Chapter 5 #3
The stretch is impossible. I'm being split open from the inside, torn apart, destroyed and remade in the same breath. Every nerve ending I possess is shrieking at once. I can feel myself breaking around him, feel tissue giving way, feel blood flowing where blood shouldn't flow.
I can't breathe. Can't scream. Can't do anything but feel the inexorable pressure as the knot swells to full size inside me. Locking into place. Sealing us together with a finality that's as terrifying as death and as irrevocable as birth.
Then.
The pain transmutes.
Like iron in a forge—heat and pressure changing its fundamental nature, making it into something new. The agony becomes something else entirely. Something I don't have words for in any language.
The knot locks fully and my inner walls spasm around it. Clenching. Rippling. Pulsing in rhythmic waves that start at the place where we're joined and radiate outward through my entire body like ripples from a stone dropped in still water.
I'm coming.
The orgasm isn't a wave. It's a tsunami. A forest fire. An earthquake that shatters my foundation and rebuilds me cell by cell into something new.
I scream.
The sound tears from my throat—raw and animal and utterly inhuman, a sound I didn't know I could make. My back arches so hard I feel vertebrae crack. My legs lock around his hips, heels digging into his ass, pulling him deeper even though there's nowhere deeper to go.
The chains snap.
Iron shatters like it's made of nothing. I don't know how—don't know if it's my wild omega strength or some dark magic in the altar or pure desperate need. Don't care. Just feel the sudden freedom as the metal breaks and my hands are finally, finally free.
Immediately, I dig my nails into his back. All ten points. Breaking skin. Drawing blood. Raking down his spine hard enough to leave furrows that will scar, that will mark him as mine the way his knot is marking me as his.
He roars above me.
And comes.
I feel it. The first hot pulse flooding into me like liquid fire. Then another. Another. Endless spurts painting my insides, filling me so full there's nowhere for it to go with the knot sealing everything in.
The pressure builds and builds. I can feel myself swelling with it, feel my belly distending as he pumps more and more into me. Too much. Impossible amounts. More than any human body should be able to hold.
"Taking it," he growls against my temple, his voice barely words anymore. "Taking all of it. Made for this. Made for me. My omega. My mate. Mine."
I want to argue. Want to bite him again. Want to remind him that I came here to kill him, not to be bred by him.
But another orgasm crashes over me before the first one ends, and I can't do anything but hold on while the world comes apart around us.
The pleasure blurs together into one continuous wave so intense it borders on agony, a sensation too big to fit inside my body, spilling over into something transcendent and terrifying.
I'm dissolving.
Coming apart at the seams. Every cell in my body singing the same wordless song. I can't tell where I end and he begins anymore. Can't tell if the pleasure is mine or his or ours together, some third thing we've created between us.
His hips are still moving. Tiny, grinding thrusts that shift the knot inside me, drag it against walls that have never been touched, against nerves that have never been woken. Each movement sends another shockwave through my core, another aftershock of the earthquake that's destroyed me.
I bite his throat again.
Can't help it. Need something to anchor me, something solid to hold onto while the rest of me fragments into a thousand shattered pieces.
My teeth sink in right over his pulse. Deep. Deeper than any of the other bites. I feel the moment I hit the artery—feel the hot rush of blood that follows, flooding my mouth faster than I can swallow.
Too much blood.
Gushing down my throat. Filling my stomach. I'm choking on it, swallowing convulsively, and still it keeps coming with every beat of his racing heart, like he's trying to pour himself into me from both ends.
He makes a sound—half snarl, half moan, all animal. His hands finally leave my hips and I feel relief wash through me as his claws retract, pulling free from muscle and bone with wet sucking sounds that should be disgusting and somehow aren't.
Then his arms are around me. Crushing me against his blood-slick chest. One hand fisting in my hair, tangled in the bloody, matted mess of it. The other splayed across my lower back, holding me pinned to him as he grinds deeper, deeper, impossibly deeper.
His knot pulses again. Another flood of liquid heat inside me. My body clenches in automatic response and we're both groaning into each other's skin, both shaking, both completely destroyed.
"Kess," he breathes against my hair, and his voice is wrecked beyond recognition. "Kess, Kess, Kess—"
My name like a prayer. Like a plea. Like the only word left in his three-hundred-year-old vocabulary.
I should say something. Should curse him or claim him or tell him to go to hell where he belongs.
Instead I just hold on.
Nails still buried in his back. Teeth still resting against his throat, though I've stopped biting—just breathing there, tasting his pulse against my tongue, tasting three hundred years of death and guilt and desperate, clawing loneliness.
The pleasure fades slowly. Reluctantly. Leaving behind bone-deep satisfaction and exhaustion so profound I can barely keep my eyes open.
But the knot isn't fading.
Still locked inside me. Still pulsing occasionally, little aftershocks. Still keeping his release trapped where he put it.
We'll be here for a while.
The thought should make me panic. Should make me fight, make me rage, make me do anything other than lie here in his arms like something tame.
But I can't move. Can barely breathe. The orgasms took everything I had and then some. Left me hollowed out and trembling and absolutely wrecked, an empty vessel filled with nothing but him.
His arms tighten around me. Gentling now, the violence bleeding out of him. Supporting my weight instead of restraining it.
"You're alive," he whispers, and there's so much wonder in his voice it makes my chest ache despite everything. "You survived. How did you—"
"Shut up," I mumble into his throat.
He shuts up.
Just holds me. One hand in my hair, gentle now, fingers threading through the bloody tangles like he's trying to memorize the texture. The other on my lower back, thumb tracing circles through the mess we've made of each other.
The knot pulses again. The pressure shifts inside me as more of his release finds room somehow, filling spaces I didn't know I had.
I make a sound. Something between a whimper and a groan. Overwhelmed and oversensitive and still so full I feel like I might burst.
"I know," he murmurs against my temple, lips brushing my skin. "Almost done."
"You said that three pulses ago."
His chest rumbles with something that might be a laugh if laughter could sound that broken. "Dragon biology. We're... thorough."
"Thorough." The word comes out flat, exhausted. "That's one word for it."
Another pulse. Another flood. My belly is visibly distended now—I can feel it pressed between us, round and taut, proof of how much he's filled me.
"Fuck," I breathe, and I don't know if it's a curse or a prayer or just an observation of fact.
"Already did," he says, and there's a hint of dark humor in his ruined voice. "Quite thoroughly, I think."
I bite his throat. Not hard. Just a reminder that I can. That I still have teeth, even if the rest of me is too wrecked to use them.
He hisses. His cock twitches inside me, the knot giving one more pulse, and then—
Finally.
Finally.
It's done.
The pressure stops building. His release stops flowing. Everything goes still except for our ragged breathing and our racing hearts and the fine tremors running through both our bodies.
We're locked together still—the knot shows no signs of going down. But at least he's stopped trying to fill me past my limits.
I let my head fall forward against his shoulder. Close my eyes. Just breathe.
"You survived," he says again. Quieter now. Reverent, almost worshipful. "Forty-seven didn't. But you did."
I should acknowledge the weight of those words. The forty-seven names carved in stone. The forty-seven scars on his ribs. The forty-seven deaths he carries like chains heavier than the ones that just broke around my wrists.
Instead I just focus on breathing. In. Out. In. Out. The simple rhythm of being alive.
My body is starting to register damage now that the pleasure-high is fading. The wounds in my hips throb in time with my heartbeat—deep, bone-aching pain that promises infection and scarring and weeks of difficult healing.
Blood is still flowing from them. Hot and wet. Running down my sides in slow rivers to pool beneath us on the hungry altar.
His throat is still bleeding too. The artery I tore is trying to close, dragon healing working overtime, but I bit too deep. Blood runs down his chest in steady streams, drips onto me, into me, mixing with mine on the ancient stone.
We're both losing blood. Too much blood.
The edges of my vision darken like curtains closing.
But there's something else. Something worse.
A burning where his claws opened me. Where his blood ran down from my mouth and mixed with mine in the wounds. Not the clean pain of injury—something different. Something that feels like heat but wrong, like fever but foreign. Like my body is trying to fight off an invasion and losing.
Like something is spreading through my veins from those four deep punctures in my hips, crawling toward my heart with every beat.
The burn intensifies for a moment—sharp and electric, lightning in my blood where his cursed essence touches my torn flesh. Then it fades to a dull throb that pulses in time with my heartbeat.
Different.
Wrong.
I should care about that. Should worry about what it means, what he's done to me, what I'm becoming.
But the darkness is pulling me under like deep water, and I'm too tired to fight it.
His face blurs above me. His mouth is moving but I can't hear the words through the roaring in my ears, through the thunder of my own failing pulse.
The last thing I feel is his hands touching my face.
Gentle.
Almost tender.
The last thing I think is: I won.
Then the darkness takes me.