Chapter 10
Rhystan
I'm going to knot her.
The thought burns through me as I drive into her, her back arched off the bed, her nails raking furrows down my arms. Two days of this—maybe three, time has stopped meaning anything—and I still can't get enough. Still can't believe she's here, alive, wrapped around me and making sounds of pleasure.
The base of my cock is swelling. I feel it catching on her entrance with each thrust, stretching her wider, and she gasps beneath me, her thighs tightening around my hips.
"Rhystan—" My name in her mouth is like a curse, like a prayer. "I can feel it, you're going to—"
"Yes." I grind deeper, letting the knot catch and hold. "Take it. Take all of it."
She does.
The knot pushes past her entrance and locks us together, and the sensation rips a groan from somewhere deep in my chest. Tight. So fucking tight, her body clenching around me, squeezing, milking me as I start to come.
I've done this before, many times. But I've never felt it before—not like this, not with a mind clear enough to register the pleasure instead of drowning in rut-madness and waking to a corpse.
Those memories are fragments at best: blood and violence and the beast's savage satisfaction, then nothing but grief and another name to carve in stone.
This is different.
This is her inner walls fluttering around my knot.
The wet heat of her cunt clenching with each pulse of my release.
The sound she makes—not quite a moan, not quite a sob—as I fill her with more seed than any body should be able to hold.
The way her fingers dig into my shoulders like she's trying to anchor herself to something solid while pleasure tears her apart.
And I'm here for it. Present. Aware. Feeling every second instead of losing it to the red haze of the curse.
"Fuck—" She shudders beneath me, another orgasm rolling through her, her body convulsing around the knot. "It's too much, I can't—"
"You can." I roll my hips, grinding deeper, and she cries out. "You're taking it. You're taking all of me."
She comes again. Or maybe it's still the same orgasm, one long continuous wave that I can feel through the bond, her pleasure echoing into my chest. I press my face into her throat and breathe her in—sweat and sex and wildflowers, the copper tang of blood from where she's bitten me, underneath it all something wild and ancient that my beast recognizes even if I don't have words for it.
Ours, my beast rumbles. Finally. Ours.
For the first time in three hundred years, I don't argue with it.
We stay locked together as the aftershocks fade.
I shift my weight off her—carefully, the knot tugging with each movement—and settle onto my side, pulling her with me until her back is against my chest. She makes a sound of protest at being moved but doesn't fight it. Too wrung out to fight anything.
Her dagger is still in her boot by the bed.
I can see it from here—the leather hilt, the glint of steel in the candlelight. She stripped off everything else before pulling me down onto the mattress, but the boot stays within arm's reach. Always. Even now, when she's too exhausted to lift her head, the weapon is right there.
Waiting.
In case she needs to kill me.
I should probably be concerned about that. Instead I find it strangely comforting. She hasn't stopped being who she is just because she let me inside her body. The omega who came here to murder me is still in there, underneath the heat-daze and the reluctant pleasure.
Still mine, even if she hates that she is.
"Stop that," she mutters, her voice hoarse from screaming.
"Stop what?"
"Your heart." She shifts against me and we both groan at the way the knot moves inside her. "Every time it beats I feel it."
"You want me to stop my heart from beating?"
"Yes." But there's no venom in it. She's too wrung out for venom, too thoroughly fucked to muster her usual hostility. "Figure it out. You're three hundred years old. Surely you've learned some tricks."
My beast makes a sound that might be laughter. It's been doing that—expressing emotions I didn't know it could feel. Three hundred years of snarling and screaming, and now it's... quiet. Content in a way that terrifies me because I don't trust it.
But I can't deny how good it feels.
"You bit my throat again," I tell her, pressing my nose into her hair. "I'm going to have scars."
"Good." She traces one of the healing marks on my forearm—her teeth, from earlier, when I pinned her against the headboard. "You've given me enough of them."
My hand drifts to her hip without conscious thought. To the scars there, the ones my claws left during the claiming on the altar. They've healed over now, smooth and pink, but the texture beneath my fingers is wrong. Harder than omega skin should be. Tougher.
Like hide.
Like dragon hide.
Something cold moves through my chest. The contamination—my blood mixing with hers on the altar, soaking into the wounds I made, changing her in ways I don't understand. The texts say it's supposed to kill humans in weeks.
But she's not dying.
She's changing.
I should tell her. Should warn her that something is happening to her body, that my cursed blood is doing things to her that I can't explain or predict. She deserves to know.
But she's warm against me, her body soft with satisfaction, the bond humming contentment between us. For once she's not looking at me with murder in her eyes. For once she's just... here. Present. Almost peaceful.
I can't take that from her.
Not yet.
Later, I tell myself. When I understand more about what's happening. When I have answers instead of just fears. I'll tell her later, when I know enough to explain it properly.
It's not a lie. Not really. Just... a delay. A kindness.
"Your grandmother," I say instead, steering us away from dangerous territory. "The one who raised you. What was she like?"
A long pause. I feel her weighing whether to answer, feel the bond shift with something complicated—grief and love and old anger tangled together.
"Fierce," she says finally. "Terrifying, if you didn't know her. She taught me to fight before I could read. Taught me to hunt, to track, to survive on my own if I had to." Another pause. "She used to tell me stories about our family. About why we had to hide."
"Hide from what?"
"She never said exactly. Just that there were people who would hurt us if they found out what we were.
" Her voice has gone soft in a way I've never heard from her.
Vulnerable. "I thought she meant because I was feral.
Because of what I do during heats—the blackouts, the violence.
I thought that's what made us dangerous. "
"Maybe it was more than that."
"Maybe." She shifts, getting comfortable against me. The knot has started to soften but I'm still inside her, still connected, reluctant to withdraw. "She died when I was sixteen. I've been on my own since then."
Eight years. Eight years of surviving alone, of heats spent in forests and caves, of a world that looked at her like a monster because they didn't understand what she was.
I know something about that.
"I'm sorry," I say, and mean it.
"Don't be. She prepared me." A pause. "For this, I think. Even though she couldn't have known—she prepared me to survive things that should have killed me."
Like me, I don't say.
Like the claiming. Like the contamination changing her blood. Like whatever she's becoming that I don't have a name for yet.
The heat rolls back in before I can spiral further into guilt.
I feel it through the bond—that wave of desperate need crashing through her, turning whatever she was about to say into a moan. Her body arches against mine, her inner walls clenching around my softening cock, and the sensation rips a groan from my chest.
"Again," she gasps, grinding back against me. "I need—"
"I know." I'm already hardening inside her, my body responding to her need with an urgency that has nothing to do with the curse. "I've got you."
This time when I fuck her, I pay attention to every second.
-
The heat breaks on the fourth day.
One moment I have her pinned beneath me, driving into her with savage desperation, her legs wrapped around my waist and her nails raking down my back.
The next, something shifts—the fever receding from her eyes, the frantic edge softening, her body going still beneath mine instead of arching up to meet each thrust.
I feel the change through the bond before I see it on her face.
The heat-daze clearing. Awareness flooding back in—where she is, what she's doing, who's on top of her with his cock still buried inside her body.
Her expression shutters closed.
"Get off me."
The words hit like a blade between the ribs.
I pull out—we're both raw, both oversensitive, and she winces at the withdrawal—and roll off her immediately. She's already moving, scrambling to the far side of the bed, as far from me as she can get without leaving the mattress entirely.
The bond floods with her emotions. Shame. Anger. Disgust—at herself, I think, more than at me. The particular self-loathing of someone who's just done something they swore they wouldn't do.
"Kess—"
"Don't." She's reaching for the sheet, wrapping it around herself like armor. Won't look at me. "Don't say anything. Don't... just don't."
I should give her space. Should get up and leave, let her have the room to herself, let her rebuild her walls in private.
But my beast is snarling at the sudden distance, at the coldness radiating off her, at the way she's looking at the wall instead of at me. Ours, it growls. Go to her. Fix it.
I can't fix this.
Can't fix the fact that she came here to kill me and spent four days fucking me instead. Can't fix whatever she's feeling right now—the shame, the anger, the loss of control that must feel like betrayal of everything she thought she was.
"I'll leave," I say quietly. "Give you space."
"Good." Still not looking at me. "That's... good."