Chapter Eleven #3
“Easy.” His voice is ruined, barely above a rasp, his forehead dropping hard to mine, gold eyes burning through the dark from an inch away. He looks as if every last layer of that ironclad control completely dissolved. “Easy… stay with me.”
“I’m with you,” I manage. “I’m extremely with you. What is… is that—”
“Yeah.” A short, shattered exhale against my mouth. “Yeah, that’s exactly what it is.”
Oh. Oh, fuck!
“You could have mentioned that was on the table—”
“I mentioned it.”
“You said biological quirks. That is not a quirk, Rogue. That is a structural event—”
“Charlotte.”
“I would have appreciated a diagram—”
He rolls his hips, the knot pressing exactly right, and whatever I was about to say dissolves into the night sky without a trace.
“Oh,” I say. It comes out barely above a breath.
“Still want that diagram?”
“Shut up.” My vampire-sharp nerve endings, the ones that have made the last four days a masterclass in sensory overload, take that slow, rhythmic throb and translate it into something that starts deep inside me.
It radiates outward in concentric rings, one after another, building rather than fading, stacking rather than cresting, and my brain performs a full emergency shutdown on every non-essential function.
He rolls his hips.
A small motion.
Barely anything.
“Do that again,” I demand.
The knot shifts with it, pressing against a place inside me that makes my spine arch completely off the tree, my mouth fall open, and a broken, filthy sound tear out of me that the forest is absolutely going to keep between us.
“There—” I drag him closer by the back of his neck, my legs locked around him, my hips rolling in answer. “Right there, don’t you dare stop—”
“I’m not stopping,” he says, his voice stripped to nothing, and he proceeds to move.
Not away. Deeper. A slow, grinding roll forward that presses the knot exactly where the last shift found, and this time the sound I make is his name on a breath with nothing else attached to it, just Rogue, just that, while my whole body answers in a wave that starts at my core and rolls all the way to my fingertips.
“Don’t hold back,” he says into my hair, the same words as before, but rougher now and frayed around the edges. Like he’s barely holding himself together while he says them. “Not with me, Charlie. Christ.”
I let go completely.
The sounds coming out of me turn rough and uncontrolled.
I dig my fingers into his shoulders and drag him closer until there’s no distance left between us.
My fangs descend completely on their own.
He sees it. The growl that comes out of him is deep and wolf-dark, the sound reverberating through the knot and straight into my core is hard enough to set off a violent wave that knocks my head back against the tree.
“Jesus.”
“I know.” He presses his mouth to my jaw, my throat, his breathing rough and close against my skin.
His hands grip my hips with a force that would shatter anything human and does spectacular things to me, tilting me forward, changing the angle, the knot pressing deeper still, and every small involuntary shift of either of us sets off another rolling cascade that I am utterly unequipped to manage.
“Rogue.” His name is the only word I have left, and I’m using it constantly.
“Right here.” His voice is hoarse, two hundred years of careful control completely eroded, leaving something underneath that sounds undone in the most fundamental way. “I’ve got you.”
He moves again, unhurried and deliberate, a slow grind that drags the knot against that spot with devastating accuracy, and the sound I make dislodges something from the canopy above us.
“Harder!”
He does.
Again…
… and again.
Each roll of his hips is slow and intentional, the knot pressing in exactly the right place with exactly the right force, and the pleasure builds in layers I have no vocabulary for.
Not the sharp, climbing peak of human sensation…
this is vaster. Spreading and continuous, and stacking on itself, wave rolls over wave with nowhere to resolve, just building and building until my entire body is caught in it, and I stop attempting to monitor any of it.
“Don’t hold back,” he says into my hair. The same words he said before, but they mean something different now, strained, almost desperate, the request of a man hanging onto his last thread of composure. “Not with me, Charlie. Please.”
I stop holding back. My hips roll forward to meet Rogue’s, and I stop moderating the sounds I’m making.
I dig my fingers into his shoulders and drag him closer until there is no distance left between us, and my fangs descend entirely on their own.
The growl that comes out of him at that is so deep and wolf-dark it reverberates through the knot and into my core and sets off a wave so violent that my head drops back against the tree, and I say something extremely undignified into the night sky.
“Mine,” he growls, his jaw pressing hard against my neck and shoulder, teeth dragging a slow, claiming line. “Mine.”
“Yours,” I gasp, and mean it in every single dimension.
His mouth finds my throat and stays there, open and hot, while his hips hold their devastating rhythm and the knot keeps its devastating pulse, and I am completely, entirely unraveling.
The pleasure has become one continuous thing, no peaks and valleys, just an endless building pressure that radiates from every point of contact outward, my whole body lit up and humming, vampire senses turned entirely against me, translating everything at a resolution no human body was ever designed to process.
My fangs find his shoulder.
This time I don’t hesitate.
I sink in at the exact moment he grinds forward, and the taste of him detonates through me simultaneously with the deepest pulse of the knot yet. The resulting collision obliterates every coherent thought I’ve had in twenty-three years of living, plus four days of undead existence.
Lycan heat floods my mouth, rich, ancient, and his, a flavor that is specific and unmistakable, running through me like a lit match meeting accelerant.
The bond, the blood, the pleasure, and the heat collapse together into something singular and devastating, and I make a sound against his skin that is muffled only because my fangs are buried in him.
His answering groan is the most destroyed sound I’ve ever heard from a living creature.
His arms lock fully around me, both of them, gathering my entire weight against his chest with a grip that communicates something far beyond words, and his hips press forward in slow, grinding pulses that match the rhythm of the knot, relentless and unhurried and absolutely destroying me.
I take only a mouthful… less. Just enough to feel him flood through me like wildfire, and stopping there is simultaneously the hardest thing I’ve ever done and the easiest, because the part of me that pulled back is mine, is Charlie Harris, and she held.
My tongue closes the marks with instinctive care, and the shudder that moves through him at that small gesture travels all the way down through the knot.
“Jesus Christ,” I breathe.
“Yeah,” he says, and there is nothing left of the controlled, calculating VP in his voice at all. Just the man underneath, completely and entirely undone. “Fuck, yeah.”
He holds my weight without any sign of effort, lycan strength inexhaustible even now, and I stop managing every point of contact, holding onto him, and letting myself be held.
The knot keeps its slow, deep pulse between us, sending waves rolling through me one after another that have no inclination to stop, and I have given up any pretense of dignity because there is no one for miles, and I am done.
His breathing at my temple is harsh and broken and gratifyingly ruined.
“Rogue.”
“I know.” His arms tighten further. “I know.”
“This is a lot.”
“Yeah,” he says, voice scraped raw, and presses his mouth to my temple. “It really is.”
The waves keep coming. The knot keeps its rhythm.
Every small involuntary shift of either of our bodies sets off another cascade, deep, spreading and continuous, and somewhere in the middle of it all, my body stops being a source of terror, hunger, and loss of control and becomes something else entirely.
Something that knows exactly what it’s doing and is doing it magnificently.
“Oh—” The word dissolves before it forms, and his name replaces it. Just his name, over and over, because it’s all I have left.
“Right here,” he says. His voice is nothing. Wreckage and warmth and a quiet certainty he isn’t going anywhere. “Look at me. Stay with me.”
The forest breathes around us, dark, indifferent, and enormous.
Above us, the canopy frames a narrow strip of sky, and my vampire eyes read every star in it at a resolution no human eye could manage, each one sharp, distinct, and absurdly, impossibly beautiful.
His heartbeat is in my ears, in my bones, and through the bond between us, steady and fierce, synced with something deeper than proximity.
He doesn’t speak for a long time.
Neither do I.
The cold settles back in slowly at the outermost edges, but at the center, where we’re pressed together, it is warm. Completely, entirely warm.
“You all right?” he murmurs eventually, lips against my hair.
I take genuine stock.
My fangs are retracted.
The hunger, the screaming, the four-day-old hunger that has been clawing at the inside of my skull since the turning, is quiet. Not suppressed or white-knuckled into submission but settled, like something that has been given exactly what it needed and knows it.
My body hums with a warmth that has a name neither of us is going to say out loud tonight.
“Surprisingly, yes,” I tell him. “Which is not a sentence I expected to say at any point this week.”