Chapter 46 — Ethan
I’d read some about fated mates in the Lycan books, the sparse passages about bonds ordained by the Moon Goddess, souls tethered through eternity.
I remember Thea’s explanation about Lycans marking each other to form a bond far stronger than human marriage.
But I’d dismissed it as mythology, the kind of legends every culture invents to give meaning to indescribable connections.
It doesn’t sink into my brain that a divine being I’ve never even heard of could somehow guarantee this.
“How do you know?” The words barely form.
Rhiannon shifts forward until her boots bracket mine, her body a wall of heat I can’t retreat from. “The High Seer confirmed it. When I visited Mahal about Jayme, he told me my fated mate was already among the pack. I assumed he meant another Lycan.”
Her grip on my shirt tightens. “That’s why, when I started developing feelings for you, I fought it.
Tried to shut it down. But then the mind-link opened between us, something that has never happened between a Lycan and a human.
Ever. I went back to Mahal and consulted him again.
” She takes a steady breath. “You’re my fated mate.
The mind-link exists because the Moon Goddess bound us together. ”
“So, when you say you’re temporary—” Her hand presses flat against my chest, her amber eyes lock onto mine like she’s bracing for me to bolt. “You’re wrong. If you walk through that gate tonight, you’re not saving the life I built, Ethan. You’re taking the air that I breathe.”
The walls I’ve built are no match for her. Relief, joy, and disbelief crash together until I can’t separate one feeling from the next.
I pull her so close that her feet lift from the ground. My hand cradles her head as I bury my face against her hair, breathing her in.
“I love you so much, Rhiannon.”
Her arms lock around my waist, her face pressing into my chest. “I love you too, Ethan.”
I ease back just enough to meet her eyes and grin. “So, the Moon Goddess has a really strange sense of humor.”
She huffs out a shaky almost-laugh. “Yeah, you could say that.”
“If anything, it does explain why it’s so fucking impossible to walk away from you.”
Her fingers toy with the collar of my shirt, but her expression sobers. “The obstacles we talked about before. . .the politics, the laws, the resistance from others. That still hasn’t gone away. You know that, right?”
I nod slowly.
“But Xander promised to petition the Alpha King on our behalf, and Mahal will support us.” A note of hope threads through her words.
“There’s a genuine possibility the Alpha King might approve.
Not even he can defy what the Moon Goddess intends.
If he does give his blessing, our relationship will become public, and we’ll have to face everything that comes with that.
Every whispering voice in Kortan will have an opinion, and not all of them will be kind. ”
“And if he says no?”
“We run,” she says with no hesitation. “To the Outer Lands. But we’ll run together. Xander won’t pursue us. If the Alpha King does, and he finds us, we’re dead. Both of us.”
I search her face for any crack, any trace of doubt. “You’d give up everything? Your rank, your pack, your entire world? To live in the Outer Lands with a human?” My throat tightens. “Knowing they’d kill us if they found us?”
“In a heartbeat. I’d rather spend an eternity with you in exile than an hour alone in Kortan.” Her fingers lace through mine. “Those are the options. I need you to understand what you’re choosing.”
I meet her golden-brown eyes. They’re the eyes of the woman who almost killed me in Thea’s apartment, who later threw herself between me and a blade, who just now handed me her entire soul and asked me not to harm it.
“Then we stop half-assing this.” I cup her face with both hands. “If we’re doing this — really doing this — we have to commit. We have to be all in. Together. No more secrets, no hiding, nothing halfway.” My thumbs brush her cheekbones. “Whatever comes next, we face it side by side.”
“Yes.” Her forehead presses against mine. “All in.”
I kiss her.
It starts slow, almost careful, my lips brushing hers like a question I already know the answer to. Rhiannon’s fingers curl into the front of my shirt, and she makes this sound against my mouth that’s half surrender, half demand, and it dismantles careful entirely.
I catch the shift in her. Her general dissolving into my hands. I pull her closer, my fists tangling in her hair, and she arches into me like she’s been holding her breath for days.
This is the moment my life divides into before and after.
The exact pressure of her mouth. The warmth of her skin under my palms. The specific way she sighs when I angle my head and deepen the kiss, her lips parting to let me in. The taste of her, wild and warm, like cloves and midnight air. Every detail burns itself into my memory permanently.
“Ethan, we should stop.” The words leave her mouth, but there’s zero conviction behind them. Her fingers tighten their grip in my hair.
“Probably,” I say. Neither of us move.
She kisses me again, harder this time. Her hands slide down my chest, dragging over every ridge underneath the fabric of my shirt. Her touch is raw and possessive in a way that makes my blood run hot.
“The ceremony starts in a few hours.” Her words are warm against my lips.
“Plenty of time.”
Her lips twitch into a smile. “You need to rest. Olcan’s orders.”
“Olcan said no training, no guard duty, no heroics.” My hands grip her ass, pulling her tighter against me. “He didn’t say anything about this.”
Her laugh flutters against my chest, low and real, the kind she only lets slip when her walls are down.
“You’re impossible,” she says, but her body says something different. Her hips roll against mine in a grinding rhythm that makes my vision blur around the edges.
I press her back against the stone wall, my mouth finding her neck. She tips her head, exposing more skin, and I work the laces of her vest loose one by one.
None of it is fast or frantic.
Each cord I pull is a deliberate choice.
She watches my hands work with her golden-brown eyes tracking every movement, and she doesn’t rush me. She doesn’t grab my wrists and take over the way I half-expected. She just breathes, and lets me.
That wrecks me more than anything else could.
Her vest slides off her shoulders. Then her undershirt.
Then the leather strap across her ribs. Each layer gone reveals more warm, freckled skin, and I follow every scar I find with the flat of my thumb: the long one across her left ribs, the crescent-shaped one at her collarbone, reading her history like braille.
Her hands find my hem. She pulls my shirt up and over my head, and when her palms press flat against my chest, she goes still.
She isn’t grabbing or demanding. Only feeling my heartbeat.
Her pupils are dilated, swallowing the amber of her irises until only a thin ring of gold remains. Her chest rises and falls in sharp, uneven breaths, her lips full and parted. A flush crawls up her neck and spreads across her cheekbones.
She’s stunning.
I lower my mouth to her chest, cupping both breasts in my hands, their warm weight settling against my palms. My tongue traces a slow circle around one areola, then the other, mapping the texture of the pebbled skin while Rhiannon shudders above me.
“Ethan,” she stutters, already losing herself in my touch.
She gasps when I close my lips around her left nipple, drawing it into my mouth with steady pressure.
Her flesh is impossibly soft against my tongue, smooth and yielding, and I savor it.
I savor the taste of sweet salt on her skin, the taste of her.
My right hand finds her other breast, my thumb and forefinger catching her nipple between them, rolling it in slow, firm rotations.
“Fuck.” The word punches out of her in a moan that bounces off the stone walls.
I suck harder, flicking my tongue across the peak while my fingers mirror the rhythm on the other side.
Her back arches off the wall as she presses more of herself into my mouth, her fingers digging into my scalp.
Her moans build, low and guttural. There’s nothing performative about them — just raw, unguarded sounds of pleasure dragged out of a woman who usually never lets herself be anything less than composed.
Suddenly, both her hands grasp my shoulders and propel me backward.
I stumble, blinking. “What—”
My back hits the wall behind me before I can finish my sentence. Stone bites into my shoulder blades, and Rhiannon pins me there with her full weight: one hand flat against my sternum, the other already working my belt open.
Her lips crash into mine, her teeth catching my lower lip with a sting before her tongue slides past and envelops mine.
She yanks my pants down my thighs without breaking the kiss, her fingers strong and efficient. The fabric pools at my ankles.
She wraps her hand around my shaft, and I lean forward, already hard and growing stiffer within her grip. Her thumb massages the head in a slow circle that pulls a groan from somewhere deep in my chest.
Apparently, my body’s response to being physically overpowered by a supernatural predator is enthusiastic approval.
But I knew that already. I made peace with it weeks ago.
Her fingers glide along my length, slow and firm, attending to every ridge while her tongue strokes against mine in a rhythm that mirrors her hand. I breath in sharp bursts through my nose — breaking this kiss is not an option.
She pulls back, taking me in with seductive approval. “You’re so hard for me already.” She tightens her grip around the base and pulls upward in one long, devastating stroke. “So big.”
My skull knocks back against the wall. “God, Rhiannon. Keep talking like that and it’ll go to my head.”
She flashes me a grin. “Maybe I want it to go to your head.”
Then, she drops to her knees in front of me.
Well, damn. My entire respiratory system forgets its function.
The Commander of the Crescent Guard, the woman who faces down wolves and councils and ancient enemies without flinching, is on her knees in the moonlight, looking up at me with those golden-brown eyes, her dark hair falling around her bare shoulders.
Her expression is one of pure desirous hunger.
She looks like a goddess from a myth: powerful and beautiful and dangerous even in this position — especially in this position, because there is nothing submissive about the way she’s looking at me.
Rhiannon is like a lioness choosing to be generous, a woman with more than enough power to destroy me deciding to please me instead.
The image ingrains itself behind my eyes with the weight of something sacred.
Rhiannon on her knees while I watch her from above, her hand working me while she holds my gaze, is almost too much. I’m looking down at the most incredible and formidable woman I’ve ever known, and she’s looking up at me like I’m the only thing in this world worth wanting.
She strokes me twice more, her grip twisting at the crown, then guides my cock forward and teases the swollen head across one peaked nipple, then the other.
I hold my breath as she lowers, positioning her mouth, and the distant, still-functioning part of my brain goes silent. I do my best not to come undone by this sight alone.
Her lips stretch around me as she takes me in.
Slowly, the wet heat of her mouth envelops me inch by inch.
Every muscle locks up. My breath leaves me in a sharp hiss.
One of my hands finds its way to the back of her head.
Her dark waves spill through my fingers like silk, impossibly soft, catching the light in threads of auburn and black.
I don’t push or guide her. I just hold onto her.
Just absorb the sensation even as it overwhelms me.
My other hand finds her jaw and cups it gently, my thumb brushing her cheekbone, anchoring myself to the gentleness of the touch while her mouth works me in ways that defy description.
She finds a rhythm and devours me, tongue, teeth, hand working in unison. Being the thing the Commander wants this badly threatens to undo me faster than any physical sensation could.
Then, her growl returns. That deep, chest-level rumble, resonating through her mouth and around my cock. It’s low and possessive, almost subsonic, traveling through the most sensitive nerve endings in my body.
“Fuck. . .” My words don’t cohere. They dissolve in my throat.
She hasn’t stopped. Hasn’t slowed. Her eyes lock onto mine from below, and she takes me in deeper, that rumble traveling through every nerve ending I possess, and the message in her gaze is unmistakable.
Instead of the alarm that any rational person might feel at the sound of a Lycan growling with their cock in her mouth, a bolt of arousal rips through me so intense my vision grays at the edges.
“Rhiannon.” My voice comes out ragged. My hand tightens in her hair, tugging it gently while giving her room to pull back. “I’m— Fuck, I’m going to—”
Her mouth releases me with a deliberate, agonizing slowness that nearly ends me right there.
Her tongue drags along the full length of my shaft as she withdraws, leaving a wet trail of heat that makes my abs contract so hard every individual muscle screams. A thin strand of saliva connects her lower lip to the tip of my cock for one suspended second before it breaks.
She takes me in both hands and presses the head of my cock against her chest, nestling me between her breasts.
The feeling of it washes over me in layers.
There’s the slickness from her mouth, the surprising heat from whatever furnace burns inside her Lycan body, and the softness of her skin against the straining ache of me.
She encloses my shaft in her pillowy breasts and strokes, her hands working in tandem, and the visual alone nearly kills me.
Her eyes are locked onto mine. And there it is again: that flash of amber bleeding through the golden-brown of her irises, there and gone like heat lightning. Her pupils are dark and deep as the night sky.
“Come on me.” She speaks those three words with the same authority she uses to command armies. There’s no room for hesitation. No option for negotiation. No chance of delay.