Kate
He keeps coming, spilling through my fingers, his release scorching, hotter than the blood flooding my mouth, or it feels that way. Maybe it’s all in my head. Maybe I’m making this more than it is.
I don’t think I am.
I never imagined it could feel like this.
Our connection. Solid. Impenetrable.
I can feel what he feels as if his emotions were mine. A pressure so heavy my chest might cave in around it. Kane is wrecked. He is in pure bliss. And underneath the bliss there is so much doubt that it’s breaking my heart all over again.
Was biting him, claiming him as mine, not the right thing to do?
It felt right.
It felt like I would die if I didn’t clamp my teeth over him and break skin.
It was euphoric. Better than the drawn-out orgasm he pulled through my whole body minutes ago.
When he came, it was like coming again myself, and if my teeth hadn’t been anchored in him, I’d be a puddle on this floor. My body is still shaking.
Kane’s thick arms band around my back, pulling me in, holding me upright while a shuddering breath fans the side of my face. His wet cock slips from my hand, my claws already back in their beds. My small breasts press against his abdomen, and his heart finds the rhythm of mine and keeps it.
His lips touch my forehead, the softest thing I have ever been given, velvet-smooth, and he lingers there while his chest finally slows, his breath warming me like a campfire with no smoke.
Then his arms unwrap. His palms travel up my bare arms to my shoulders, and he pushes me back far enough to lock our eyes.
“Did you do it because it’s what you want?
” He swallows, unblinking, his irises reddish-orange with everything that has nothing to do with alpha power.
“Did you claim me for yourself? Or did you do it because…” He chokes, then jerks a breath in.
“Because you feel trapped here with me. Like I was your only option.”
“Kane—”
“I won’t force you to stay.” His big hands come up and cup my face, the heels of his palms resting along my throat, his head shaking so slowly I can barely see it move.
“I would never make you be with me if you didn’t want me, Kate.
But I wasn’t lying earlier, either. If you leave, I leave.
You will never be free of me—and now that our bond is solid, I’ll always know exactly where you are. ”
“If I wanted to be free of you, I never would have claimed you, asshole.”
I use the space between us to smack the back of my hand into his stomach, just to underline it. And instantly feel terrible, because he sucks in a breath like I landed a real blow, and that’s when I finally see him. How tired he looks. How he’s barely holding himself up.
My brows knit, and something scratches at the back of my skull, like there’s a thing I should know and don’t.
Is something wrong with him?
“I’d rather be dead than be here without you. Be anywhere without you. You’re my always, Kate. Please, fucking forgive me. Don’t hate me. Don’t stop talking to me again.”
His words scatter my train of thought, and my chest starts to burn with an intensity I’ve never felt, tension stretching across my back like a drawn bow.
“Don’t say that.” I’d hit him again if I weren’t half sure it would knock him over this time.
Something is wrong, and I don’t think it has anything to do with weeks of my silence.
But I can’t chase it while he’s standing here talking about death.
I’d come apart if anything happened to him.
Not now. Not when I’ve only just found out who I am, who he is to me, why something felt just out of reach from the first second I caught his scent five years ago.
“We may be bonded for life, Kane, but you and I are anything but solid. You crushed my heart. You could have set my body on fire, and it would have hurt less. You fucking…” I tear myself out of his hands and step back, heaving, the memory arriving tenfold.
Does no one understand that words hurt worse than physical pain?
A wound closes. Words don’t. Once they’re spoken, they can’t be taken back, and the person they were aimed at hears them over and over, like a bad song on an endless loop.
It wrecks something in your mind on a level that makes no sense.
I want to forget I ever heard them in his voice.
I can’t.
“If you tell me it felt like I rejected you, my mate, it will fucking kill me, Kate.”
He hauls his jeans up in haste, covering himself, buttons undone, zipper down, belt buckle swinging.
“Do you want me to lie?”
“Never.” His head shakes. “I’d feel it. I’d taste it on my tongue.
It would be pointless, and even if it weren’t, you never have to lie to me.
” He swallows again, and then his arms rise, wrists crossing on top of his head, fingers gripping his hair and pulling it taut, like he’s trying to deal himself the pain I’m feeling.
Maybe he is.
He hurts because I hurt. I know it the way I know my own pulse now. I can feel his agony as deeply as he feels mine.
When I bit him, when I claimed Kane for myself, I wasn’t thinking about what it would do to us, how completely it would wire his feelings into mine. It makes me wonder whether our thoughts are wired together too.
Ever since Trez told me he and Jagger can speak mind to mind, that it comes with being mates, I’ve wondered if Kane and I would have it. I’ve wanted it. I dreamed we did, a few nights ago, and when I woke up and it wasn’t real, the disappointment nearly made me cry.
Though that might have been pregnancy hormones.
Still. I wonder.
Can we?
I don’t hate you, I say inside my head, aiming it at him the way I’d aim it at Trez, with no idea whether the road runs both ways.
His eyes fly wide. His mouth drops open.
And there’s my answer—no full moon in the sky, none for a week at least, and he heard me anyway.
I could never hate you when I love you.
Whatever has been holding Kane together breaks. I watch it shatter in front of me, and I feel it shatter inside me. And then something else happens, something neither of us does on purpose: everything the bond holds fills to the brim and sets, the way molten metal sets into a blade.
Kane crosses to me in one long stride, and before I finish blinking, his hands are under me and I’m lifted, my bare legs wrapping around his waist and my hands landing on his shoulders.
“I more than love you, Kate. You’re my oxygen. My heartbeat. The blood in my veins. I don’t want to do this life unless it’s alongside you.”
Tears pool in his amber eyes—or maybe mine, because my vision of him blurs. And then Kane staggers, his arms cinching me tighter to his chest as he catches himself.
What the hell?
I know his abilities. However pregnant I get, I’m a twig against his strength. He could hold me for hours, days, and never tire. And the tiredness I can feel through the bond isn’t sleepy. It’s marrow-deep. It’s hollow. And wrong.
But instead of prying open one more crisis tonight, I lean in and fuse my lips to his, pouring everything I have into him, willing my energy through the bond and into his bones.
I kiss my mate until my lips go numb.
I kiss Kane until my eyelids grow heavy.
I kiss the one and only man I’ve ever wanted until he’s the only thing taking up space in my head.
I kiss my always until I forget I killed a man today.
I kiss my unborn baby’s father until I’m not sure whether we’re still two beings, or whether we’re now one.
Read more by N.E. Henderson here: