,” she whispers. It comes out uncertain, too small for the strongest woman I’ve ever known, and the guilt lands where it belongs. I did that. I taught her doubt.
Never again.
My palms slide down the tops of her thighs, hooking behind them, and I trail my mouth across her belly to the crease where hip meets thigh, kissing, breathing her, then opening my mouth and sucking the tender swell of her there.
My canines tingle as I bite down, light, watching every reaction move through her face, and every one of them hits my chest like something I haven’t earned yet.
“Fuck you how?” I whisper it against her skin, slow enough to raise goose bumps in a wave.
“Fuck you where, baby?” She swallows but doesn’t answer, so I keep going, worshipping and saying filthy things in the same breath.
“Your pretty little pussy… your tight ass… or that hot, wet mouth of yours?” I drag my tongue over the spot I bit. “Where do you want to be fucked, Kate?”
A mewling sound spills out of her, and her knees dip. My grip firms, holding her up. I should move her to the bed. I don’t, because there is nowhere on this earth I would rather be than on my knees in front of this woman.
“All of them,” she breathes, her chest heaving.
“I only have one dick, baby. But it’s yours.” I smile against the crease of her thigh. “How do you want me to make you come? Tell me like an alpha.” The growl vibrates out through my teeth and into her skin.
Kate’s fingers dive into my loose dirty-blond hair, the tie long gone, snatched out by a branch somewhere between the courtyard and this floor. Her nails, or maybe her claws, scrape my scalp, and my whole spine lights up. She fists the strands and yanks my head back, away from her body.
I look up. And I wait.
For her direction.
Her order.
“Eat my pussy, Kane.” The growl in it goes into both my ears and all the way down. My dick jerks against the denim, and the pressure crosses from ache into something with its own pulse, its own life. “Shove your pants down. I want to see your cock in your hand while you lick me.”
“Whatever you want.” It comes out strangled.
The instant her fingers loosen, I’m tearing at my belt, furious at every second my hands spend off her body.
I shove the jeans down my thighs with the zipper barely started, and my dick springs free, hot and heavy into my own fist, while my other hand snatches her foot up onto my shoulder and opens her to me.
The new angle puts her core at my eye level. Her pussy slick, swollen, already gleaming for me, her scent hits so hard the room tilts.
Fuck, she’s pretty. Everywhere. Every inch.
Before I can lean in, Kate wrenches my head back by the hair, dragging my eyes up.
“Stroke it,” she grits out, nearly angry with wanting.
“Fuck me,” I heave.
“No.” Her growl rolls down my chest. “You’re going to fuck me, mate. And you’re not going to come until I do. So fuck me, Kane. Fuck me so well I can’t tell whether it’s your tongue getting me off or that big dick doing the job.”
My eyes roll. Her words pull the air straight out of my lungs.
I stroke myself.
Then I stroke myself again, and this time I force my eyes open and up, and find her not watching my face at all. She’s biting her bottom lip with her gaze fixed between my legs, on my fist moving exactly the way she ordered it to.
The whimper that escapes her loosens her fingers in my hair, and I take it as permission.
I lean in and bury my face to her center.
Her curls tickling my nose, her taste flooding my mouth, her scent traveling down my spine and straight to the tip of me until holding back is a war I’m fighting on two fronts.
I lick into her, slick and open, stroking my cock in time, and I honestly can’t tell anymore whether it’s her leg shaking or my entire body.
She tastes like something I’d crawl across the rest of my life to get back to. I will never have enough. I’ll always need more, want more, crave more.
“Yes.” Her hands clamp around my head, hips bucking into my face. “Oh—yes. Just like that, Kane.”
All her weight is riding one leg now, so I move my free hand beneath her, bracing her.
And then, because she demanded everything and I intend to deliver it, I dip my middle finger into her heat first, coating it, and press it slow against the tighter entrance behind.
My tongue slides inside her as the finger breaches, and the moan she lets out rings my ears like struck bronze.
Her claws come out at the base of my skull. Tingles detonate down my neck. I press deeper, draw back, press again. On the next stroke I drag my fist down to the root of my cock and squeeze, because her taste and her sounds and her claws have me one breath from breaking her one rule.
Fuck, she’s going to kill me.
If I die right here, it will be the happiest death ever recorded.
Her muscles start to flutter and clamp. My tongue finds her clit and circles, my fingers working her in rhythm, my fist still moving because she told it to.
Her torso folds over me, her breath scorching my bare back as her claws rake down it.
Pain and a blessing in the same four lines, and then her foot slips off my shoulder and she goes off like a dam failing.
She comes, and keeps coming, and the sound of it swells me harder in my own grip while I suck her through it, wanting it to last forever, needing her to take every last drop of pleasure she deserves.
When her body finally sags over mine and her breathing slows, I ease off, kiss the crest of her mound, then the place where her belly begins to round, our son, one wall of muscle away from my lips, and I keep kissing my way up her stomach as I rise to my feet.
And I keep stroking.
Because she hasn’t told me to stop. She hasn’t told me I can come. Every pull of my fist is a war between obedience and detonation, but I hold it, because her word is the only law left in this bathroom.
Because that’s what she said to do.
Kate’s back meets the wall, chest still heaving, while I stand over her with my knees threatening mutiny and my eyes trying to roll back, fist still moving, pulse hammering in my ears, in my throat, in every inch of me she owns.
Then she registers it. Her eyes go round, flick down, flick back up.
Something moves through her face that I can’t read, and it scares me more than her claws ever could.
Her palm lands flat on my chest, and my feet are moving backward before my brain gets a vote.
The bathroom door slams. Wood splinters. My spine hits it.
My heart pounds. The ache in my dick has long since stopped being an ache. It’s a second heartbeat now, throbbing against my own grip.
Then her hand knocks mine away.
Her soft palm closes around me, and I suck in a breath that never finishes. My ears thunder. Possibly the earth moves. Was that an earthquake?
She strokes me the way I was pretending my hand was hers, and the ache converts to a pleasure with teeth. Her claws graze down my shaft. Her palm presses over the head.
My hips buck.
Oh, fucking fuuuuck—
My vision whites out. And then—teeth.
Her teeth. A beast’s teeth, sinking deep into the side of my neck.
Exactly where I bared it for her, down on my knees.
I come un-fucking-done, exploding in her fist as her claws tighten their grip, and something slots into place inside me, bone-deep, marrow-deep, the door swinging wide this time, both ways.
I see stars.
Motherfucking stars.