Chapter 9 #2
Time loses meaning. The fever builds in waves, each crest higher than the last. I try to handle it myself—get my hand between my legs where I'm swollen and desperate—but touching just makes it worse.
My fingers are too small, too blunt, nothing like what my body actually needs.
Each stroke reminds me of what's missing.
The fullness I felt on the altar. The knot that stretched me until I shattered.
The emptiness becomes a physical pain, a howling void where something should be. An ache so deep it feels like I've become one with the emptiness. I sob into the pillow, past pride now, past dignity, reduced to nothing but need and the inability to satisfy it.
A knock at the door makes me snarl. There's nothing human about the sound. All animal, all warning, the noise a cornered predator makes.
"Kess." His voice, muffled through wood. Rough like gravel, strained in ways I've never heard from him even on the altar. "I can smell you through the walls. Through the stone. You're everywhere."
"Go away."
"Your heat—it's too soon. The bond is pulling it forward."
"I know that." The words come out half-growl. "Don't you think I fucking know that?"
"Let me help you." A pause, heavy with things left unsaid. "Please."
"I don't need your help." I drag myself upright, pressing my back against the headboard, putting as much distance as I can between myself and that door. "I don't need anything from you."
"You're going to hurt yourself." His voice is closer now, like he's pressed against the wood. "The fever—I can feel it through the bond. The intensity. This isn't a normal heat, Kess. If you try to ride it out alone—"
"I've survived heats alone for six years." I snarl it at the door, at him, at the universe. "I can survive one more."
"Not like this." Something in his voice cracks.
"I can feel what you're feeling. The pain.
The need. And I can't—" He stops. Starts again, his voice rougher.
"I can lock myself away. Chain myself in the dungeons until it passes.
I've done it before. But I need you to tell me now, because in a few more minutes the beast won't let me walk away. "
I close my eyes and press my palms against my eyelids until I see stars.
The emptiness inside me is unbearable. Every nerve is screaming for something I refuse to ask for. Every instinct clawing at my resolve, trying to tear it down.
"Go," I manage through gritted teeth. "Lock yourself away. I don't want you."
The lie tastes like ash.
A long pause. Then footsteps, retreating down the corridor. Each one fainter than the last.
The bond screams in protest as the distance grows.
Pain lances through my chest, sharp and bright, like something tearing apart inside me. The tether between us stretches taut, straining, screaming against the separation.
I curl into myself on the bed. Wrap my arms around my knees and press my face against my legs, trying to hold myself together while everything inside me tears apart.
The fever keeps climbing. Sweat soaks the sheets beneath me. My heart pounds so hard I can feel it in my teeth.
This is where I usually black out. My conscious mind retreats and my body takes over, does whatever it needs to survive. The red haze descends and I stop being Kess and become something else, something feral and mindless.
Except I'm not blacking out.
The bond is keeping me here. Keeping me aware. Refusing to let me escape into the darkness that's always been my refuge.
I have to feel all of it.
Hours pass. Maybe. I can't tell anymore. The fever just keeps building with no plateau in sight, no peak to crest and come down from. Just endless ascending spiral of need and rage and desperate, clawing want.
"Please." My voice is a whisper, my body taut and aching, my teeth chattering, tears streaming down my eyes. "Please... make it stop..."
A long, torturous silence.
Then.
Something crashes.
The door explodes inward—wood splintering, the lock tearing free with a screech of tortured metal. Hinges ripping loose from stone with sounds like breaking bones.
He's there.
Standing in the ruined doorway with his chest heaving and his eyes solid black. No gold left—just endless darkness, the beast fully in control. His claws are extended, curved and wicked, dripping with splinters. Every muscle taut with barely-contained violence.
He came back.
Because I called for him.
Something in my chest—something I don't want to name—surges at the sight of him.
"I tried." His voice is barely human anymore, all gravel and smoke and dragon-roar.
"Chained myself to the wall. Iron that's held dragons for centuries, millennia even.
" He shudders, a full-body tremor. "But your scent—I could smell you through three floors of stone.
Could feel you suffering through the bond. And I heard you—"
He cuts himself off with a snarl that echoes off the walls.
"Tell me to leave." The words grind out like they're being torn from his chest. "Tell me to go and I'll find a way. I'll tear off my own arm if I have to. Just tell me what you want, Kess."
What I want.
I want to not want him. Want my body to stop betraying me. Want to go back to the simple hatred I felt when I walked into that grove with a knife hidden in my hair.
But I also want him on top of me. Inside me. Want his hands on my skin and his teeth in my throat and his knot filling the void that's driving me insane.
"I hate this," I hear myself say. "Hate that my body wants you. Hate that I can't stop thinking about the altar, about what you—what we—" I can't finish. "I hate that you're the only thing that's ever made my heat bearable."
He flinches like I've struck him. But he doesn't move. Doesn't close the distance. Just stands there in the ruined doorway, shaking with the effort of holding himself back.
"I know," he says. "I hate it too."
"Then why are you here?"
"Because you were hurting and you called for me." The words come out raw, scraped bloody. "I could feel every second of it. And I couldn't just sit in the dark and let you suffer when I could do something about it."
"So this is pity?"
"No." He takes one step into the room. Just one. "This is me offering. And if you say no, I'll walk back out and find something stronger to chain myself to. But if you say yes—"
"If I say yes, what?"
"Then I'll give you what you need." He's closer now. When did he get so close? "Whatever you need. However you need it."
We're both barely holding on.
"The first time I was chained to an altar," I say. "I couldn't choose."
"I know."
He's close enough to touch now. The heat radiating off him matches the fever burning under my skin.
"Last chance," he says, his voice dropped to something low and rough and barely controlled. "Tell me to leave. Tell me to go and I'll go."
I should preserve what's left of my pride. My anger. My conviction that I came here to kill him.
But my body is screaming in pain. The emptiness is unbearable. And underneath all the hatred, there's the memory I can't shake: his arms around me after, gentle in the aftermath of violence, holding me like I was precious instead of prey.
"I can't do this alone," I hear myself say, the words dragged out of me with hooks. "I tried. I can't. And I hate that I can't, hate that I need—"
"I know." He closes the distance, one hand cupping my face, surprisingly gentle. "I know you hate it. Hate me. That's fine. Hate me all you want. Just let me help you through this."
His thumb traces my cheekbone. His eyes are still black, still beast, but there's something almost human in the way he's looking at me.
"You can go back to wanting me dead tomorrow," he says, a ghost of dark humor in his wrecked voice. "Tonight, just let me—"
I kiss him.
I don't remember deciding to do it, don't remember thinking or considering at all. I just grab his hair and drag his mouth to mine because I can't stand the words anymore, can't stand anything but the need clawing at my insides, demanding something only he can give.
His response is immediate—a sound like a snarl caught in his throat, his hands fisting in my hair, his body pressing me backward until my shoulders hit the headboard.
The impact jolts through me, sharp and bright, and I bite his lip hard enough to draw blood because I need to taste him, need copper on my tongue and his groan vibrating against my mouth.
He kisses me like he's trying to devour me.
Like he's been starving for three hundred years and I'm the first meal he's been offered.
His tongue sweeps against mine and I moan into him, my hips rolling up of their own accord, seeking friction, seeking pressure, seeking anything to ease the ache that's been building for days.
His hands find the hem of my shift and he tears it off me in one rough motion, the thin fabric ripping like paper, baring me completely.
The cool air hits my fever-hot skin and I gasp, but then his chest is against mine—when did he lose his shirt?
—and there's nothing but heat, his body covering mine, skin to skin.
"Harder," I gasp against his teeth. "Don't be careful with me—I can't stand careful right now—"
He stops being careful.
His hands find my hips—right over the scars he left on the altar, the changed skin that's harder than flesh should be—and his grip tightens until I know I'll have bruises tomorrow.
Good. I want the bruises. Want evidence that this happened, that I chose it, that my body got what it was screaming for.