Chapter 5 #2
I yanked her hips back toward me, gripping them hard enough to leave marks I intended to admire later, and removed my fingers.
Replacing them with the head of my cock, I pushed roughly past the tight ring of muscle, giving her just enough time to adjust to the head before giving her no time at all to adjust to the rest of me.
“Silas! Ugh, God, no—” Her pleading dissolved into a low, broken moan as I pulled most of the way back out before driving in again.
Then, ignoring the protests of my cock, I paused, buried to the hilt, letting her just feel the fullness, the stretch of her no doubt very sore hole, and the utter surrender of taking my cock in her bottom because she’d been a bad girl.
“Are you going to be an obedient little mate from now on?” I asked as I resumed thrusting, faster now, deeper, my hips meeting the still-warm curves of her punished ass with every stroke.
I didn’t expect an answer and I didn’t get one. She was well beyond words now.
Moving my hand underneath her, I strummed her swollen clit as I continued to pound into her, holding her in place against every writhing attempt to escape the intensity of it.
When her climax hit, her body seized around mine and I held still for a moment as she whimpered and finished convulsing around me.
“Are you ready for your real ass fucking now?” I growled down at her.
“What do you mean? You just did that!” Her voice grew higher pitched with every word.
“You’ve been a bad girl, Katie. Now you’re going to take your punishment fucking like a good little mate.”
She made a whining sound and attempted to crawl away from me, but I held her in place, bringing my hand up between her legs to land sharply on her soaking wet pussy.
“Ow!” she yelped.
“Hold still,” I said firmly before pulling out and driving in again.
This time there were no slow thrusts.
I gripped her hips and fucked her ass hard and fast, my cock pistoning unforgivingly into her for maybe a full minute before she shattered again, screaming as she spasmed around me.
I followed her over the edge with a final thrust that drove us both up the mattress, burying myself as deep as her body would take and filled her well-fucked bottom with my seed.
When I pulled my slowly softening cock free at last, she lay with her chest heaving and her hair splayed across her face, looking thoroughly, unambiguously used. I settled beside her, slid one hand beneath her head, and looked at the ceiling while listening to her breathe.
After a long few moments, she turned her face toward me, pressing her cheek against my arm. “That was a lot.”
“It was meant to be,” I told her.
“Well…” She paused, obviously unsure where to go with the rest of her thoughts. “You said you’d explain the whole thing. What you are. What… I am.”
She waited, watching me with those eyes that never quite went off duty even when the rest of her was wrecked.
“You’re a shifter. A she-wolf.” I felt her stillness take on a different quality. Not shock, exactly. Something more like a key turning in a lock that had always been there. “Your wolf has been inside you your whole life. It’s what warned you each time you sensed the skinwalker.”
She was quiet for a moment that stretched long enough I could hear the distant sound of traffic below the window.
“That feeling I had in the mountains, when I thought something was watching me.” She paused. “The nurse in the hospital room. That dread that came out of nowhere.”
“Your wolf smelled the skinwalker before your conscious mind had any information at all. It’s been protecting you since before you knew there was anything to be protected from.”
She absorbed that. The ceiling seemed to hold genuine interest for her for a moment. “Why haven’t I ever shifted?”
“She-wolves can’t shift until they’re mated.” I glanced down at her, watching the implications of that land somewhere behind her eyes. “You’re mated now.”
“So I’m going to turn into a wolf.”
“Yes.”
“Involuntarily?”
“The first time or two, yes.” I considered how to frame the rest of it carefully, which was not a thing I had much practice doing.
“It’s not painful. Disorienting, but not painful.
You’ll run into things until you get your depth perception sorted out.
Wolves don’t see the world the way humans do.
Your brain will need time to learn how to interpret what your eyes are giving it, and until it does, you’re going to have a complicated relationship with stationary objects. ”
She stared at the ceiling. “I’m going to run into trees.”
“Almost certainly.”
“That’s humiliating.”
“I witnessed it happen once, with another shifter’s mate. She hit a fence post at a full sprint within the first thirty seconds.”
She made a sound I recognized after a moment as a laugh, short and startled, swallowed almost immediately like she hadn’t meant to let it escape and wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to acknowledge it had.
Then the silence stretched longer, and the subtle shift in her breathing told me she was working through something more complicated than fence posts.
“So why do you keep talking about your territory like it’s some kind of anchor point?”
“Because it is. Male shifters are bound to a physical location. The further we are from our territory, the more difficult it becomes to shift into human form at all, let alone hold it. What you saw at the hospital, at the cabin, every time I was running on fumes trying to stay upright in a body that wanted to be a wolf—that was me operating at the edge of what’s possible outside my range. ”
She absorbed that for a moment, turning it over in her mind before she responded.
“I’m in law school,” she said at last. “I have friends who are going to notice I’ve vanished off the face of the earth. I can’t just disappear into the forest to become your… mate.”
“You’re already my mate. And no one said anything about the forest.”
“You live in a cabin.”
“It has running water and a very good espresso machine.”
“I’m serious, Silas. I have professors who are going to file reports.
I have a landlord. I have Dana’s dying plant to feel guilty about.
I have a whole non-wolf life that exists outside of whatever this is.
” She pushed herself up onto her elbow, her hair falling forward over her shoulder.
“I can’t just run off to be your Stepford Wolf Wife because the Earth or whatever decided I’m your mate. ”
I ran my hand slowly down the curve of her back, feeling the warmth still radiating off her skin. “I’m not pulling you out of your life. Your life is just going to be different.”
That sounded like I was going to lock her in my basement.
“I mean, that’s already true regardless of anything I do or don’t do.” Better, if not by much.
I met her eyes steadily. Time to bring it home.
“I’m not asking you to disappear, Katie.
I’m telling you that right now, until the skinwalker is dead and in the ground, you don’t have the option of going back to Canyon Road and sitting in your apartment like none of this happened. You know that, I think.”
She chewed on that with a focused, slightly resentful expression. I watched the way her jaw tightened and released, the careful internal engineering of whatever she was constructing.
“I’m hungry,” she said finally. “There’s nothing in Dana’s kitchen. She’s been in Europe for weeks.”
She clearly wasn’t quite ready to fully sit with the weight of everything yet, and I wasn’t going to force her. “There’s a market two blocks north,” I replied.
The look on her face softened toward reluctant trust over the course of a long moment.
“Fine,” she said, finally. “But I’m picking what we eat.”
“Fair enough.”
“And you’re explaining more when I get back.”
“Also fair.”
She got off the bed, located the leggings and sweatshirt, and began pulling them back on.
I dressed and watched her, thinking about the skinwalker still out there in the mountains, but eventually decided to let her have this one. I could go another hour in this form at most, not enough time to go to the market and back without risking a meat-section wolf-out we definitely didn’t need.
She slipped on a pair of Dana’s shoes by the door and grabbed a couple of reusable grocery bags from the coat rack.
“I’ll be back with food.”
I nodded, watching her close the door.