Chapter 54 #3
I push a single finger in and bite back a curse as her walls welcome me, fluttering and clenching.
She trembles, trying so hard to be still when I know her hips want to lift.
I want a fucking taste.
Just a little one. Just enough to keep the apex predator inside me at bay… for now. One does not simply happen upon the role of pride leader. Iron-clad control is not incidental to it.
But this woman, this soft, giving omega, humbles me.
She also breaks me down. And although I know it’s dangerous and that the control I pride myself on is slipping, I shove the tray and scrolls aside, drop her ass onto my desk, and with a groan of defeat, spread her pussy lips and take a long, savoring lick.
Darrion
The hail from Fenix as I return from a patrol renders me unsteady.
Our pride third is not one for being circumspect with information.
More often, he is brooding, grumpy, or smugly gloating.
He is none of those today. I don’t bother knocking on Atlas’s study door.
It is particularly bold of me. And pushy. Neither of which is my norm.
I blame it on Fenix as I nearly pitch over the damn mutt who is sitting right behind the door.
He growls and snaps his teeth—I have just trodden on his tail, so I cut him some slack.
Her scent arrests me. My wings obediently, and completely involuntarily, manifest behind me. The door slips from my nerveless fingers and rattles into the jamb.
She’s over his desk, again. This time, face up, pretty tits flushed where he is mauling them. His head is buried between her thighs, and the sounds she is making take my blood and lust to a boiling point in an instant.
Atlas lifts his head slowly, as if I have not just barged into his private study like a pumped-up bull scenting fertile breeding stock.
Darkan chatters his beak approvingly.
Is she fertile? Is that what ails me… and Atlas by the look of things.
Omegas need to be barbed. Repeatedly, if you are to trigger their readiness to breed. There has not been a lot of that lately—not since the Sundial Chamber—and understandably so.
Atlas pins me with a look and arches one brow, yet something peers from behind his eyes that I have not seen before. Interesting. Somehow, I paste on a neutral expression and straighten out the cuffs on my silk jacket. “Should I get a chair?”
“Don’t bother,” Atlas growls. He leans back and indicates the position between her spread thighs.
I take quick strides until I’m standing over her. She has flung one arm across her eyes, and her chest is rising and falling unsteadily. My lips quirk. “That is quite a vision,” I say admiringly. “Has she been allowed to come?”
“No,” Atlas says. “Not yet.”
Poor little mate.
I don’t know exactly what he intends for me to do, but I’m fully committed to whatever the fuck it is, and I’m not about to argue. She has been wallowing in events of the past, and it would be fair to agree that it has been an unhealthy kind of lingering.
None of what transpired was her fault.
Further, her mere presence here—the insights provided by Lark and Rafe, and that she brought here, along with the pride-wide enhancements we all benefited from during the height of the battle and which were down to her and her alone—undoubtedly played an important part.
If not in the winning, then certainly in expediting it. Her mere presence saved lives, of that I have no doubt. And beyond all this, she has come into her own.
“Mark her,” Atlas says. “Her tits, her pussy, the gown if you so wish.”
My next breath comes out slower than the last as my mind scrambles to assimilate his request. “She needs barbing.”
“Don’t fucking push me,” he growls.
We are both fucking distracted, glaring at one another, when I notice movement out of the corner of my eyes. The damn mutt has snuck over—Lark can be stealthy when he chooses to—and is drooling all over her tit.
Violet squeaks.
I bat the insolent pup away. Alas, his snout has the constitution of a boulder, and it nearly breaks my godsdamned fist.
He whines, shakes his head, and stubbornly plants his ass, giving him a front row view.
I’m too fucking primed to care. Atlas wants my seed on her, for me to mark her. Her eyes are on me, wide and full of heat. The other occupants fade from my mind. There is only my mate, lain out like an offering, ready to be defiled.
In a flash, I manifest my clothing away, and take my aching cock in hand. This will not take fucking long. More likely, embarrassingly brief…
Violet
“Mark her,” Atlas said. “Her tits, her pussy, the gown if you so wish.”
It’s so primitive, both the request and the sure knowledge that Darrion will do exactly as he’s told.
He leans over me like an avenging angel, deadly and beautiful to behold.
His glossy brown wings make a fan around him.
His face is a picture of savage need, his muscles pumped and glistening with a fine shimmer of sweat as he jacks his cock over me.
It makes sticky, urgent noises, and pre-cum drips and splatters over me and the once pretty gown.
“She needs barbing.”
My next moan is wanton. I’m thinking about their barbs, how they felt inside of me. “Please barb me!”
“Ah, gods!” Darrion’s cry accompanies a hot, heavy splat landing against my breasts.
More and more, against my throat, and then falling in a heavy rain against the exposed folds of my pussy and clit.
I’m on fire. Panting. Lost in the image of the huge male bracing over me with his chest heaving and his expression one of deep satisfaction.
He releases his cock slowly, though he remains hard, the barbs raised like ridges along his length. Eyes gleaming and whirling like his griffin peers out at me, he scoops up the cum lying thickly over my pussy and pushes it into me.
I come. Back bowing and neck arching. Sounds leave my lips that I barely recognize.
The stimulation is all-consuming, blinding. It shatters me.
The world spins.
When I rouse myself from the detonation, I’m face down over the table with a cock lodged in my pussy. The thick swelling butting enticingly against my entrance tells me it is Lark.
Lark
I don’t remember Darrion leaving, nor my shift to human form. I don’t even remember how Violet came to be face down over Atlas’s desk, with my cock buried inside her soft cunt all the way to the knot. I only know that that is where she is. And this is where I am. And we are both fucking close.
I love this woman wholly, completely, deeply. I didn’t know that kind of love existed until she entered my life. The past few weeks of distance, while understandable, existed as an echo of the many times before when we loved her through her heat. And then she forgot.
I told myself it was not the same. But the heart is not always rational, and past hurts can linger.
And now all this talk of barbing? Gods. My fingers grip her hips tightly. She is making cute little mewling sounds and humping back for more. My knot is hard and engorged to the point of misery and pleasure in equal degree.
There’s a moment of resistance when I push before it just slips right in and nestles there.
And my entire world narrows to the focus of where the two of us are joined, the pulsing beat of our two heartbeats, where we become one.
She cries out as her channel begins fisting over the knot in a way that compels me to follow through.
My hips jerk, and I grind against her, shuddering in the throes of my release, growling and tempering the urge to half-shift. I want to be human this time—need her to feel me as a man.
Violet
“Do you remember me now, mate?”
Lark’s words carry a wound that sparks through the bond. One that bears echoes of the past and our days of traveling… and the many times when I forgot.
“I do. Always. I could never forget again.” Guilt mixes with the pleasure of our intimate connection.
How they cared for me, quietly, and without reservation—how they never once pressed the advantage they had.
With different men, such a situation could have played out tragically.
“The memory will never be locked away again. Not now we are bonded forever.”
“Damn right, lass,” he grits out. “But sometimes a man still needs to press a point. The deeper kind of reminder, just because he chooses to, and he can.”
“Oh,” I gasp, a frisson of fear and arousal as I feel him kick inside me… and begin to grow. Bigger, harder, thicker.
“What exactly are you doing today?” Atlas says coolly.
I had almost forgotten he was there, even though he was holding me, fingers against my nape as I clutch his other hand.
“Partial shift,” Lark hisses through his teeth.
Atlas chuckles darkly.
The pleasure turns deep and twisty. So full. Pulsing together, as I once more come apart.
Then I feel the snap.
Not a decision. Not even a choice. More like a wall giving way… the kind that has held for so long.
Atlas moves. Nothing like the deliberate patience I have come to know as him. He lifts me from the desk and Lark’s embrace. His hands are everywhere, rough with urgency. I feel the rumble move through him before I hear it—something between a growl and a groan, deep and unguarded.
“Atlas—“
“Quiet,” he says. His voice has lost its careful register. Raw at the edges. Almost warning me not to name what is happening, lest the naming of it restore his sense.
As if I would. Not when I have craved this for so long, the side he shielded me from, and yet which I now demand he reveal.
His wings snap wider, casting a shadow… Aldric clacks his beak once in what might be the griffin equivalent of losing his mind entirely.
Atlas
She is back. She is with us. I feel her essence through the bond as both a balm and a raging fire. The control I pride myself upon is shattered. But that is what happens when the woman you love begs you to give her your barb.
She wants to be bred.