Chapter 14 #5
He holds the bite a long moment, growling low against my throat, while his hips keep moving in short, shallow thrusts.
I feel him come again—hot, pulsing, filling me full—and then the base of his cock swells hard and fast, locking us together with a deep, relentless pressure that makes the pain at my neck flare even brighter.
A small, panicked whimper escapes me.
His teeth finally ease. He licks the broken skin once, twice, then presses his forehead to the back of my head and just breathes. Hard. Shaking.
The room goes very quiet.
For a second there’s nothing but the sound of him breathing against the back of my head, hard and ragged, and the wet throb at my throat keeping time with my pulse.
It hurts. God, it hurts. Not the good hurt, not the used-up ache in the rest of me—this is bright and specific and wrong, a deep pressure under the skin where his teeth were, radiating out into my shoulder and up behind my ear.
And underneath the pain there’s something else.
Something is happening in my chest.
I don’t have a word for it. It’s like a hook going in somewhere behind my sternum and then pulling—slow, insistent, dragging every single part of me toward the body at my back.
It doesn’t ask. It isn’t asking me anything.
It’s just taking root, and I can feel it taking, taking, taking.
Some animal part of me is opening the door for it while the rest of me screams.
My hand goes to my neck and I hiss. My fingers come away red.
"Cal." It comes out thin. "Cal—what did you—"
He doesn’t answer.
"What did you do?"
I try to pull away and I can’t. That’s when I remember. We’re still locked—he’s still inside me, still swollen, still sealed to me, and the small movement drags at both of us and makes me cry out and makes him groan and neither of us can do a single thing about it.
I go rigid in his arms.
"Sonny." His voice is wrecked. Not thick anymore. Not that low dragging thing it’s been for hours. He’s back to himself. "Sonny, don’t—don’t pull, you’ll hurt yourself. Just—"
"Get off me."
"I can’t." He says it like it’s killing him. "Sweetheart, I can’t. Not yet. It has to go down first."
"Get off—"
"I can’t." His arm loosens off my waist but he doesn’t take it away, and I understand a second later it’s because if he lets go entirely I’ll try to move again. "I know. I know. Just breathe. Please just breathe."
I start crying. It comes up out of me in a horrible hitching way, my hand still pressed to my neck, blood tacky on my fingers, and behind me Calder makes a sound like someone put a knife in him.
"Oh God," he says. "Oh, God. Sonny. What did I—"
"You bit me,” I say between sobs. I can’t catch my breath.
"I know."
"What does that mean?" My voice breaks apart on it. "Cal. What does it mean? What did you do to me?"
He doesn’t answer.
And something in me just stops working.
My chest locks. I’m pulling air and none of it’s landing—short useless gulps that don’t make it anywhere near the bottom of my lungs. My hand comes off my throat and presses flat over my sternum instead, shoving at it, like I can force the thing open from the outside.
Away.
That’s all that’s left in my head. Away, away, away.
Off this bed. Out of this room. It doesn’t matter that an hour ago I was begging him not to stop.
Something got into me without asking and it’s still in me and it’s wired to the body at my back, and every animal part of me wants three hundred feet of open ground between us.
The stupid hook in my sternum wants the opposite and bile rises in my throat.
I try to move. I can’t. Calder’s knot drags at where we’re still joined and the pain goes up my spine like a wire and I sob out loud.
"Don’t touch me."
His hands come off me instantly. Both of them, gone, lifted away where I can see them.
"Okay." His voice has changed completely but even the soothing sound of it makes my skin crawl. "Okay. I’m not. I’m not touching you."
I can’t stop gulping at the air. There are black spots crawling in at the edges of my vision and my hand is fisted over my chest and I can hear how I sound—high and fast and wrong, like something caught in a fence.
"Sonny." Careful. Very careful. "Sonny, you have to slow your breathing down. Your heart can’t—"
He stops.
I feel it happen. I feel the exact second the last of whatever was driving him goes out of him, because his whole body changes against my back—goes slack, goes cold, goes still.
"Oh God," he says.
That’s all. Two words, and then nothing at all, and somehow, that’s worse.
But my stupid, stupid biology won’t quit.
The heat didn’t stop when he bit me. Every pulse of the knot still rolls a wave up through me. I’m sobbing and begging him to let go and yet, I still want him closer.
I have never hated anything the way I hate my own body right now.
We lie there like that. I don’t know how long.
And then, eventually, the knot goes down.
I feel it happen—the pressure easing off by degrees until he can move again—and then Calder pulls out of me, slow, careful even now.
It’s like someone pulled a plug.
The heat comes back so fast it takes my breath.
Not a wave. All of it at once, roaring up through me the second he’s gone, and the emptiness he leaves behind is so total I make a sound I’ve never heard out of myself.
My skin heats up like a struck match. Sweat breaks over my whole body.
The ache slams back into me twice as deep as before and I’m sobbing before I even understand I’ve started.
I have to get out of here.
I drag myself across the mattress toward the edge, hand over hand, sheets tangling around my legs. Away from him. Out of this bed. Anywhere.
I get my feet on the floor and try to stand up.
And my legs give out.
My knees fold under me before I’ve taken a single step and I go down hard against the side of the bed, one shoulder cracking against the frame, and I end up in a heap on his floor with my back to the mattress and my whole body shaking.
"Sonny—"
He’s next to me in a second. Around the end of the bed and crouching in front of me with his hands already out.
"No." I get an arm up. "No—don’t—"
"You’re hurt, let me—"
"Don’t touch me."
His hands stop an inch from my arms.
I look up at him and I catch it—just for a second, before he covers his emotions with a mask. His face. When I say those three words he looks…
Devastated.
Then it’s gone, and he pulls his hands back, and he stands.
He doesn’t say anything. He finds his jeans on the floor and drags them on, fast, wrong, doesn’t bother with the button. He picks up a shirt and doesn’t put it on. He doesn’t look at me again.
The door opens and shuts and he flees. His feet go fast down the hall and a door slams somewhere below me.
I sit there on the floor of his room, naked, in a pile against the side of his bed.
And everything hits me at once.
The bite. The blood drying on my throat.
My mother’s voice out of three inches of black glass, saying if it makes you feel like a man, go ahead.
Killian’s fist in my hair. The hook behind my sternum still pulling me toward a man who just walked out.
The heat winding up out of nothing again, already, again, with nothing left in the world to stop it.
My chest goes tight.
Not the panic kind. The other kind. The my heart is overloaded kind.
I press my hand flat over my heart and it’s going so fast I can’t find the individual beats, just a long stuttering blur under my palm.
The room tips sideways and my senses go fuzzy.
Oh, I think I’m going to…
And then nothing.