Chapter 8 Unleashed
Unleashed
Edith
His mouth is on mine and the careful man I've been falling for has left the building.
This isn't the measured restraint from the kitchen, the calculated brushes of contact, the hand that hovered near my face and always dropped.
This is what was underneath all of that — raw, consuming, five years of starvation unleashed in a single kiss that takes everything and demands more.
His hands are in my hair, fisted at the roots, tilting my head back so his mouth can take mine at the angle he wants.
His body pins me to the mattress, and the weight of him is enormous, denser than any man I've ever been beneath, like his bones are made of something heavier than calcium and his muscle is packed tighter than human physiology allows.
The heat of him sinks through my dress, through my skin, into my blood. Everywhere we touch, I'm burning.
My fingers find his belt. Fumble with the buckle because my hands are shaking and he's making it impossible to concentrate; his mouth has left mine and is moving down my throat, teeth scraping across my pulse point with a pressure that's precise enough to be deliberate and rough enough to make my hips roll up against him involuntarily.
"Kaz —" His name comes out wrecked. "I need these off. Now."
He pulls back enough to look at me. His eyes are fully black; no amber, no whites, just polished obsidian reflecting the lamplight in shifting patterns. The intelligence behind them is the same man. The body housing that intelligence is becoming something else.
"If we do this —" His voice has that layered quality, harmonics beneath the words that I feel in my teeth, my chest, places lower. "The shift breaks when I lose control. And I'm going to lose control."
"That's the plan." I get the belt open. Drag the zipper down. "Show me what you are."
Something cracks behind his expression, ice over moving water, and the man who's been managing himself around me for four days stops managing.
He stands. Strips with the ruthless efficiency of someone who's been removing gear before violence for decades. Boots, pants, everything, gone in seconds.
And I see him.
The shift lets go like a held breath.
His skin darkens from Mediterranean bronze to a deep, oxidized red: the color of heated copper cooling in air.
The transformation sweeps across his body like a tide, and in its wake, everything changes.
His shoulders broaden. His frame decompresses: two inches of height he's been crushing out of himself, thirty pounds of mass finding room to exist. The proportions shift from human-athlete to something built for a world with different gravity, different predators, different definitions of dangerous.
The armor plates emerge.
They crack through the skin of his shoulders in dark red geometric ridges, angular, segmented, catching lamplight like polished volcanic glass.
They continue down his spine in formations that look grown rather than built, each plate distinct, each one pulsing faintly as if they have their own circulation.
His forearms develop similar plating, organic bracers that aren't worn but extruded, part of his body the way fingernails are part of mine except infinitely harder and designed, unmistakably, as weapons.
He's taller. Broader. Denser. The room feels smaller around him, the ceiling closer, the air warmer.
And lower.
My gaze drops because I'm human and he's naked and the part of me that's been imagining this for days needs to see.
He's hard — fully, heavily hard, and the size of him makes the air stall in my throat — equal parts arousal and logistical concern.
Thick, proportional to the rest of his true form, flushed the same deep red as his skin.
And ridged. Geometric patterns along the shaft, raised edges, textured surfaces, spaced in a way that looks deliberate.
Functional. Designed by millions of years of evolution to do things I have no frame of reference for.
"This is what I am." His voice is deeper in this form. Rougher. The harmonics making my ribcage vibrate. "Under the disguise. Under everything I've been pretending. If you want to stop —"
I get off the bed. Walk to him. Put my hand flat against his chest.
His skin is scorching. Smooth between the scars but with that metallic quality, slightly slick, like touching sun-heated stone that's been polished by centuries of weather. His heartbeat slams against my palm, too fast, too hard, the rhythm of a body flooding with hormones I can't name.
The plate beneath my hand pushes toward me.
Reaching. The same response I felt in the kitchen, through his shirt, except now there's no fabric between us and I can feel the full architecture of it.
Hard geometric edges surrounded by skin that yields under my fingers.
Warm. Alive. Responding to my touch by pressing closer, like his body is trying to reach me through every available surface.
I trace the plate upward, following the ridge to his shoulder. Lean forward. Press my lips to it.
He makes a sound that I will remember on my deathbed.
Not a groan. Not a moan. A rumble from so deep in his chest it's subsonic — I feel it more than hear it, vibrating through the plate into my lips, down my jaw, through my sternum into my belly. The sound of something massive and starving being offered what it needs.
"These," I say against the plate, and my lips buzz with the vibration. "Don't you dare hide these from me."
"Edith —" My name is a surrender.
I pull him to the bed.
He comes without resistance; this warrior who could level buildings is following the tug of my hands like I'm the strongest thing in the room.
I push him down. He goes, sitting on the edge of the mattress, and from this angle, me standing between his knees, him looking up at me, the size differential reverses.
His face is level with my sternum. His hands find my hips, burning through the dress.
"Off," I say, reaching for my own zipper.
His hand gets there first. The fabric tears; his fingers too strong, too desperate, the fine motor control sacrificed to urgency. The dress splits down the back and sags off my shoulders, and I let it fall.
Black lace underwear I chose this morning hoping for exactly this, though the specifics of this exceed anything my imagination produced.
"Rip it," I tell him. "All of it. I don't care."
His hands — huge, red-skinned, scarred, clawed at the tips where obsidian-black nails have extended into something sharper than any knife I've ever held — close around the lace at my hips.
He pulls. The fabric shreds like tissue, torn apart by fingers that could punch through steel but manage, somehow, not to scratch my skin.
I'm naked in front of an alien.
His gaze moves over me with an intensity that borders on devotional. His nostrils flare — actually flare, drawing air across what must be olfactory receptors calibrated to detect things humans can't, and the growl that rolls through his chest in response makes my inner thighs clench.
"I can smell you." His voice is gravel and heat.
"How wet you are. How much you want this.
" His hands span my waist — the contrast making me dizzy, his massive red hands against my pale skin, his fingers meeting at my spine, thumbs nearly touching at my navel.
"You've been putting out pheromones since the kitchen.
Do you know what that does to a Krath? What your scent does to my biology? "
"Tell me."
"It tells every cell in my body that you're mine." His thumbs brush upward, finding the underside of my breasts, and the heat of the contact goes through me like a current. "That your body is ready for mine. That if I put my mouth on you right now, you'll taste like —"
"Then put your mouth on me." I thread my fingers into his hair and pull his face against my chest. "Stop narrating and do it."
His mouth closes around my nipple, and I learn something new about Krath physiology.
His tongue is not smooth. Not the uniform surface of a human tongue — there's a grain to it, a texture like fine velvet run against the nap, and when it drags across my nipple, the friction creates sensation that no human mouth could replicate.
The rasp is devastating, each pass sending a jolt from my breast to my clit in a straight line, like his tongue is wired directly to the part of my nervous system responsible for making me incoherent.
He sucks. Hard. The heat of his mouth is extraordinary — wet and burning and so far above human body temperature that my skin flushes red wherever his lips travel.
He moves to the other breast and gives it the same focused, annihilating attention, and I'm already grinding against his stomach, already desperate, already so wet I can feel it on my thighs.
"Kaz — I need —"
"I know what you need." He lifts me — effortlessly, one arm, the kind of strength that makes furniture-moving look like an administrative task, and puts me on the bed.
On my back. Slides down between my legs with predator focus, his shoulders pushing my thighs apart, and the sight of this massive, armored, red-skinned alien kneeling between my legs with those bottomless black eyes fixed on the most intimate part of me is going to recalibrate my sexual expectations for the rest of my life.
"I can hear your heartbeat." He presses his mouth to my inner thigh. The kiss brands my skin. "Here." Higher. Closer. "I can hear it speed up when I get closer." His breath ghosts over my clit and I nearly jackknife off the mattress. "Right there. That's where you want me."
"Please —"
His mouth finds me, and the world restructures itself around the sensation.