Chapter 33
Thirty-Three
EZRA
Iam hovering above her on my forearms, my cock erect between us, my balls hanging heavy and full. Her body is laid out beneath me on the silk pillows.
Her pussy is flushed. Wet. Trembling.
Her auburn hair fans out beneath her head in loose waves, catching the candlelight in strands of copper and gold. Her belly is round and soft between us, rising and falling with each breath. Her pussy is still glistening from my mouth, slick running in a thin sheen down the inside of her thighs.
Her gold locket has slid to the side of her throat, and the bare skin where it usually rests is pale, freckled, the small pulse at the base of her neck hammering visibly against her skin. I stare at the big failed scar on her collarbone.
That is where I am going to mark her. I am going to erase her old mark.
I have thought about marking her for the last seven months.
Every detail of it. The angle of my jaw.
The pressure of my teeth. The way the bond will settle into my chest if it takes.
I have rehearsed it in my mind a thousand times, lying awake at night in the penthouse with her sleeping beside me, my hand resting on the curve of her pregnant belly.
I have never wanted anything more in my life.
The candlelight catches the small pulse at her throat. Her heartbeat is visible there, rapid, insistent, and I watch it for one long moment before I look down at her face.
Her eyes are wet. Her lips are parted. She is looking up at me with absolute trust, and the sight of her, naked and flushed and carrying my children, looking at me like I am the only thing in the world makes my cock throb so hard I have to close my eyes for half a second.
“I’m going inside you now, my beautiful omega wife.”
“I’m ready,” she whispers.
I line myself up at her entrance. Push into her slowly.
She is so wet from the orgasm she had minutes ago. My cock sinks into her pussy to the hilt in one smooth hard stroke. Her pussy hugs my cock right away, making me groan.
“Fuck, you’re tight,” I growl, watching as Julian and August suck on her swollen breasts. “My love. My omega.”
“I’m yours,” she gasps, her legs tightening around me, her arms around my neck.
I bury my face in the curve of her neck and just feel her around me. Her pussy clenches around my cock in small, involuntary pulses, and I breathe through it without rushing to let her feel me.
I kiss the place at her collarbone where the locket usually sits. The skin is warm under my lips. I can taste salt, the faint perfume of her shampoo, the deeper note of her omega scent of roses, doubled now with the heat of arousal.
I pull back just enough to look down at her face.
“I’m going to do it,” I whisper.
She nods. A single, small movement. Her eyes don’t leave mine.
My three brothers have gone absolutely still. They are watching her face. None of them are breathing.
I lower my head slowly to the curve of her collarbone. Breathe against her skin once. Feel her pulse hammer against my lips.
Magnus's failed claim. Silus's, layered over it. A jagged, raised thing that never healed clean, that I have looked at a hundred times over the last seven months and hated every single time.
I am going to put my mark directly over it.
I trace one finger down the curve of her shoulder toward the scar. She shivers. My thumb rests against the old scar at her collarbone.
“Does it still hurt?” I ask quietly. “This one.”
“Only when I look at it,” she whispers.
Something tightens in my chest. “Then don’t look at it,” I say. “Look at me.”
She does. Her green eyes find mine, gold flecks catching the candlelight, and I lower my head slowly to her collarbone. I breathe against the scar once. Feel her pulse hammer up into my lips.
“I want to mark you right here,” I murmur against her skin. “Over the old one. I want mine to be the last thing that ever touched this spot. Will you let me?”
Her breath catches. Her hand comes up and grips my forearm, hard.
“Yes,” she whispers. “Please. Cover it. I don’t want his marks anymore.”
I sink my teeth into her, and she flinches.
I press carefully. The smallest possible pressure. The most controlled thing I have ever done in my life. Not a bite. A touch of my teeth, hardly more than a pinch, just enough to break the skin. I hold for half a second. I pull back.
I wait.
I do not move. I do not breathe. I listen for the burn — the acid heat of a failed mark, the rejection her body has known before. I listen with every cell in my body.
She blinks, breathing hard.
Suddenly, the bond settles.
It is gold. It is everything. It fills my chest and spreads outward through my ribs, down my arms to my fingertips, into my throat, behind my eyes.
I feel her in my body in a way I have never felt anyone.
Her heartbeat in my own chest, as if it had always been there.
Her breath. The soft rise and fall of her belly against mine.
The way she loves me. A wave of warmth radiates from the center of my chest and fills every empty space I have ever carried.
I pull back fully and look at her face.
Her eyes are wide. Her lips are parted. Tears are spilling down her temples into her hair, and her hand has come up to press against her own chest, right over her heart, like she can feel it too.
She has felt the bond take.
I had not breathed for the last twenty seconds. I breathe now. A long, shaking exhale against her cheek, and my voice, when it comes, is not my own.
“Liana?”
“I’m okay,” she whispers with tears in her eyes. “It doesn’t burn.”
The old scar begins to disappear. The silvery, jagged ridge is softening under my mark, smoothing, the angry raised tissue melting away and leaving only the warm gold glow of my claim. Her freckled skin knits clean around it.
“Ezra,” she breathes. Her hand flies to the spot, her fingertips pressing against smooth, unbroken skin where the scar has been for six years. “It’s gone. Ezra, it’s…oh my god, it’s gone.”
She is crying and laughing at once, her fingers moving over her own collarbone in disbelief, and the sight of it undoes me more than the bond did.
“It’s gone,” I confirm, my voice rougher than I mean it to be.
I press my lips to the fresh gold mark, to the smooth skin around it, kissing the place where his claim used to sit.
“He doesn’t get to leave anything on you.
Not one thing. I’ll take every scar off your body one at a time if that’s what it takes. ”
“Thank you,” she sobs, turning her face into my throat. “Thank you, thank you.”
My brothers exhale all at once — a soft collective sound that is half prayer, half laugh. Julian’s hand finds Cole’s shoulder. August’s glasses are fogged. The mark has taken. After so many failed attempts on her body, after three years of scars, the first one has taken, and it is mine.
I kiss her temple. Her skin is damp with tears.
“You are my wife,” I say, and my voice cracks clean through the middle of the word. “You are my omega. Forevermore.”
She nods against my mouth. She cannot speak. She is shaking under me, her body trembling with the new bond, her pussy clenching rhythmically around my cock.
I feel her tighten around me and remember, distantly, that I am still buried inside her.
I begin to move.
Slowly at first. Deep, measured strokes, my eyes never leaving her face.
The warmth of the new bond pulses steadily through my chest with each thrust, golden and alive, and I can feel her body responding to me in a way it had not before.
She is more open. More receptive. Every roll of my hips makes her gasp louder than it had before, her back arching, her hands clutching at my shoulders.
The bond is amplifying everything.
I thrust faster. Harder.
“Feels so good,” she yells, coming hard, and I feel her pussy tighten around my cock in waves.
I fuck her through it. Don’t stop. Don’t slow.
She comes again barely a minute later, a second orgasm crashing through her with a broken cry, her thighs shaking against my hips, and I had not expected her to come twice that close together. The bond is doing something to her body.
Making her more sensitive. More responsive. Every thrust drives her higher.
She is sobbing softly into my shoulder now. I kiss her face. Her wet eyelashes. The new mark at her collarbone, my teeth marks already fading to gold under my lips.
I feel my own orgasm building. Steady, inexorable.
I drive into her, my hips snapping against hers, the wet sounds of our bodies filling the tent, and when it hits me, I come inside her with a groan that tears out of somewhere deep in my chest.
My cock swells, knotting her to me, pulsing thick and hot, and I hold myself there, buried to the hilt, my forehead pressed to hers.
I kiss her mouth. Her forehead. The mark again.
“I love you,” I say against her lips.
She is breathless. Boneless. Her eyes are half-closed, her lips swollen, the new bond glowing gold at her throat.
I roll her gently onto her side. Cuddle her against my chest, careful of the knot still locking us together. My hand rests on the curve of her belly.
“Does it hurt?” I ask just to make sure.
“No,” she says. “It doesn’t hurt at all. I feel so much closer to you. Like you’re inside my heart.” Her hand finds mine, squeezes. “I want all of them. All of your marks. Tonight.”
I chuckle. Low. Rough. My knot is still swelling inside her, and the bond is still settling, warm and golden between my ribs.
I reach behind her. Lift her ass cheek with one hand, exposing her to the candlelight. Her tight pink hole is glistening, slick running in a thin trail down between her cheeks. “Who’s ready to take her cute ass?”
I glance over her shoulder at Cole.
His eyes are dark. Fixed on her ass with a hunger that makes my own cock twitch inside her, even knotted. His jaw is tight. His cock is hard against his stomach, the head flushed dark.
I give him a small nod.
He moves toward the bed without a word.