Chapter 16
Chapter
Sixteen
What the hell was happening?
The pressure between my legs should have been easing, but instead it grew, becoming more intense by the second.
Hopelessly lost in a fog of sensual exhaustion, I couldn’t find the energy to open my mouth and demand answers. All I had the strength for was another low pant of pleasure as the inside of my body struggled to conform around the ever-expanding base of Lash’s cock.
My spine arched as every nerve in my body surged with awareness, but my hips didn’t move from his. Not even an inch.
Whatever this new bulge was, it had locked us together, the heat between our bodies searing us into one.
For a moment, I feared we might be stuck like this forever, with Lash always inside of me until the end of time.
Would that really be so bad? But the thought flew from my mind the instant he shifted positions, rolling us onto our sides.
Still gathered up in his arms, he spun me around on the swollen knot so my back pressed against his chest. The brilliant friction between us made me cry out again.
Clasping one hand over my mouth, Lash’s growl rumbled against my ear. “Fuck, I love the sounds you make, woman, but I can’t let them leave this cave.”
At least that was something I understood.
Nelissa’s men might still be miles to the south, but it was anyone’s guess how far sound could bounce off these sheer rock walls…or just how sharp ferus ears could be. The last thing either of us wanted was uninvited visitors.
Especially now.
Pressing me close against his chest, he swept my sweat-drenched hair to the side before nuzzling the back of my neck.
I thought we were done.
We should have been done.
We’d both come—him once spectacularly, and me so many times I’d lost track. The fire inside both of us should have been slowly ebbing away. We should’ve been settling into the afterglow.
Instead, Lash’s neck kisses were awakening a new kind of hunger inside me. A desire for something I didn’t have words for. Something I wasn’t even sure existed.
But Lash knew.
His hips slowly ground against my backside as the intensity of his kisses grew. His tongue flicked, and his teeth grazed and?—
What the fuck?!
Lash’s palm muffled the sound of my startled shriek as bright pain pierced through my sensation-soaked skin. I jolted in his arms, but he held me tight, keeping me from ripping myself in half on the bulb stuck inside me.
But even though the initial sting was fast and sharp, the hurt didn’t last long. Within seconds, the intensity began to fade, mellowing into a dull ache that radiated down my entire spine.
“L-Lash?” I panted after my voice had come back to me.
“Yes.” The deep bass of his voice sounded calmer and more content than ever before.
Well, that made one of us.
“What the hell was that?”
“A claiming bite,” he answered.
Son of a bitch! “You bit me?”
“Of course,” he said, before running his tongue over the wound. I tensed, waiting for pain to rush through me anew, but it never came. Instead, the touch of his lips managed to soothe my torn flesh.
It shouldn’t have been possible. It didn’t make sense. None of this did.
Not our near transcendental lovemaking, or Lash’s magical kisses, or the fact that I honestly didn’t mind any of it. That somehow, it all felt strangely right.
What did you expect? I thought to myself. You’re through the looking glass, now.
Up was down. Wrong was right. Pain was pleasure.
And I didn’t understand a single bit of it.
“But why?” I asked.
“Because, for better or worse, you’re mine,” he answered. “And now no one can deny it.”
For better or worse?
That sounded dangerously close to a wedding vow.
But maybe this wasn’t the best time to tell Lash I wasn’t exactly the marrying type. Tomorrow would probably be better. After whatever crazy fire raging between us had burned itself out, and we were both thinking clearly again.
Though I had a feeling that conversation wasn’t going to go well, no matter how much time had passed. Lash didn’t strike me as the kind of guy who was used to dealing with disappointment.
Or rejection.
But that wasn’t my problem, I reminded myself.
That’s what he got for presuming to lock himself inside a girl, biting her on the back of the neck, then declaring her his on the first night.
Never mind that the tension that had been with me since LA was finally starting to melt out of my shoulders. Or that my muscles were starting to unclench in Lash’s arms. Or that, for the first time ever, my mind wasn’t buzzing with the need to figure out what to do next.
Those things probably weren’t related.
And if they were, I really didn’t want to think about it.
In this moment, I was content to nestle deeper into Lash’s embrace and let my eyelids drift down.
Everything else could wait until tomorrow.
Right now, I was too spent to do anything other than sleep.
Opening my eyes, I found myself standing in the middle of Nelissa’s camp…right in the middle.
All around me, pale lanterns flickered, embers sputtered in dying fire pits, and overtired alphas grumbled to themselves beneath their crumbling shelters as they struggled to sleep.
The conditions had appeared bad enough when Lash had marched me through it the night before, but now the whole place seemed downright miserable.
Nelissa must have run the poor bastards to exhaustion as they combed the Wilds for Lash and me. No doubt, in just a few hours, they’d be waking up to start the search again. And if they found us…
“Valse!”
The sound of one alpha’s shout pushed the thought right out of my mind even as it flooded my veins with adrenaline. A second later, a fist-sized rock arced through the air, smacking one of the sleeping alphas square in the chest.
“Wha’ the—“ the barely conscious giant shot up at the waist, his heavy eyes focused right on the spot where I was standing.
I froze, every muscle in my body seizing up in fear even as my heart pounded loud enough to be heard miles away. But the alpha just blinked and scratched his head. It was like he didn’t see me at all.
“Stop snoring, you shit pile,” the first alpha roared.
But Valse the snorer was apparently too tired to care. “Fuck off, Rowan,” he muttered before flopping right back down again. Within seconds, he was back in dreamland.
Dreamland…
That’s what this was. That’s why the alpha couldn’t see me.
The realization washed over me, flushing away my fear.
Just like last night, I was caught up in a vividly realistic dream.
Okay…so, maybe this wasn’t exactly like last night.
Obviously, the content was different, but so was the perspective.
In the dream Lash and I had shared, I’d been an active participant, but tonight I had taken on the role of a phantom. A ghost-like observer who couldn’t be seen.
Fascinating.
For a moment, I wondered if that meant this was just an ordinary dream, but the fact that I could even ask that question proved it wasn’t.
I’d never experienced a lucid dream. Not once in my life. No matter how bizarre or far-fetched my dreams became, my subconscious had no trouble fully buying into the madness.
But this felt real. Truly real.
Risking a step forward, I nudged the sleeping alpha with my foot just to see what would happen.
In an instant, everything changed. There was a flash of light. A gust of wind. A swirling sensation deep in my belly. Blinded and dizzy, I cupped my hand over my mouth, desperate to hold back the burning wash of vomit that rose up in my throat.
Thankfully, the feeling didn’t last long. A heartbeat later, my stomach settled, and my vision started to clear. But what I saw only confused me more.
Suddenly, I wasn’t standing in Nelissa’s camp anymore.
I was deep in the woods, standing directly across from the sleeping alpha.
Except he wasn’t asleep anymore. Now he was standing across from me, claws out and fangs exposed. With his shirt off, it was easy to see the raw, violent power racing through his muscles. Tightening and coiling. Readying to attack.
My breath hitched in panic.
For whatever reason, he could see me now. There was no doubt about that.
Especially, not after he stared me in the eye and snarled.
“You.” He flung the word like a curse. “We’ve been hunting you all day. Now I’m going to kill you.”
“No.” It wasn’t a plea or prayer. Just a simple statement of fact. He might lunge at me with those claws. He might even plunge them straight through my heart. But he couldn’t kill me. “This is a dream.”
I was more certain of that than ever. There were little signs of it scattered all around us—the foggy haze that obscured everything past the closest line of trees, the strange, viscous feel to the air, the way time was moving too fast yet too slow at the same time. This here—this was definitely a dream.
And not just any dream.
The sleeping alpha’s dream. Valse’s dream.
I must have been pulled into it when I’d jabbed him with my foot.
Now I was seeing what he saw as he slept. Hearing what he heard. All of it.
This was amazing.
“Unlike that traitor Lash, I don’t dream about kirre,” he barked in disgust. “I kill them.”
Apparently, Valse meant what he said because in the next breath, he was flying across the clearing with murder in his eyes.
Dream or not, the sight of a furious alpha looking to spear my guts with his claws was terrifying. My instincts taking over, I stumbled back a step—not just in Valse’s dream, but in mine as well.
The instant my foot lost physical contact with the alpha’s sleeping body, the psychic connection between us broke, and I found myself right back in the center of Nelissa’s camp, as invisible as before.
Below me, Valse tossed over onto his side in unconscious frustration. “Where’d you go, bitch?” he mumbled groggily. “You can’t hide. I’ll…I’ll…”
His voice trailed off into silence...until a few seconds later, when another one of his loud snores carried across the camp.
“Fate’s curse you!” his fed-up neighbor griped. “I hope Lash gets in one good swipe to ‘yer balls when we finally find that son of a bitch.”
My lips lifted in a dark smile. That wasn’t a bad idea.
I’d be sure to pass his suggestion on to Lash when we woke up.