Chapter 7 #2
And then — while I’m still shaking, still clenching around him — I feel him change.
His rhythm stutters. He buries himself deep and stays, and I feel the base of him swell, catching at my entrance. He’s thickening inside me, stretching me wider, the pressure building until I gasp.
He’s close. I can feel it in the tremor running through his body, the way his grip has gone rigid on my hip.
He’s about to come inside me. And somewhere beneath the aftershocks and the haze, a fragment of my rational mind surfaces long enough to understand what the change in him means. I freeze, eyes widening.
He thrusts forward, the bulge bursting past my tight entrance with a pop that’s almost audible. I choke out a gasp.
No! No, no, no!
Alpha knot.
This is bad. Very, very bad.
“No! Get it out. Now!” I lurch forward. Hands and knees, every muscle straining, trying to pull free.
I can’t.
The knot is locked. His body sealed inside mine, the base of him swollen past the point where separation is possible, and I am physically trapped.
The panic is a white flash. My claws gouge the dirt. I wrench forward again, harder, and the movement drags the swollen flesh against nerves that are still lit up from the orgasm. Pleasure and panic collide, and I cry out — fury, despair, a sound that doesn’t know what it is.
He growls.
Different from before. Deeper. The sound fills the clearing, fills my body, fills every wolf cell within me. It’s an alpha’s growl, a dominant male’s growl, and the meaning of it is written into my DNA: Obey.
My wolf goes limp.
Every muscle I have gives out. My arms fold.
My chest drops to the grass. My body flattens beneath him with a surrender so complete I feel it in my marrow — not defeat, not exhaustion.
Acceptance. My wolf recognizes this male.
My wolf has been reaching for him, and the knot is the confirmation she’s been waiting for.
Her response is immediate, total, and… satisfied.
“Good,” he groans, his breath hot against the back of my neck as he buries his face in my hair.
“So damn good.” He’s fucking me in short, punchy strokes, limited by the restriction of the flesh that has him locked into me.
A bulge that’s pushing against my G-spot, and every other sensitive point in my overstretched pussy.
“Oh… Oh God…” I whimper as another orgasm builds. Without thinking, I turn my head. My throat stretches open. Bared. Offered. The most vulnerable part of me, given to the man on my back by the wolf inside me.
His lips brush the junction of my neck and shoulder. Teeth graze my skin. Not human teeth. His fangs have extended. I feel the points sink in, sharp and enormous.
“Wait…” I moan, though there isn’t a shred of conviction behind it. But some part of my brain realizes that what’s about to happen is going to upend my life.
He bites down, wolf jaws in a human mouth locking in with the full force of an alpha’s claim. The pain is brief. Exquisite. What replaces it isn’t pain.
I scream as he comes inside me, my body convulsing around him. The sensation in my neck shoots straight to my core.
The knot expands to its full size at the same moment. I feel both — the hot flood of his release and the swelling that locks him in, and the bite, all three happening together, and my wolf exults. She sings. She howls inside me with a joy so ferocious it swallows my horror whole.
“God. Oh, God,” I whimper, and I barely recognize my voice.
A flood of images hit my brain just as I’m overwhelmed by a wave of sensation so intense I feel dizzy. I’m seeing myself from above, feeling soft skin against my body. Warm, clasping flesh enveloping me. And I feel myself coming. So detailed, so intimate, but not in any way I’m familiar with.
It’s him. His thoughts. His feelings. His orgasm pumping out in hot bursts. Entering me in a way that makes the physical joining seem like nothing.
And most terrifying of all is the drive to claim. Enormous. All-consuming. A need that takes up every corner of his mind — this female… mine — and the sheer force of it steals my breath.
“Fuck,” I choke out. His teeth are still in my flesh, gnashing in a way that’s tearing at my skin. But all I feel is the sweet pleasure of it, my body responding with a flood of endorphins that leaves me high.
And him. I feel him. His shock. Raw. Feeling his control slip away, feeling it shatter. He didn’t choose this. His wolf overrode him the way mine overrode me. He’s as wrecked by what’s happening as I am.
He holds me there.
His full weight on my back. His teeth locked in my neck.
The knot sealing us together, his cock still twitching with the tail end of his release.
My face is in the grass. I smell dirt, blood, the sharp scent of sex.
My wolf is blissful. My human mind is hammering at the walls of the animal’s contentment, and the walls don’t give. They don’t even flex.
Minutes. I don’t know how many. His breathing against my neck, gradually slowing. My wolf, purring. Purring. Like a cat in the sun. Like everything is exactly as it should be.
Nothing is as it should be. Nothing will ever be as it should be again.
Get off. Get off. Get off!
I want to scream, but I know it would be pointless. He’s as powerless to pull out of me as I am to pull free. For the first time ever, I hate my animal nature. The cosmic joke that just tethered me to the one man I despise more than anything else in the world.
His breath begins to slow, no longer panting. His jaw loosens. The fangs withdraw, and the blood runs fresh and warm down my shoulder. His weight shifts. The knot softens, the swelling reversing by slow degrees. I wait. My muscles are coiled. The second I can move, I’m out of here.
The lock releases.
I surge away from him. The separation is violent — I feel it like a wrench that makes us both flinch, and I don’t care. I’m on my feet, shaking from head to toe, blood running from the bite and from my knees and from my palms where my own claws drew blood.
Behind me, he doesn’t stay down. He’s on his feet in one motion — fast, balanced — and when I spin to face him, what I see stops me cold.
His eyes are glowing. Golden, bright, wolf eyes in a man’s face.
His canines haven’t retracted. They extend past his lower lip, still wet with my blood.
His hands are half-clawed, his chest heaving, and every line of his body is radiating a dominance so dense I can feel it pressing against my skin from ten feet away.
But more terrifying is the fact that I can still sense what’s in his mind. His wolf saying one thing. Over and over. Mine. Mine. Mine.
I clamp a hand to my neck, directing every scrap of hate within me at him. “What did you do?” I yell. “What the fuck did you just do?”
My voice is rough. Shredded. All the control that’s defined me gone.
He stares at me. The wolf eyes. My blood on his mouth.
“I didn’t—” he starts. Then stops. Because he did. He absolutely did just claim me.
“I— I came here to end you, you fucking bastard!” The words come in pieces.
My body won’t stop shaking. “I had a knife in your skin an hour ago, and now there’s a…
a…” I shake my head, hand tightening over the bite as if I can tear it out of my flesh.
“I can feel you inside my head, and I want you out! Right now, goddamn you! I… I…. I need…” I can’t finish.
His emotions are flooding through me. The shock.
The claiming drive still pounding through him.
He wants me again, wants to mark every inch of me with his scent.
He’s fighting it. I can feel the fight, the effort it takes to stand still when everything in him is howling to close the gap.
His body sways toward me — one involuntary lean — and he catches himself, and the effort locks every muscle in his body rigid.
I back up. He doesn’t follow. But his hands are fisted at his sides. The tendons in his neck are standing out, and the wolf behind his eyes is burning.
“I should have fucking killed you!” I scream.
His eyes narrow. “Wait,” he says, taking a step forward.
Wait for what? Does he think we can talk this through? Or is he planning to take me again?
My wolf fucking loves that idea. I don’t. I’m getting out of here. Now.
I fling up a hand as if it could possibly ward him off. “Don’t! Get the fuck away from me.”
Rage and terror and sheer confusion are swirling within me. And beneath it all, my wolf, pulling toward him.
No. No, that’s not going to happen. Not now. Not ever.
I turn and run.
Not as a wolf. I can’t shift. My body is too far gone for the control it takes, every muscle shaking, the bite throbbing, the unwanted connection screaming.
Besides, if I become the wolf, she might turn back to him.
I run barefoot through the trees, branches whipping my arms, stones slicing my feet.
The blood from the bite has reached my breast, warm and ticklish, a line of evidence running down my body.
My wolf strains backward with every step. The pull is savage. Running from him feels like tearing stitches out of a wound — each stride ripping something my body is trying to hold together.
I’m sobbing when I reach the truck. Great choking gasping sounds that rack my entire body.
My claws are still out. I grip the tailgate and hang there, bent double, breathing through my teeth until the nails retract enough to work the door handle.
Spare clothes behind the seat. I drag them on.
The shirt sticks to the blood on my shoulder.
Engine. Road. Go. Fucking go!
I start the engine, slam my foot on the gas, and hurtle out of there, tires spitting gravel as I put distance between us.
But I can feel him. Still in the clearing.
Standing where I left him. The fangs retracting.
The wolf receding, but not gone. He’s satisfied, settled, certain in a way the man is not.
But I don’t care about that. He’s not my fucking problem. My wolf just demolished the only thing I ever trusted about myself.
I drive north. Ravenclaw is ten hours away. I wish it were further. To put more distance between us.
I drive like the devil’s on my tail. Because maybe he is.