Chapter 6 #15
“Karax—”
“Let me.” I look up at her, meeting her eyes over the landscape of her body.
She’s still too thin from the bond sickness, still gaunt and hollow in ways that make my chest ache with guilt.
But she’s beautiful like this—flushed and wanting, spread out before me on rough wool blankets in a hay-filled barn.
“Let me show you what this means to me.”
I settle between her thighs and breathe her in. Her scent is different now—still sweet omega arousal, the slick already beginning to coat her folds, but layered with something else. Something that smells like choice. Like freedom.
Like the beginning of something I don’t have words for.
I lick into her slowly, deliberately, and she cries out—her hips jerking, her hands fisting in my hair. I pin her down with one arm across her stomach, holding her still while I explore her with my tongue.
“Oh god—” Her voice breaks. “Karax, please—”
“Please what?” I circle her clit with the tip of my tongue, barely touching. “Tell me what you want.”
“More. I need more—”
“Say it properly.” I press a kiss to her inner thigh, feeling her legs shake. “Not because I command you. Because you want to.”
She understands what I’m asking. During the heat, she called me Alpha because her biology demanded it. Now I need to know if she’ll choose to say it.
“Please, Alpha.” The word comes out steady, certain. “Please make me come.”
The sound that tears from my throat is something between a groan and a sob.
I bury my face between her thighs and worship her—licking, sucking, fucking her with my tongue while she writhes beneath me.
Her slick coats my chin, my cheeks, dripping down my throat as I drink her in.
I learn what makes her gasp (circles around her clit) and what makes her scream (two fingers curled inside her, pressing against that spot that makes her whole body shake).
When she comes, it’s with my name on her lips—not Alpha, but Karax—and her fingers pulling my hair hard enough to sting.
I don’t stop.
I work her through the first orgasm and into a second, then a third, until she’s sobbing and pushing at my shoulders.
“Please—I can’t—I need you inside me—”
I kiss my way back up her body, tasting her on my lips, and she pulls me into a kiss that’s all tongue and desperation. She can taste herself on me, I realize. The thought makes my cock throb painfully against my breeches, the ridges already prominent along my shaft.
“Are you sure?” I ask against her mouth.
“I’ve never been more sure of anything.” She reaches between us, her small hands fumbling with my laces. “I’m choosing this, Karax. I’m choosing you.”
I help her free my cock—already hard, already leaking, the ridges swollen with need. She wraps her hand around me and I hiss at the contact, my hips jerking involuntarily.
“You’re so big,” she whispers, and there’s wonder in her voice rather than fear. Her fingers trace along the ridges, exploring. “I forgot how big.”
“We can go slow—”
“I don’t want slow.” She guides me to her entrance, her pussy slick and swollen from three orgasms. “I want to feel you. All of you.”
I push into her.
Slow, despite what she said. I need to feel every inch—the initial resistance, then the give as her body opens for me.
The way her pussy stretches around my girth, accommodating me even though I’m far too large for a human woman.
The flutter of her inner walls as each ridge drags across her sensitive flesh.
“Yes,” she breathes when I’m halfway in. “Yes, more, please—”
I push deeper. Watch her face contort with pleasure. Feel through the bond the exact moment the pressure becomes too much, tipping from fullness into something that borders on pain—
I stop. “Hannah—”
“Don’t stop.” Her legs wrap around my waist, her heels digging into my ass. “I want all of you. I can take it.”
I push the rest of the way in, and she screams.
Not pain. Pleasure so intense it sounds like agony. I feel it echo through the bond—the overwhelming fullness, the way every nerve ending in her pussy is firing at once, the pressure of my cock against her cervix.
“Fuck,” she gasps. “Oh fuck, you’re so deep—”
I hold still, letting her adjust, my arms trembling with the effort of not moving. She’s so tight around me. So hot and wet and mine, not because I trapped her but because she chose me.
“Move,” she whispers. “Please, Karax. I need you to move.”
I start to thrust.
This time, there’s no brutality. No desperation.
Just slow, deep strokes that make her moan and arch beneath me. I feel every clench of her pussy, every flutter of her pleasure, every wave of emotion that passes through the bond.
Something is growing between us. Something I felt him wondering about. Something I’m afraid to name because naming it might make it disappear.
“Look at me,” I tell her, cupping her face in one massive hand. “I want to see your eyes.”
She meets my gaze, and I see tears glistening there. Not sadness—something else. Something that looks like coming home.
“I think—” Her voice breaks as I thrust particularly deep. “I think I might be falling for you. I don’t know if I should. I don’t know if it makes sense. But I think I am.”
The words crack something open in my chest. Something I’ve been keeping locked away for seven centuries, afraid to look at too closely.
“I don’t know what to call this,” I admit, my voice rough. “I’ve never felt it before. Not in seven hundred years. But whatever it is—” I thrust again, watching her eyes flutter. “It started before I had any right to it. And it’s not going away.”
“Is that love?”
“I don’t know.” I lean down, pressing my forehead to hers. “Maybe. Maybe it’s becoming that. Maybe it will be, if we let it.”
“Then let’s let it.”
I kiss her—deep and desperate and full of everything I can’t put into words—and I feel my knot beginning to swell at the base of my cock.
“Hannah—” I pull back, my hips stuttering. “I’m going to knot. I can try to pull out—”
“Don’t you dare.” She wraps her legs tighter around me, locking me in place. “I want it. I want all of you.”
I thrust harder, faster, feeling the knot catch against her entrance with each stroke. She’s so wet, so slick with arousal and my precum, that I slide in and out easily despite my size. But the knot is growing, swelling larger with every thrust, and soon—
“Now,” she gasps. “Please, now—”
I slam into her one final time and feel the knot push past her entrance, locking us together.
She screams.
Her pussy clamps down on me like a vice, her whole body shaking as the orgasm rips through her. I feel it everywhere—through the bond, around my cock, in the way she clings to me like I’m the only solid thing in a spinning world.
I follow her over the edge.
My vision goes white as I spill inside her—hot, thick spurts flooding her already-full cunt. The knot pulses with each release, locking my seed deep inside her, ensuring nothing escapes. I feel her pussy milking me, feel the rhythmic clenching that draws out my orgasm until I’m empty and shaking.
We collapse together onto the blankets, still locked, still trembling.
“We’re stuck,” she murmurs against my chest, and there’s laughter in her voice.
“For a while.” I shift us onto our sides, cradling her against me so my weight doesn’t crush her. “The knot will go down eventually.”
“How long?”
“Half an hour. Maybe longer.” I press a kiss to her hair. “Is that okay?”
“It’s perfect.” She snuggles closer, her small body fitting against mine like she was made for this. “I like being stuck with you.”
Something warm blooms in my chest. Something that might be the beginning of that thing I’m afraid to name.
We lie there in silence for a while, the knot slowly softening inside her, my cock still twitching with aftershocks. I can feel my seed leaking around the edges of the knot, dripping down her thighs, and some primal part of me is satisfied by the sight.
Mine. She’s mine. Not because I forced her. Because she chose.
“I want to try something,” I say finally. “When we go back to Stone Court.”
“What?”
“I want to try being…” I struggle for the right word. “Partners. Equals, in everything that matters. I want you beside me, not behind me. I want your voice in council meetings, your input on decisions, your hand in reshaping everything I’ve built.”
She’s quiet for a moment. I feel her skepticism through the bond—not rejection, just honest doubt.
“You know you’ll probably fail at that,” she says. “Seven centuries of being the one in charge. Seven centuries of taking what you want without asking. You’re not going to become an equal partner overnight.”
“I know.”
“You’ll slip. You’ll make decisions without consulting me. You’ll fall back into old patterns.”
“Probably.”
“And I’ll call you on it. Every time.”
“I’m counting on it.”
She tilts her head back to look at me, searching my face for something. Whatever she finds makes her smile—small, tentative, but real.
“Okay,” she says. “Let’s try. Partners. Equals. Knowing we’ll both fail at it sometimes, and we’ll keep trying anyway.”
“That’s all I’m asking.”
“And in the bedroom?”
I tighten my arms around her, letting her feel the possessiveness I’m not even trying to hide. “In the bedroom, you’re mine. My omega. My claim. That doesn’t change.”
“Good.” She presses a kiss to my chest. “I don’t want that to change.”
The knot finally softens enough for me to slip out of her. She makes a small sound of loss, and I watch my seed spill from her swollen pussy onto the blankets beneath us.
“We should clean up,” she says, but makes no move to do so.
“We should.” I pull her closer instead. “In a minute.”
“In a minute,” she agrees.
We lie there as the morning light filters through the barn slats, tangled together in hay and blankets and the beginnings of something that might be love.
It’s not forgiveness. It’s not absolution. It’s not even trust, not yet.
But it’s a start.