Chapter Thirty #2
I grabbed her. My hands found her waist and pulled her against me, and the sound she made against my mouth sent fire down my spine.
She was warm, so warm, and everywhere we touched the light and shadow magic swirled together like ink in water.
I could feel the bond between us brightening, thickening, responding to the contact like a flame given oxygen.
“Damon.” My name in her mouth. I’d heard the nightmare say my name a thousand times. This was so different it might have been a different word entirely. “Damon, please.”
I walked her backward until her shoulders met the wall.
My body pressed against hers and I could feel every curve, every place where she fit against me like she’d been made for it.
Maybe she had. Maybe I’d been made for her.
The thought didn’t terrify me the way it once would have.
When I was a boy playing at being a man and still afraid of having anything permanent in my life.
Her hands slid under my shirt, fingertips tracing up my stomach, and I shuddered.
When was the last time someone had touched me without trying to hurt me?
The sensation was almost too much. Almost. But the wolf was steady in my chest, a low rumble of encouragement, and Alyssa’s eyes were on mine, watching for any sign that this was too fast, too soon, too close.
“Don’t stop,” I told her. “Please don’t stop.”
She pulled my shirt over my head and her mouth found my collarbone.
I groaned, my head falling back against nothing as her lips traced a path across my chest. Her hands mapped me as she went.
The scars the nightmare had left. The ridges of bone where I’d lost too much weight in captivity.
She didn’t flinch from any of it. She touched it all with the same reverence, and something cracked inside my chest that I didn’t know how to name.
“You’re here,” she murmured against my skin. “You’re free. You’re mine.”
“Yours,” I agreed, and the word felt like a vow.
I needed to touch her. The compulsion was primal, deeper than thought, driven by the wolf and the bond and something even older than both.
I stripped her shirt over her head and pulled her close, skin to skin, and the shock of contact made us both gasp.
The shadow magic flowed across her body, tracing the contours of her waist and hips, and where it passed, goosebumps rose on her skin.
“That feels...” She shivered. “It’s like cool water. Like being touched by something alive.”
“I can pull it back.”
“Don’t you dare.”
Her mouth found mine again and the kiss was deeper this time, hungrier.
I lifted her and she wrapped her legs around my waist, and the pressure of her body against mine made the wolf snarl with need.
I carried her to the low stone platform at the edge of the room, some kind of bed that the Fifth Court had provided, and laid her down.
She looked up at me with those eyes. The ones that had seen me at my worst, possessed and broken and doing terrible things, and had loved me anyway. The light in her veins was brighter now, pulsing faster, and the bond between us was a living thing, pulling and singing, demanding more.
I stripped the rest of her clothes off slowly. Not because I was patient but because I wanted to see her. Really see her, with my own eyes, through my own will, without the nightmare’s voice twisting everything beautiful into something ugly.
She was beautiful. I’d known that before, known it even through the fog, but knowing it and seeing it were different things entirely.
“You’re staring,” she whispered.
“I’m allowed to stare.” I ran my hand down her side and watched the shadow magic follow my fingers, leaving dark trails on her skin that faded slowly. “I missed so much. Let me have this.”
Her expression softened. Then her hand hooked into the waistband of my trousers and pulled me down over her. “You can have everything. But I need you closer.”
I shucked the rest of my clothes and settled between her thighs, and the heat of her against me made my vision blur. She was already wet, and when I rolled my hips against her, she moaned in a way that made the wolf lose its mind.
“Tell me what you want,” I said. My voice was rougher than I’d ever heard it. Low and dark, the shadow magic giving it a resonance that wasn’t entirely human.
“You,” she said. “Inside me. Now.”
I didn’t need to be told twice. I pushed into her slowly.
Inch by inch, feeling every moment of her stretching around me, her body welcoming mine.
Her back arched and her nails dug into my shoulders.
The sound she made was somewhere between a gasp and a cry that I swallowed with a kiss until I was finally fully sheathed inside her.
The bond ignited.
Not the gentle brightening of before. This was a flare, white-hot, the thread between us thickening into something that could bear the weight of everything we were.
I could feel her. Not just her body, not just her warmth.
Her. The fierce protective love that burned at the centre of her like a sun, tangled up with fear and hope in equal measure.
And I knew she could feel me. The desperate, aching gratitude of a man who had been given back his life and was finally, finally allowed to use it.
“Oh,” she breathed. Her eyes were wide, shining. “Damon, I can feel you. All of you.”
“I know.” I was barely holding myself together. “I can feel you too.”
I started to move. Slow at first, long strokes that made her whimper and clutch at my back.
The shadow magic was everywhere, spilling from my skin, wrapping around both of us like a living blanket.
Where it met Alyssa’s light, the two magics danced.
Intertwining, separating, finding each other again.
The chamber responded to it. The veins in the walls pulsed brighter with each thrust, shadow and light chasing each other through the stone.
“Faster,” she gasped. “Please.”
I gave her what she wanted. My hips snapped forward and she cried out, her legs tightening around my waist. I buried my face in her neck and breathed her in, tasting her skin, feeling her pulse hammer against my lips.
The wolf was surging forward, not trying to take over but pressing against my consciousness, adding its intensity to mine.
Everything felt heightened. Every nerve on fire.
Every sensation magnified by the bond and the newness of experiencing pleasure without a parasite feeding on it.
“You feel incredible,” I told her, and meant it with every part of me. “You feel like freedom.”
She pulled my head up and kissed me, hard, messy, all teeth and tongue and the desperation of two people who had waited too long for this. Her hips met mine thrust for thrust and I could feel her tightening around me, could feel through the bond that she was close.
“Don’t hold back,” she said against my mouth. “I want all of you. The wolf, the shadows, everything. Don’t hold anything back.”
I let go.
The shadow magic surged. It poured from me in waves, wrapping around Alyssa, sinking into her skin where it met the light and merged.
The wolf howled in my chest, not in pain but in triumph, and I felt canines lengthen in my mouth.
The instinct was overwhelming, ancient, the same drive that had created the bond marks on her neck from the others. The need to claim. To be claimed.
“Alyssa.” Her name came out as a growl. “I need to... the bite. I need...”
“Yes,” she said immediately. No hesitation. “Yes, do it.”
I drove into her hard, deep, and felt her shatter around me. Her orgasm hit through the bond like a wave, flooding me with her pleasure, and it pushed me to the edge. I buried my face in the curve of her neck, found the skin where shoulder met throat, and bit down.
She screamed. Her body clenched around me and a second orgasm crashed through her before the first had finished.
The taste of her blood on my tongue was the thing that broke me completely.
I came with her name in my mouth and her blood on my lips.
The bond between us blazed so bright that the entire chamber turned white.
Then the court marks on her body started to move. Quickly followed by something on me.
I felt it before I saw it. A burning that wasn’t pain, spreading across my skin from the place where my mouth met her neck.
When I lifted my head, gasping, shaking, still buried inside her, I watched the shadow magic and Alyssa’s light trace new patterns across both our bodies.
The marks that had been on Alyssa’s skin, the ones from her other bonds, were expanding.
Growing. Weaving new lines that connected to a fresh mark on her neck where my teeth had broken skin.
The bite was already healing, sealing itself into something permanent.
A dark crescent threaded with light, and from it, lines of shadow and light spiralled outward, reaching down her shoulder, across her collarbone, linking with the marks that were already there.
On my own skin, marks were appearing for the first time.
Dark as ink, shot through with veins of white light, spreading from my chest where the bond burned brightest, down my arms, across my ribs.
I watched them emerge with a wonder that stole my breath.
I’d never been marked by anything except scars.
These weren’t scars. These were promises.
Written on skin in magic older than memory.
“Damon,” Alyssa whispered. She was watching the marks move across her own body, her fingers tracing the new lines with something like awe. “Look.”
Where the marks on her skin met the marks on mine, where our bodies were still pressed together, the patterns connected. Seamless. Like they’d always been meant to join. Light and shadow, woven into a single design that covered us both and bound us to each other and to the court that had chosen us.
The bond was complete.
I could feel it. Not a thread anymore. A river.
Wide and deep and rushing with everything we were and everything we would become.
Her emotions flowed through me and mine through her, and for the first time in my life I understood what the others had.
What Dean felt when he looked at her. What Tank and Maddox and Ryder carried in their chests every moment of every day.
This was what it meant to be bonded. To be mated.
To belong to someone so completely that the line between self and other became a suggestion rather than a boundary.
I pressed my forehead against hers. We were both trembling. Both breathing hard. The chamber around us had gone quiet, the pulsing of the walls settling into something steady and content, as if the court itself had been waiting for this and was now, finally, satisfied.
“Hi,” Alyssa said. Her voice was wrecked and her eyes were shining but she was smiling.
“Hi,” I said back.
She laughed. A small, hiccupping thing that was half a sob, so I kissed her. I could kiss her whenever I wanted. I could touch her and hold her and the only voice in my head was the wolf’s quiet rumble of satisfaction.
I rolled onto my side and pulled her with me, keeping her close, unwilling to break contact. Her back pressed against my chest and I wrapped myself around her. The shadow magic settled over us both like a blanket, warm despite its darkness, and Alyssa hummed softly against me.
“I can feel the wolf,” she murmured. “Through the bond. He’s happy.”
“He’s smug,” I corrected. “There’s a difference.”
She laughed again, and the sound of it moved through the bond like sunlight through water.
I pressed my lips to the fresh mark on her neck. My mark. The thought sent something fierce through me that the wolf echoed with a low, possessive growl.
“We still need to figure out the shadow magic,” Alyssa said after a while. Her fingers were tracing the new marks on my arm, following the dark lines where they wound around muscle and bone. “What it can do. How to control it.”
“I know.”
“And the wolf. The full moon is close, you won’t have much time to get used to each other before you’re forced into the first shift.”
“I know.”
“And we need to deal with Arik before he...”
“Alyssa.”
She stopped. Tilted her head back to look at me.
“I know all of that,” I said. “And I know none of it can wait forever. But right now, in this exact moment, I’m lying in bed with the woman I love for the first time in my life and the only voice in my head is telling me to hold on tighter.
” I pulled her closer to prove the point.
“Give me tonight. We can save the world tomorrow.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then she turned in my arms, pressed her face against my chest, and breathed me in.
“Tomorrow,” she agreed.
The court dimmed around us, the veins in the walls fading to a soft glow, as if someone had drawn curtains over the light. The marks on our skin pulsed gently in the dark. Shadow and light. His and hers. Bound together in a pattern that would never come apart.
I held her, and the wolf settled in my chest. The silence in my head was the most precious thing I’d ever owned.
Tomorrow, there would still be a war on the horizon. Tomorrow, there would be magic to master and a brother to confront so we could save a realm.
But tonight, for the first time in my life, I felt whole with this woman in my arms, and that was all I had the capacity to care about right now.