Chapter 18 #2
I don't go faster. I go deeper. The difference pulls a cry from her throat that belongs to a woman she's never met. Her jaw clenches because the woman who made that sound is the omega she's been burying for years, and the burial just failed.
"That's not what I said."
"I know what you said." I drive into her with a stroke that lifts her hips off the furs. "I don't take orders."
She bites my shoulder hard enough to draw blood. The bite feels like fury and want and the healer's refusal to lie still while someone else runs the procedure.
Wet sounds fill the chamber alongside the fire's crackle. Each stroke drives slick down between us, soaking the furs, and the obscenity of it feeds something primal in my wolf that I stopped trying to civilize the moment she burned the compound.
Her nails rake down my back. The pain registers as fuel. I pull out to the tip and slam back in hard enough to push her up the furs.
She snarls against my throat. The snarl is Signe through and through: precise, furious, directed at the wolf who won't give her what she wants on her terms.
I give her more. My hips snap against hers with a force that drives the air from her lungs in short, percussive gasps, and the pace accelerates because neither of us is pretending patience is an option.
"This is a physiological response," she manages between thrusts, and the fact that she's still narrating while I'm buried inside her makes me want to break her of the habit and never let her rebuild it.
"Keep telling yourself that."
"The omega drives the urgency. The alpha matches it. The neurochemistry is predictable."
I change the angle and find the place inside her that turns the terminology into a gasp, and the gasp becomes a moan, and the moan becomes my name stripped of everything except the vowel.
The narration dies mid-word. She comes with her back arched and her inner walls seizing around me in contractions that nearly pull me over the edge.
Her legs lock around my hips. She presses into me, and the slick that coats my cock with each thrust runs hot enough to feel like it's rewriting my chemistry from the inside.
Between waves, she surfaces. The healer's eyes focus on mine, lucid and present and fierce.
She's choosing this. The heat compels the omega, but the woman behind it chose to be in this room, chose to burn the compound. The waves don't erase the choice. They amplify it.
"Eirik." Her voice is stripped raw. The healer's register is gone, and what's left underneath sounds like a woman she's kept locked behind terminology for years. "I chose this before the heat. I need you to know that."
I know that. I've known it since the first morning she put her hands inside my wounds and her fingers didn't shake.
"I know."
"Then stop being careful with me."
My mouth finds the claiming site. I lick the skin just left of the hollow of her throat, tasting salt and the concentrated omega signature that seeps from the scent gland beneath the surface.
The contact makes her clench so hard around me that my vision blurs.
I pull back from the site because I remember what she told me. The knot. Not before.
The waiting costs me something I'll be paying off for the rest of my life, because every alpha instinct I carry is screaming at me to bite now, to seal the bond, to make the permanent thing permanent.
But she told me when the seal works. The telling was clinical and precise, and the precision is the part of her I want most. She gave me the information while she still had the voice to give it.
The least I can do is use it right, even while the rest of me is running on a frequency that doesn't know words at all.
The knot begins to form. The swelling builds at the root, thickening with each thrust until the base catches at her entrance and stretches her around it.
Her body responds with a fresh flood of slick, the omega recognizing what's coming and opening for the lock with a biological readiness that mirrors my own urgency. The thickening catches, stretches, holds. I thrust deep one final time and the knot seals.
The base swells past withdrawal, locking inside her with a fullness that empties the air from both of us.
I can feel every point of contact: the ring of her body gripping the swollen base, the heat radiating from the lock outward through my spine, the involuntary pulses of her inner muscles clenching around the knot in contractions so deep they feel like they start at the base of her spine.
Her clenching triggers my own release, and I spill inside her in long, shuddering waves while her body wrings every pulse from me with the relentless grip of the omega completing its function.
I can't move. She can't move. The knot holds us together with a biological insistence that doesn't care about dignity or distance or the careful space she's maintained between her body and every wolf who's ever touched it.
I'm inside her, locked, and the forced stillness strips every remaining performance the way fire strips paint.
"I love you." The words come out low and rough and without permission, pulled from a place the wolf doesn't guard because the wolf never learned to hide it.
"I've loved you since you put your hands in my blood and didn't flinch.
I loved you when you were still lying to me about what you are.
I'll love you after the knot releases and the heat fades and the clinical voice comes back, because the clinical voice is part of it, Signe.
All of it. Every wall you built. I want to live inside every one of them. "
She doesn't answer. She can't. Her forehead drops against my jaw and her breath catches on something that isn't a word and isn't a sob and belongs to the omega she's been burying since she was old enough to understand what hiding costs.
She can't fold her arms and step back. She can't pick up the pestle and grind herself into composure.
The woman who has narrated every moment of her life in clinical terminology is pinned beneath an alpha whose body is locked inside hers.
The pinning leaves no room for the vocabulary she's used as armor since her mother first placed a suppressant on her tongue.
She comes around the knot with a sound that carries no clinical vocabulary at all. Just my name, whole this time, both syllables, and the sound of it in her mouth while her body seizes around mine is the most honest thing she's ever given me.
Her left hand lifts from the claiming site. Her fingers move aside. The skin she's been covering since she was a girl is bare beneath my mouth, and the baring is the invitation I've been holding my jaw shut for.
She's moving her own hand so my teeth can replace it. The moving is consent and surrender and the bravest thing she's ever done, all in the span of her fingers lifting from skin to air.
My canines find the skin just left of the hollow of her throat, on the diagonal toward the clavicle. The teeth pierce cleanly.
Her blood wells around them, hot and fast, and the taste floods my mouth: copper and omega and a neurochemical signature so concentrated that my wolf goes silent for the first time since the heat began.
The scent-bond snaps into place with a permanence that isn't metaphorical. It's chemical, molecular, irreversible.
Raw and real, the scream tears through the stone walls, and I hold the bite while her body processes the wound and the neurochemistry simultaneously.
The agony thins into warmth that spreads from the bite outward through her body, and the sound she makes when the warmth reaches her extremities has left pain behind. Recognition, raw and involuntary. Her biology accepting the claim at a level she can't narrate and has stopped trying to.
The silence arrives like the heat did: all at once, without negotiation. Signe, who narrated the sex in clinical terms even while coming apart around me, goes quiet.
The healer who described her own heat as a "hormonal cascade" has run out of terminology.
The lover who lectured me on canine elongation while spread beneath me has run out of lectures.
Every clinical term she's ever used to keep love at arm's length dissolves into the space between one breath and the next.
She goes quiet, and the quiet feeds my wolf in a way nothing else ever has.