17. Mine #2
The first ridge stretches her open. Her mouth falls open on a gasp.
Each subsequent ridge drags along her walls, forcing her wider, filling her completely.
By the time the knot presses against her entrance and her walls grip it — tight, slick, hot — and she gasps.
Not pain. Fullness. Her body squeezing the ridge with a pressure that sends electricity up my shaft into my spine.
She is panting, nails digging into my shoulders.
“Breathe,” I growl. “Take your mate.”
“More.” Her legs wrap my waist, ankles barely crossing behind me.
The second ridge. It catches at her entrance — the raised edge dragging against the ring of muscle — and then slides past, and she moans, her nails digging into my biceps.
The catch-and-release of each ridge entering is a specific, rhythmic sensation — a staccato of pressure and yield that I feel through the shaft, and she feels as each band stretches and fills her.
Third ridge. Fourth. Deeper. I am shaking.
She is shaking. Her walls are fluttering around me — involuntary pulses, her body adjusting, accommodating, stretching around an anatomy wider and more textured than anything human.
Each inch draws a sound from her — a climbing scale of moans, louder as I go deeper.
“You’re so — god — I can feel every one of them — each one — it’s like —” She cannot finish. The fifth ridge passes the spot on her front wall and her eyes roll back and her spine lifts off the mattress and a raw, guttural sound tears from her throat.
“Right there — stay — no, keep going — more —” Her heels dig into my lower back.
She is contradicting herself. Her body wants the ridge against that spot and also wants more of me and the conflict is making her frantic.
Her hips tilt, grinding against the ridge, and the friction makes us both groan.
I give her more. Slowly. The sixth ridge, the seventh — deeper than I thought she could take, and she takes it, her body yielding around me in wet increments, her walls pulsing with each new inch.
I am watching her face — the flush from chest to hairline, her mouth open, her eyes glazed and dark, tears leaking from the corners not from pain but from the overwhelming fullness of being stretched around something this size.
The knot reaches her entrance.
She feels it — the swell pressing against her, wider than the shaft, demanding more than the ridges asked. Her eyes focus. Find mine.
I press forward. A fraction at a time. The knot stretches her entrance — slow, the tissue yielding around the widest point, and she is panting in short sharp breaths, her hands gripping my arms, her eyes locked on mine.
“Breathe,” I growl, voice dropping into gravel. “Take it. Take every inch of your mate.”
“I am breathing. I’m breathing, and you’re enormous, and I want every — oh —”
The widest point. Her jaw drops. Her eyes squeeze shut. A high sound — not a scream, the precursor — and her body stretches and yields and the knot pops past her entrance and seats inside her with a wet, obscene finality that we both feel in our bones.
Locked.
The mating knot swells to its full diameter. Larger than it was in the shower, stretching her to her limit, a burning pressure that makes her whimper.
The fullness is devastating.
Her walls grip every ridge, and the thick knot pulses in rhythm. I start to move — deep, rolling grinds that shift every textured band inside her while the knot grinds against her g-spot.
She comes almost immediately, crying out, walls clamping down hard around my knot in rippling sequence. I grind deeper, fangs scraping her shoulder.
“Mine,” I snarl against her skin. “This perfect cunt is mine. Say it while I’m locked inside you.”
“Yours—fuck—it’s yours—don’t stop—”
I fuck her with the knot — slow, devastating circles. The purr drops into its deepest register, vibrating directly through the knot and into her core. Each ridge vibrates with it. She sobs my name, coming again, harder, her body milking me in powerful waves.
I explore every inch of her while locked deep— hands mapping her breasts, thumbs teasing her nipples, mouth claiming her throat and the claiming bite I will soon leave.
She maps me in return — fingers tracing every marking, stroking the dense fuzz on my chest, gripping my horns until my vision whites.
When the knot finally releases I flip her onto her stomach, pull her hips up, and sink back into her from behind.
This round is harder, more possessive. I rail her deep, tail wrapped around her waist, one hand fisting her hair, the other gripping her hip hard enough to bruise.
She pushes back to meet every thrust, moaning my name.
I reach around and rub her clit in tight circles. She comes again with a broken cry. The sensation pulls me over the edge. I roar and sink my fangs into her shoulder in the claiming bite as I empty myself deep inside her — thick, heavy pulses flooding her while the knot swells and locks us again.
“Mine.” Again. Spoken into her skin.
Trell said mine tonight. Thirty years of it — his, asset, best work — possession as a ledger entry, a serial number with my pulse attached. This is the word turned inside out. Spoken into her skin, it is not a claim of ownership. It is a surrender of it.
I turn her over — carefully, still locked, swallowing her gasp at the shift — because I need her face for this, and I am past examining why.
“Yours —” Barely a word. Her hands find my face. Small palms on my jaw. “And you’re mine right back, lovey.”
Something in my face rearranges. Muscles moving in a configuration they have not attempted in thirty years.
“There you are,” she whispers. “There you are.”
She holds my face. Thumbs on my cheekbones. Watching me come apart with an expression I have never seen directed at me — not fear, not assessment, not the clinical regard of a commanding officer evaluating an asset.
Tenderness. The look she gives lost things before she writes them down. Except this lost thing is not going in a notebook. This lost thing is inside her and knotted and purring and shaking and has nowhere to be except here.
“You smiled again,” she whispers.
“...I know.”
We stay locked together for a long time. I curl my body around hers, purring softly, hand over her heart.
She reaches back and strokes my jaw. “You smiled again.”
“Twice,” I murmur against her hair.
“I’m going to make it a hundred. I’m keeping count.”
We talk in the dark, locked together, her spine against my chest. I tell her about the Proving Dens — the night they made it clear the purr meant soft and soft meant target.
The way I killed the sound at seven and catalogued it as a successful elimination for most of my life, until a courier offered tea to the male who was robbing her and something buried answered.
She does not say I’m sorry. She takes my hand and presses my palm flat over her heart and holds it there, and the purr finds a register I did not know it had. The one that soothes.
“Next time,” she murmurs, already half asleep, “the tail participates.”
“Logged.”
She falls asleep in my arms, claimed and claiming, her body marked with my bite, my fingerprints, and the evidence of how thoroughly I have filled her.
On the shelf beside the berth, my earpiece pulses blue. Once. Twice.
I do not answer.
What remains is her.