Chapter 7 #4
Her breath catches. Her inner walls tighten around my cock as if to prove me right, and the squeeze makes my next thrust harder than I intended.
She takes it. Her heels dig into my back and her hips rise to meet the impact, and the sound that comes out of her is the first one she hasn't tried to control.
That sound is going to cost me. Every wolf in this Tower will know by morning that something in this chamber changed.
They'll taste it on the air between us, read it in how I look at her across the great hall, and the ones whose loyalty runs thin will file it under leverage. I know this. I’m inside her and I know this, and the knowing changes nothing about how my hips move or the sounds I'm making with my mouth on her throat.
She drags her nails down my back. Not the frantic clawing of previous nights where she was fighting what I made her feel.
This is intentional: lines of fire scored from my shoulder blades to the small of my back, hard enough that I feel skin part under her fingers, and the sting of it makes my hips snap forward in a thrust that is harder than anything else I've given her tonight.
She takes the impact with a sound that is half gasp and half satisfaction, and when I pull back to look at her she is bright and sharp and entirely herself.
"I'm still here," she says. Quiet. Steady. A reminder that whatever this is, she hasn't disappeared into it. She's choosing to be in it, and the choice has edges.
"I know." My voice is rough. I roll my hips, grinding into the place inside her that makes her breath fracture, and her body tightens around my cock so hard it nearly finishes the thought for me. "That's the problem."
"Eleanor." Her name. Not mine. Her name, spoken with my lips on her temple while I'm buried inside her, and the sound of it in my own voice is so unfamiliar that it stops my breath.
She turns her face toward me, eyes open, and the expression is the same one she wore in the courtyard when she touched my wolf. Recognition. As if I've shown her something the alpha has been hiding.
I keep moving. Grinding strokes that work the full length of me along every nerve she has.
She's tightening around me with each one, the inner walls of her squeezing my cock in a rhythm that mirrors her breathing, and the next orgasm is building in her before her body shows it—I feel it, a gathering pressure that sharpens with each stroke.
I match the pace to it, adjusting angle and depth, working the spot that makes her thighs tremble with the same focused attention I gave her with my mouth. Relentless and patient.
Her nails dig into my arm. Her heels lock tighter around me. The sounds between our bodies grow louder as her arousal coats me, and the friction of every stroke is unbearable in its perfection. She's trembling beneath me, drawn tight as a bow, and when the orgasm hits her she says my name.
My name. Spoken on an exhale while her body contracts around my cock in waves that squeeze me from root to tip.
Her back arches, her legs lock, and the grip of her is so tight that I have to stop moving and hold myself inside her while she shakes apart beneath me.
The sounds she makes are open, desperate, uncontrolled, and through the tether between us I feel what she feels: the pleasure cresting and breaking and cresting again, each wave pulling me deeper, her body clenching around me with a force that makes my vision blur.
The knot wants to come. The swell builds at the base of my cock while her body clenches around me, and every instinct I carry is demanding that I let it happen.
Lock inside her. Hold her here, joined and inescapable, until the boundary between her body and mine dissolves into something neither of us can take back.
In previous nights, refusing was tactical.
A calculation weighed against timing and leverage and the architecture of a campaign I was still pretending to control.
Tonight the refusal costs me something I don't have a name for.
Tonight, choosing not to knot her while she's saying my name and her body is pulling me deeper feels less like strategy and more like severing a piece of myself I'll spend the rest of the night wanting back.
I hold it. I lock my jaw and force the swell down.
The effort leaves a tremor in my arms that she can feel.
The absence of what I didn't give her sits between us like a door I chose to keep closed while everything else in me was trying to walk through it.
She puts a palm on my chest and pushes. Sits up.
I pull out of her and the loss of contact makes us both flinch, the wet sound of separation loud in the quiet chamber.
She slides off the bed and onto her knees on the stone floor.
My cock is slick from her, hard and aching.
She kneels in front of me and looks up. The look on her face is furious and tender and complicated in ways I can't sort. She takes me into her mouth.
I didn't command this. My hands go still.
My breathing stops. The bond floods me with something I can't parse: her intent, her choice, the deliberateness of what she's doing registering through the connection like a detonation in a quiet room.
She opened her mouth and lowered her head and took me past her lips without being told, and the ground beneath every assumption I've built about what she is to me and what I am to her is giving way.