Chapter 12 Kess #2
Breathing hard, chest heaving, eyes already gone solid black—no gold left, no humanity, just the endless dark of an alpha in full rut.
His shirt hangs in tatters around his shoulders; he must have partially shifted to get the strength to break through, claws shredding fabric before retracting.
Those claws are out again now, curved and gleaming, flexing at his sides like they're hungry for something to tear.
Every muscle in his body is taut with barely-contained violence. The veins in his forearms stand out like cords. His scent rolls through the room like smoke—woodfire and musk and the dark, animal smell of a predator who's found his prey.
His rut fully risen. Called up by my heat. Both of us caught in the oldest dance there is.
"You broke my door," I say, and my voice comes out strange and distant, like someone else is speaking through my mouth.
"You locked me out." He takes a step into the armory, glass and splinters crunching under his boots. "During your heat. While you're armed and feral and—" His nostrils flare, scenting the air, and something in his expression shifts. Gets darker. Hungrier. "You smell like battle."
"Good." I'm on my feet before I consciously decide to move, instinct overriding thought. The practice sword is three feet away; I grab it, the wrapped leather grip familiar in my palm. "Because you're about to get one."
His eyes track the weapon. Something shifts in his expression—not quite a smile, but close. The kind of look a wolf gives another wolf right before they start circling.
"You want to fight me." Not a question.
"I always want to fight you." The heat is building higher with every breath, rage and need tangling together until I can't tell where one ends and the other begins.
"That's what I am. What my bloodline is.
Warrior omegas don't submit. We don't soothe.
We don't lie down and bare our throats and hope our alphas will be gentle.
" I shift my grip on the sword, settling into a fighting stance. "We fight."
"I know." He reaches behind him without looking and pulls a practice sword from the rack by the ruined door. The wood looks almost delicate in his massive hand. "So fight me, little omega. Show me what you've got."
Then he attacks.
Fast—faster than something his size should be able to move. The practice sword whistles toward my head and I block on pure instinct, the impact jarring up my arms hard enough to rattle my teeth. If I'd been a second slower, he'd have cracked my skull.
He's not playing.
Good.
Neither am I.
I counter with a strike at his ribs, putting my whole body behind it. He deflects and our swords crack together with a sound like breaking bone. We're both moving now—circling, testing, looking for openings in each other's guard.
This isn't practice. This isn't the careful sparring I do with Carter, where we both pull our strikes and stop before anyone gets hurt.
This is combat with the thinnest veneer of civilization stretched over it, ready to tear at any moment.
I feint left and strike right. The wooden blade catches his shoulder—not hard enough to break skin through his ruined shirt, but hard enough to bruise deep. He grunts, and his eyes flash gold through the black for just a heartbeat, the man surfacing briefly through the beast.
Then he's pressing the attack, and there's no more time to think.
Fast combinations drive me back across the armory floor, each strike flowing into the next like water over rocks.
My feet find their rhythm without conscious input—dodge, parry, counter, retreat.
The movements are instinctive, written into my muscles by years of training and generations of warrior blood.
My body knows how to fight even when my mind is dissolving into heat-fog.
Especially when my mind is dissolving into heat-fog.
The fever makes everything sharper. Clearer. The world narrows down to him and me and the space between us, measured in sword-lengths and heartbeats.
I duck under his swing and drive my shoulder into his ribs, using his momentum against him. We both go down hard, hitting the stone floor in a tangle of limbs. The practice swords clatter away, spinning across the flagstones.
Then it's just hands and teeth and the desperate struggle for dominance.
I rake my nails down his back—my new nails, sharper than they should be, harder than human keratin. I feel skin part beneath them like silk beneath scissors. Feel blood well up hot and wet, soaking into what's left of his shirt.
He makes a sound against my throat—half snarl, half groan, pleasure and pain woven together into something that makes my inner walls clench around nothing.
Then he's rolling us, using his weight and leverage to pin me beneath him, my wrists caught above my head in one of his massive hands while the other tears at my training leathers.
"No—" I buck up, trying to throw him off, but he's too heavy, too strong, and some treacherous part of me doesn't really want to escape. "We're fighting, not—"
"We're doing both." His teeth find my throat—not biting, not yet, just resting there.
The promise of it. The threat. I can feel his breath hot against my pulse point, feel the points of his fangs dimpling my skin without breaking it.
"This is what you want, isn't it? Violence and fucking tangled together until you can't tell where one ends and the other begins. "
Yes.
Gods, yes.
This is what my body was built for. What my bloodline shaped me into across hundreds of generations.
Not a gentle omega who soothes her alpha's rage with soft touches and softer words—a warrior who matches him violence for violence, who earns her place in his bed through combat, who takes what she needs instead of waiting for it to be given.
I stop fighting his grip on my wrists. Let my body go soft and pliant beneath him. Let him think he's won.
The moment his hold relaxes, I bring my knee up hard into his ribs.
He curses—a guttural sound in a language I don't know—and his grip loosens.
I twist free and lunge for the nearest weapon, not a practice sword this time but a real blade hanging on the wall rack.
My fingers close around the leather-wrapped hilt and I pull it free in one smooth motion, steel singing against the bracket.
He freezes.
We both do.
The practice swords were one thing—bruises and maybe cracked ribs, nothing that wouldn't heal in a few days. This is different. This blade is three feet of folded steel, sharp enough to shave with, sharp enough to open a throat to the spine with one good stroke.
Sharp enough to kill even a dragon shifter, if I hit him right.
"Kess." My name in his mouth like a warning, like a prayer. "Put it down."
I look at the sword in my hand, at the way lamplight runs liquid down the blade. At him kneeling three feet away, breathing hard, eyes black with rut and fixed on me with an intensity that makes my skin prickle. Blood runs down his back from the scratches I left, dripping onto the stone floor.
At the space between us that could be closed with one lunge.
At the throat I could open if I wanted to.
This is the moment. The one I've been telling myself I'm waiting for, all these weeks of training and research and pretending I'm still planning to kill him. He's on his knees. His guard is down. His throat is right there.
"No," I say.
Then I toss the sword aside and launch myself at him.
We collide hard enough to knock the breath from both of us.
His arms come around me immediately—crushing, possessive, desperate—and my legs wrap around his waist like they belong there.
My teeth find his shoulder and I bite down without thinking, hard enough to break skin, hard enough to feel the hot copper flood of his blood across my tongue.
He roars.
The sound is pure dragon—a resonance that vibrates through my bones, that makes something deep in my hindbrain want to bare my throat and submit. Pure beast, pure rut, pure three-hundred-years-of-frustrated-need finally finding an omega who can take it.
His hands find my hips, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise.
He's keeping his claws retracted—I can feel the effort it costs him in the fine tremor of his muscles, the way his grip keeps tightening and then consciously loosening.
Just his palms against me, broad and burning-hot through my ruined leathers.
He tears what's left of the leather away.
The fabric gives like wet paper, buttons scattering across stone, seams ripping with a sound like small bones breaking. My pants hang in shreds for a moment before he strips those too, and then his hands are on my bare skin and I'm burning alive.
Slick gushes between my thighs—my body's response to an alpha in rut, desperate and undignified and completely beyond my control. I can smell it mixing with his musk, omega-sweet and alpha-dark, the scent of what we're about to do filling the armory like smoke.
"Here," I gasp against his shoulder, his blood still hot on my lips. "Right here, right now—"
"In the armory—" He sounds wrecked, voice scraped raw. "Anyone could—"
"You broke the door down. Everyone in the castle heard." I bite him again, right over the wound I already made, and feel him shudder. "No one's coming anywhere near this room. Fuck me here or don't fuck me at all."
Something breaks in him.
I feel it through the bond—a snap like a chain giving way, the last of his control dissolving.
He lifts me like I weigh nothing, three steps to the weapon rack, and pins me against it with his body.
Swords and spears rattle behind my back, metal on metal, a dangerous percussion.
The wooden frame is hard against my spine, edges digging in.
His body is harder against my front, all muscle and heat and barely-restrained violence.