Chapter 20
I AM COMMANDED TO HIDE MY BIOLOGICAL SUPERIORITY
KOL
“Kol?”
My name is whispered softly against my chest.
I open my eyes. The alcove is bright with yellow light. I slept. I have never slept after Ain rises.
Eh-ree-kah is propped up on one elbow, looking down at me. Her dark mane is a wild, tangled mess.
But my eyes instantly lock onto her collarbone.
Dark, purple bruises are blooming across her pale skin. They perfectly match the shape of my mouth.
A cold spike of horror sinks directly into my gut. I hurt her? I was so consumed by the need to claim her in the dark that my jaws damaged her fragile body? I am a monster.
I reach up slowly, my digit trembling as I trace the air just above the bruised skin. I cannot even touch it without fearing I will hurt her more.
“I... broke you,” I rumble.
I pull the furs back from her body to check the damage.
It is worse than I thought.
There are more bruises. A dark mark on the curve of her hip where I gripped her too hard.
A faint shadow along her ribs where my chest pinned her into the stone.
And on the inside of her thigh, high up near the crease of her leg, a deep, angry bloom of purple where I had ground against her soft skin while I was buried inside her.
I jerk my claw back from the furs as if they burned me.
I am a monster. I am the worst thing that has ever happened to her fragile body. I was rebuilt to protect this female, and the first thing I did was crush her beneath me like a sandfin under a rock.
I need to get Mee-rah. The small female knows about human healing. She will have medicine. She will know how to fix what I have done. I need to leave this alcove immediately and never touch this female again with my clumsy, destructive-
Eh-ree-kah giggles.
The sound stops me dead.
I stare down at her. She is looking up at me, covered in the marks of my teeth and my grip and my careless, feral hunger.
And she is not afraid.
“Your face,” she manages, the words muffled behind her fingers. “You look like you accidentally sat on a baby.”
I do not understand.
She reaches for me.
I flinch, pulling my body away from her outstretched hand as if her small digits could burn through my skin. I do not trust myself to be touched by her right now. Not when the evidence of what my body does to hers is mapped across her skin in dark purple.
She does not pull back.
Her hand follows me, stretching further, and her warm palm presses flat against the hard ridge of my jaw. Her thumb traces the edge of my mouth, carefully riding the ridge of a fang beneath the skin.
The mindspace is wide open between us. I brace for her pain, her fear, her revulsion.
There is none. Just warmth.
Her scent changes. The soft, sleepy warmth flooding through the mindspace shifts into something thicker. The same dark, thick musk that poured off her skin last dark, right before I lost my mind.
There is no fear. She is not afraid of me.
And her hand on my jaw is pulling me closer.
She pulls me down by the jaw, her mouth finding mine. I hold still. I let her lead. My claws stay flat on the furs, because if I touch her right now I do not know if I can control how hard I grip.
But then she makes a whimper in her throat and an image of my thick shaft spreading her blooms in the space between us. Dust. I open my mouth wider, licking into her, chasing the taste. A low, wrecked sound spills out of her throat directly onto my tongue, and my entire body shudders.
I force myself to pull back.
“You are injured,” I project. The growl in my mental voice is so thick it barely forms words. “I need to let you heal.”
She stares up at me.
“No,” she says aloud.
Then she shifts closer, pressing the full length of her bare body against mine. I stiffen. She rolls her thigh slowly over the ridged length of my primary shaft, pressing down until every single ridge drags against her soft skin.
My claws dig into the furs.
“Eh-ree-kah,” I project. I take a deep breath to steady myself but it is a mistake. I breathe in the musk of her instead. “If you do that again, I will not be able to stop.”
She does it again.
Her back arches and her thighs clamp around my hip. She is panting, and she has not even been touched yet.
She can feel what I feel. She can feel exactly how tight, how agonizingly swollen, how desperately close to breaking I am. And she is pushing.
I set her onto her back, my frame blocking out the yellow light of the alcove, casting her in my shadow. Her ribs rise and fall rapidly under her flushed skin as her thighs fall open around my hips without hesitation, her heels hooking behind my knees, pulling me closer.
I brace my weight on one arm. With the other, I grip her hip and look down between us.
Both shafts are fully engorged, straining against the soft skin of her inner thigh. The primary is flushed dark amber, the ridges swollen and glistening. The secondary presses tight, twitching with every beat of my dra-kir.
“Both,” she projects. I go still. “I want both.”
And then I see the rest of it.
Her mind is not just open. It is pouring. Images flood into my skull in a chaotic, scalding rush. Things I have never seen. Things I did not know bodies could do.
Her. On her knees. Taking me into her mouth.
I blink.
Her mouth? The small, soft, fragile opening she uses to eat dried meat and complain about the heat? She wants to put that around my...
Another image slams through the mindspace before I can finish the thought. Her. On top of me. Riding. Controlling the depth and the angle while I grip her hips and watch from below.
That... is an option?
More. From behind. Her face pressed into the furs, her spine curved, her hips tilted up while I grip her mane and drive into her from a position that I did not know was possible.
I tilt my head, looking at the images in front of my mind’s eye.
Dust. I have never once considered any of this. I assumed mating was what we did last dark. My weight pinning her down. The way the instinct demanded.
I had no idea there were variations.
The images keep coming. Faster. Messier. Some of them involve positions that seem to violate the basic limitations of her skeleton. One of them involves her ankles somewhere near her own ears, which cannot possibly be safe for a creature with her fragile bones.
But I am filing every single one away.
I do not know where she learned this. I do not care.
I have fought dust stalkers, led war parties through pitch-black canyon runs, and survived poison without losing my mind.
But this small, bruised, completely insatiable human female has just handed me a list of things I did not know existed, and I intend to master every single one of them.
Later.
Right now, she is staring up at me, her thighs trembling around my hips, both of my shafts straining against her slick entrance, and the only image left in the mindspace is the one that matters: me, buried to the hilt inside her, while she screams loud enough to bring the cavern ceiling down.
I line up against her, the blunt head of the primary shaft pressing deep into her slick, swollen sex.
She bears down, tilting her hips upward.
The primary breaches her entrance first, pushing a thick inch inside her tight heat.
She gasps, her slick pouring over the heavy ridges.
Then, I press forward again. The shorter, curved tip of the secondary catches the stretched edge of her entrance and slides inside right beneath the first.
Her mouth opens. No sound comes out.
I hold perfectly still, every muscle in my body locked rigid, my arms shaking from the effort of not driving forward. She is so tight around me that I can feel her heartbeat through the walls of her body, a rapid, fragile flutter pulsing against both shafts at once.
I could kill her like this. The thought sends a chill through my dra-kir. One careless thrust and I could tear something that does not heal. The dust built me for this, but that does not erase the reality that she weighs less than my bone-axe.
“More,” she projects. Her fingers dig into the muscles of my forearms. “Don’t stop.”
I push deeper. Slowly. Every ridge drags. She makes a sound like the air has been punched out of her lungs. I stop. She shakes her head, pulling me closer with her heels.
So I keep going. Inch by inch. Watching her face for any flicker of pain. There is none. Just her eyes rolling back, her lips parting, her mind flooding the space between us with white-hot sensation that I cannot separate from my own.
I feel what she feels. She feels what I feel. Every nerve she fires, I fire. Every ridge that drags against her swollen walls, I feel the pressure from the inside and the outside at once.
This is what the mated warriors could never explain to me.
I always wondered why Tharn went stupid after claiming Jah-kee. Why Rok would stare at Jus-teen across the fire pit like a warrior who has taken a spear to the skull. Why Sarven, the most disciplined fighter in the clan, would abandon watch if Mih-kay-lah so much as shifted in her sleep.
Now I understand.
This is not mating. This is complete destruction. She is inside my mind. I am inside her body. There is no version of me that exists without her anymore.
When both shafts are fully seated inside her, she stops breathing for six full dra-kirbeats. I count them against the walls of her body.
Then she exhales. “Dios mío.” It is not Een-gleesh. The mindspace gives me her meaning anyway: something between a prayer and a curse.
I begin to move. Slow. Deep.
I could fight a shadowmaw right now and win. I could rip the cavern walls apart with my bare claws. The amount of raw power flooding through my being is alarming.
Also, I am fairly certain the stone shelf is cracking beneath us. I will deal with that later.