Chapter Thirteen
Lilith
The bond changes everything. I don’t realize how much until Theron touches me.
It’s just his hand at first, cupping my face the way he did the very first night, his thumb tracing my cheekbone.
Simple and familiar. But where before his touch sent electricity racing over my skin, now it goes deeper, straight through skin and muscle and bone, down into something that doesn’t have a name.
I feel him in my bloodstream. I feel the pulse of him behind my sternum, slow and enormous, the same rhythm as the blue light in my veins.
Like two instruments finally playing the same note. I make a sound I didn’t intend to make.
His eyes darken. “You feel it.”
“God,” I breathe. “Is it always going to be like this?”
“Even better.”
He kisses me, and I stop being able to form thoughts. His mouth is unhurried and thorough, as if he has centuries and intends to use them. I melt into it because I have nowhere else to be and nothing else I want.
His hands move to my waist, pushing my shirt up. I lift my arms and let him strip it over my head. My bra follows. He pulls back to look at me, and the way his gaze travels over my body, slow and reverent and absolutely certain of its welcome, makes heat pool between my legs.
“Lie back,” he demands.
I do. The dark sheets are cool against my back, and he’s warm above me. The iridescence of his skin catches the candlelight.
I reach up to pull him down, but he catches my wrists. He pins them above my head with one hand and holds them there, and I feel the intentionality of it. He’s letting me know that tonight, he’s taking his time, and I’m not going to rush him.
“I have waited,” he says, his mouth dropping to my throat, “three centuries for this.”
I whimper. He takes that as encouragement.
His mouth moves down my throat to my collarbone, to the curve of my breast. Then his lips close around my nipple, and I arch off the bed.
The hand holding my wrists tightens. He works me slowly, his tongue tracing patterns I feel in my spine, and by the time he moves to the other side, I’m already trembling.
His tentacles move. They emerge gradually, unfurling from his skin as usual, but tonight they’re different. They know me now. The bond runs both ways, and he can feel exactly what he’s doing to me, which means he knows precisely which places to find and how long to stay there.
One wraps around my right thigh, the suckers creating that familiar pull-and-release against my skin. Another slides up the inside of my left leg, unhurried, taking its time. A third trails up my side, over my ribs, and curls around my breast with a slow, squeezing pressure that makes me cry out.
“You okay?” Theron rumbles.
“More than okay. Don’t stop.”
His mouth continues its path down my stomach while his tentacles work my body with a focused, patient attention that borders on torturous.
He releases my wrists. He doesn’t need to hold them anymore because I’m not going anywhere.
A couple of his tentacles immediately take over, wrapping around both my wrists and pinning them far more thoroughly than his hand did.
The suckers latch gently along the inside of my forearms, and I feel the restraint in every nerve ending, delicious and inescapable.
I pull against it instinctively, but the tentacles don’t give. They tighten slightly as a reminder of his power.
“Give it up. I’m in control.”
His mouth reaches the top of my inner thigh and stops. I can feel his breath against my pussy, warm and deliberate, and I would give him absolutely anything he asked for right now.
“Please,” I say. It comes out wrecked already. “Theron, please don’t stop now!”
A tentacle slides between my legs instead of his mouth, and I sob.
It parts my folds slowly, dragging through the slick heat of me, and the suckers catch against my clit with a rhythmic pull that makes my hips buck up off the mattress.
His tentacles pin my hips back down. The other tentacle keeps moving while his mouth finally presses to the inside of my thigh and works its way inward.
When his lips close over my clit, I cry out loud enough that I’m certain everyone in the bar will have heard me.
His tongue works slow circles while the tentacle slides down and presses against my entrance, not pushing inside yet, just holding there as a promise. The combination of the two sensations is so overwhelming that my vision blurs at the edges.
“I need—” I gasp. “Theron, I need—”
“I know what you need.” His voice vibrates against me, and I shudder. “I can feel exactly what you need. Do you want it now, Lilith?”
“Yes. Please don’t hold back.”
The tentacle pushes inside. I moan at the stretch, at the impossibly familiar fullness, but it’s different now, more connected.
It’s almost as if there’s no separation between his sensation and mine.
Like I can feel how wet and tight I am around him from both sides simultaneously, which should be impossible, but it’s all because of the bond.
He curls the tentacle inside me and finds the place that makes my whole body seize, and he stays there, working it in slow, deliberate strokes while his mouth keeps moving on my clit.
“Fuck, I’m…”
“You’re coming, Lilith, yes,” he says.
My back arches off the sheets as I come, but he doesn’t stop.
The tentacle inside me keeps moving through the aftershocks, drawing out the orgasm until I’m shaking and oversensitive and whimpering with every stroke.
His mouth doesn’t leave my clit, and the pleasure keeps cresting in waves that don’t fully recede before the next one builds.
“I can’t—” I gasp. “I can’t again, I just—”
“You can.” He lifts his head just enough to speak, his eyes black and bottomless and absolutely certain. “You can, and you will, and I’m going to feel every second.”
A second tentacle joins the first.
I cry out at the stretch, at that breathless, burning fullness that goes so far past what should be possible that my brain simply stops trying to process it and surrenders entirely.
The two tentacles move together and apart in alternating rhythm, filling me completely, and a third finds my clit while his mouth moves to my breast. I have no more words.
No more thoughts. There is only his body and mine and the bond between us, humming and complete, and the pleasure that keeps building and building with nowhere left to go but through me.
The second orgasm hits harder than the first. My inner walls clamp down, and both tentacles pulse in response. I feel his pleasure flare through the bond in answer to mine, and that feedback loop of his satisfaction sends me spiraling past coherent thought entirely.
I’m still shaking when he shifts. I feel it before I see it.
Something ancient and vast and barely contained as his form blurs at the edges.
Not the full dissolution of the ritual, but something in between.
His eyes go pure black, fathomless, and the iridescence of his skin blazes violet-blue.
More tentacles emerge than I’ve ever seen at once, filling the space around him, moving with a hunger that the controlled version of him keeps carefully leashed.
This is what he is when he stops managing himself for my comfort. This is him. He’s enormous. And every single part of him is focused entirely on me.
“Still with me?” The words come out rougher now, the edges of his voice blurred the same way his form is.
“Still with you,” I breathe. “Don’t stop.”
He makes a sound that resonates in my chest cavity.
The tentacles rearrange me with careful, irresistible strength.
They lift my hips and spread my thighs wider.
They hold me suspended in the air, completely open and utterly unable to move.
Not that I want to move—hell no. I want to be exactly here, exactly like this, held in the dark by a kraken that wants me more than it wants anything else in its centuries of existence.
His two tentacles move inside me again, only they go deeper now, harder. The suckers drag against my inner walls in a rhythm that makes my toes curl, and a third presses, slick and insistent, against the tight furl of my ass. I tense for a second.
“Easy. Relax,” he rumbles. “I thought you wanted this?”
“Yes,” I say immediately because I want everything he has. I want all of him. I’ve spent my whole life designing the fantasy of this exact moment. The reality is so far beyond anything I imagined that the word yes barely scratches the surface.
He works the third tentacle inside my ass slowly, and the fullness is so complete and overwhelming that I can’t breathe for a moment.
I can only hang there suspended in his tentacles, filled beyond capacity, my entire body reduced to sensation.
The three of them find their rhythm, and I take them all.
I’m helpless and being utterly worshipped.
Then, a smaller tentacle pushes inside my mouth, and I eagerly suck it.
The sounds coming out of me don’t sound like me anymore. They sound like someone who has given up everything and found it was worth it.
“You’re perfect,” Theron says, his voice barely human now, low and resonant and vast. “You were made for this. You were made for me. Made to be filled by me. I told you I wouldn’t leave any hole untouched.”
“Yours,” I gasp, my mouth still full of tentacle. “I’m yours, I’m yours, I’m—”
The orgasm that crests this time is nothing like the ones before it.
It starts deep in my core and radiates outward through every nerve simultaneously.
It’s white-hot and obliterates everything except the sensation and the bond and his name, which I say over and over until it stops sounding like a word and becomes something more like a mantra.
I feel him crest with me, feel the ancient, vast pleasure of him breaking through the bond in a wave that doubles and redoubles mine.
I feel him come inside me at the same moment my orgasm reaches its peak.
I scream, high and unrestrained. I don’t care about anything except this.
The tentacles slow and hold me through the aftershocks with the same careful attention with which they’ve held me through everything. Gradually, the blaze of his form settles back to its familiar iridescence.
He lowers me gently onto the sheets and gathers me against him. His tentacles settle around us, warm and unhurried. I lie there completely wrung out, listening to the slow rhythm of his breathing as the blue light in my veins pulses gently in time with his.
A single circuit of life. The manuscript had it exactly right.
I have no idea how much time has passed. Time moves differently in this pocket realm, in the space between his world and mine, and I gave up tracking it somewhere around the third orgasm.
“So,” I say finally. “What does being your Anchor actually look like? Day to day.”
“It looks like this,” he says. “The pocket realm is yours as much as mine. You can move between worlds now, and I can follow you there without dissolving. Your life won’t disappear, Lilith. It will only get bigger.”
I think about May.
“I need to tell my best friend something eventually, or she’ll get worried,” I say.
“What will you tell her?”
I think about it. “The truth. She didn’t believe me the first time, but she will when she meets you. Fair warning, she’s going to have a lot of questions about the anatomy.”
“I can answer questions,” he says.
“Good.” I settle back against him. The light through the window is that deep, shifting blue-green that feels like being underwater, and it’s the most peaceful thing I’ve ever seen.
His tentacles tighten gently around me, possessive and warm.
“I’m never letting you go. You’re mine. My mate,” he says.
“I know. That’s why I came back.”
“I… love you, Lilith.”
I let out a contented sigh. “I love you too, Theron.”