Chapter 47 — Ethan
The sight of my cock moving rhythmically between her breasts while she looks up at me with those wolf-bright eyes short-circuits my wiring. My body obeys before my brain fully registers the command.
“Fuck. . .” The orgasm tears through me like a current: white-hot, obliterating, starting at my core and triggering a chain reaction through every nerve in my body.
My hips jerk forward against the mesmerizing softness of her chest, and I watch my cock spill my release across her flesh in thick, pulsing streaks while she holds me there, steady, her hands never faltering.
“Rhiannon—” Her name comes out in a savage sound I’ve never made before, drawn from a place I didn’t know existed.
She strokes me through every shudder, every aftershock, her pace gentling as I finish emptying myself.
Her eyes stay locked on mine the entire time.
They’re amber — fully amber now, with no hint of brown left.
They’re glowing like embers in the half-light.
Her wolf is watching me come apart with a satisfaction that is ancient and primal and completely, terrifyingly hers.
An all-powerful warrior on her knees in my chambers, my essence dripping down to her nipples, gloating like she just won a war.
It feels like I’ve claimed her while she’s claimed me at the same time.
She’s been marked by me in a temporary sense, but this is still entirely and fiercely her dominion.
And the thing that gets me, the thing my photographic memory will preserve in crystalline detail until the day I die, isn’t the act itself.
It’s that she chose this. Chose me.
My legs are still shaking when she rises. I catch her waist and pull her against me before she’s fully upright, my arms wrapping around her, her bare skin pressed flush against mine from chest to hip. She’s warm — impossibly, feverishly warm.
Rhiannon leans into me, her forehead dropping to my shoulder, and for three breaths we just stand there, skin to skin, pulse to pulse.
Her arousal radiates off her like heat from sunbaked stone. The mate bond — this impossible thread binding us together — carries it straight into my chest. I know her wanting. But it’s not just something I recognize in her. It’s a physical ache that isn’t mine but exists within me.
The thoughtful part of my brain, the part that never fully shuts off even when the rest of me is all but obliterated, does the math on how I should respond. Give her what she deserves.
I walk her backward toward the bed. She lets me. That alone is a small gift I don’t take for granted.
When the backs of her knees hit the mattress, I ease her down and settle over her, my weight propped up on my forearms. Her dark hair fans out across the pillow, and I lower my mouth to her throat, pressing an open kiss against the pulse point that jumps under my lips.
“The first time I saw you, you had me pinned against a wall in Thea’s apartment.
Your hand was around my throat. I was genuinely afraid you were going to kill me.
” I kiss the cluster of freckles that scatter across her breasts like a constellation I’ve already mapped.
“And the entire time, the only thing I could think was that you were the most extraordinary woman I’d ever seen. ”
A laugh escapes her — short, startled, genuine. There’s a note of surprise in her laughter, like I’ve picked a lock she didn’t remember she’d thrown away the key for. The sound of her laughter, though — I’ve heard music in two worlds, and nothing in either one comes close.
“You’re insane,” she says.
“Probably.” My mouth closes around her nipple, my tongue circling the stiffened peak. “But I’m accurate.”
There’s no need to rush. Not tonight. I explore each little detail, recalling the difference between what makes her sigh and what makes her gasp. When I find the places that undo her, I lock them into my memory.
Then, I shift lower.
My hands slide down her hips, my thumbs pressing into the hollows of her inner thighs, spreading her open. She lets me settle between her legs and press my mouth against her.
The first stroke of my tongue draws a sound from her that hardens my cock all over again.
I remember everything from that night by the pond: the exact rhythm and pressure and angle that made her grip the earth with both hands while I fucked her. For once in my life, my memory is a genuine superpower.
I use every piece of it.
My tongue works in tight, patient circles around her clit while two fingers slide inside her, curling forward against the spot that made her come apart under the trees. She’s so wet my fingers glide without resistance, and the heat of her — God, the heat — must be otherworldly.
Through the bond, I feel it. There’s an echo.
Her pleasure flows into me like ink spreading through water, pooling low in my core and radiating outward.
When my tongue flattens and drags upward, I feel the ghost of that pressure in my own body.
A phantom sensation with no physical source, bright and disorienting.
It feeds back into her. I feel that too. The loop is building on itself, each circuit winding tighter.
Her claws puncture through the bedding with the sound of shredding fabric.
The mattress beneath my palms thrums with the low, continuous growl rolling from her chest. Something territorial and satisfied, yet hungry for more, travels through my hands where they grip her hips.
The vibration climbs up my forearms and seeps into my bones.
Her eyes blaze full amber when I glance up. It’s pure wolf, watching me from behind Rhiannon’s face with an intensity that should terrify me.
It doesn’t.
I curl my fingers harder. Press my tongue flat. Give her everything I remember and everything I’ve learned since.
“Ethan—” My name splinters in her throat, giving way to a sound that’s guttural and ancient, a sound that belongs to forests and moonlight and the space between human language and animal instinct.
She comes against my mouth with her claws buried in the ruined sheets and her back bowed off the mattress, and the orgasm cascades into me, a wave of sensation that isn’t mine but registers in my body as if it were.
It rolls through my nervous system and settles between my legs with an urgency that has me throbbing with the need for release again before the aftershocks have finished rippling through her thighs.
That’s not biologically possible, at least not for a human.
Interesting. The bond has changed my recovery time, ensuring I can match whatever she needs.
I press one last kiss against her inner thigh and climb back up her body, settling over her. Her eyes find mine. The amber fades back to golden-brown, her gaze still soft and feral at once. I reach between us, positioning myself at her entrance.
I push in slowly.
The sensation detonates my every nerve. Her tight, wet, scorching heat envelops me inch by deliberate inch.
But it’s the other sensation that sends me over the edge.
The stretch. The fullness. Her aching satisfaction from being caressed from within completely.
It layers over my own pleasure from being inside her until I can’t distinguish where my body ends and hers begins.
We both go still.
Her eyes lock onto mine. Neither of us blinks. Neither of us breathes.
And there it is. . .the thing I first felt by the pond under the trees, the night I thought I’d imagined it.
Our heartbeats. Searching. Syncing. Two separate rhythms finding and locking into a single pulse that I feel in my chest and my throat and the base of my skull.
They’re identical: one drum where there should be two, beating in a single entity that spans two bodies.
I start to move.
The feedback loop comes over me immediately — it’s sharper, faster, and more devastating than I’m prepared for.
Every thrust sends pleasure cascading through me, and the bond captures it and routes it through her, and her response floods back into me, amplified.
The recursive wave builds on itself until the boundary between giving and receiving dissolves entirely.
Her legs wrap around my waist, her heels pressing into the small of my back, drawing me in deeper. Her pleading for me isn’t in words. It’s in the tightening of her arms, the arch of her spine, her body pulling me closer with a ferocity that says everything her voice hasn’t caught up to yet.
Then, she pulls back. Just enough to create a few inches between our bodies, allowing my thrusts to be stronger. Both her hands release my shoulders. Her legs unwrap from around my waist. And she turns over.
Everything in me goes quiet.
She settles onto her stomach, then rises slowly on her hands and knees, presenting herself to me: her spine, her backside, the exposed nape of her neck where her dark hair falls to one side. She looks back over her shoulder. Her eyes hold three things at once: passion, devotion, and vulnerability.
I understand what this means. Lycans never turn their back to anyone they don’t trust with their life.
Rhiannon, who faces every threat head-on, who maintains tactical awareness like breathing, who has never once in my presence turned away from potential danger, is giving me something no enemy will ever see.
Her most vulnerable side, naked and unguarded. For her human. Her mate.
I press forward, aligning myself with her, and slide into her from behind in one slow, deep, unhurried stroke that empties the room of oxygen.
Her back arches, her fingers curling into the sheets beneath her, and the gasp she makes settles somewhere behind my ribs where I know it will live for the rest of my life.
I lean over her, my chest pressing against the warm plane of her back, and cup both breasts in my hands.
The weight of them fills my palms as I continue the slow, deep rhythm, rolling her nipples between my fingers, feeling them stiffen against my skin while my hips draw back and push forward in steady strokes that make her breath stutter.
The pace builds on its own. Gravity and need and the feedback loop pull us into a rhythm like a current neither of us controls. I straighten, grip her hips, and drive myself into her with everything I have.
Deeper. Faster. Harder.
“Oh, Ethan!”
Rhiannon’s hands slam against the headboard, bracing, and she pushes back to meet every thrust. The collision of our bodies fills the room with sounds: skin against skin, the creaking of wood, her breath and mine tangling into something rhythmic and primal.
Her back rolls with each impact, muscles flexing beneath sun-kissed skin, and I take a mental photograph that will have the permanence of stone.
Dark hair spilling across her shoulders, the powerful line of her back, her waist, the flare of her hips under my hands, it’s magnificent, awe-inspiring, and mine. The combination rewires a part of me that will never go back.
“Rhiannon.” I press my mouth against the back of her neck. Her skin is hot and alive beneath my lips.
Her whole body seizes. I sense it a full heartbeat before my body registers the physical tremor.
Pleasure explodes through her and then hits me like a shockwave.
She orgasms around my cock, clenching tight, and the growl that tears from her chest crests into something seismic that rattles the window glass in its frame.
The sensation rips through me so suddenly, my vision whites out.
I have to grip her hips with both hands to hold on.
Then, she turns.
She rolls beneath me, settling onto her back, pulling me down between her thighs. Her eyes find mine. Amber and brown swirl together — open, unguarded. I enter her again.
We move together. The final climb. Her legs wrap around me, and our rhythm locks into a synced, pulsing rhythm building toward a peak I sense approaching like thunder rolling across a valley.
Her mouth finds my neck, the left side. It’s the specific place her lips have visited before, the place she nicked that still carries the faintest blemish.
Her lips part and her tongue slides against my skin. Her teeth barely graze it.
But there’s no biting. Just hovering.
And this time I understand.
Thea told me that the mark is permanent.
Irreversible. A bond sealed in flesh that brands you as belonging to another for the rest of your existence.
Rhiannon’s teeth press against me on the exact threshold between primal urge and contemplative restraint, and she holds herself there, trembling.
Her whole body shakes with the effort of not biting down.
“Claim me.”
She goes rigid under me.
“What?”
“Thea told me about marking.” I pull back just enough to look at her. “You want to claim me, right?”
“Yes, but—”
“Mark me. I’m yours. Do it.” I mean every syllable with the full weight of everything I’ve become in this place. Every scar earned in training. Every night spent learning the shape of her silence. Every moment I chose to stay when leaving would have been easier.
The boy from Creek Falls who never believed he was enough? He’s gone. My doubt has been burned away in a temple in the mountains, my fears smashed in a dungeon with a monster who turned out to be just as scared as I was. My insecurities were vaporized in that forest by a moonlit pond.
What’s left is the man who belongs here. Who belongs to her.
I’m yours. Forever.
Are you sure?
Yes.
She makes an inhuman sound. It’s not a growl and it’s not a cry, but it emerges from a place language hasn’t captured yet. Her wolf breaks through completely, and then her teeth break through my skin.
The pain is real: sharp and immediate, a bright searing point on my neck that I can feel all the way into my jaw.
Then, the pain is gone, and our bond implodes and expands like the creation of the universe.
Rhiannon floods in anew, filling every space I didn’t know was hollow. Her love, her fear, her relief, the burden on her of carrying a secret alone for weeks. Years of armor are stripped in a single breath, and underneath it all is this vast, aching gentleness she has never let anyone witness.
We shatter together.
I hold her through every wave with everything I have.
I’m crying. I don’t care. Through the bond, I can feel that she is too.
I love you, Ethan.
I know.