Lexa
Kaleb exhales sharply, shuddering, as he draws his fingers out of my pussy. They glisten, and he closes his eyes, pressing them back in slowly, tenderly, his thumb drawing a lazy, achingly slow circle over my clit.
I’m torn between the sharp ache of dizzying pleasure simmering in my belly and the defeated, almost lost look on his face, yet I still arch into the touch, whimpering his name, tears of want beginning to shimmer along my lower lashes as he draws a sharp moan from my lips.
“I can’t take it,” I plead, on the verge of sobbing. “Kaleb, I need you. I want you inside me. Please–I’ll do anything. Goddess, I’ll do anything–” Another sharp moan echoes against the stone walls of the stairwell when he curls his fingers inside of me. I throw my head back, my neck bent, and while I cry out, he closes his mouth against the base of my neck, his teeth grazing my skin. The fine threads of our bond shiver, sending a rush of heat fanning over my skin, settling deep in my belly.
“You’re killing me,” he groans, biting down as he presses his weight against my body, grinding his hips into my upper thighs. I feel his cock straining in his pants, throbbing like he’s on the verge of losing control. “You’ll be the death of me, Lexa.”
“Why won’t you? I don’t understand–”
“The wings,” he rasps, biting my neck again. He groans, shuddering when my inner walls clamp around his fingers. “It’ll kill you. I can’t take the risk. You’re in heat, Lexa. Fuck!” He grips the steps above my head, hisses out a breath like he’s in pain. I try to process his words, but my brain is mush, focused on one thing, and one thing only. Him. His cock. His cock inside of me, preferably.
I bite his lower lip–hard–hard enough to draw blood. He growls low in his throat in warning, and I let him go, reaching between us to stroke the heated imprint in his trousers. He doesn’t stop me when I unclasp his belt. My fingers dance over the buttons keeping us apart, and he grips my wrist.
“Please,” I whisper against his mouth, taking a shaking breath. A tear slips free from my lashes, sliding down my cheek. I think I’ll actually die if he doesn’t take me here, right now, on the stairs. My wolf can’t take it, senses a rejection that pulls me to pieces. His grip on my wrist loosens. My hand glides down his length and up again, and he takes a shuddering breath, his mouth leaving mine to press kisses along my jaw, then my neck, which I arch to allow him access to that spot he’s obsessed with at the conjuncture of my shoulder.
I unfasten the buttons, my heart racing out of rhythm.
He bites down on my neck as I free his cock, my fingers curling around him. He’s… impossibly big. It’s going to hurt. There’s no way he can fit, and I think we both know that, and I…
I guide him to my entrance, the head of his cock parting my folds–wet and hot.
He braces himself on the stairs, his knees bent, as I tease him, wetting him with my own desire, and he folds, begins to move.
Another low warning growl reverberates through him. I sink into the sound, into the feeling of him grabbing my hand and pinning it to the stone at my side, preventing me from touching him, from being the one to guide him home.
I turn my face against his, closing my eyes. “Mate,” I breathe against his ear, the word lost in a sharp, whimpered moan as he drags his cock up and down over my clit.
“You’re going to be the death of me,” he repeats before finally losing his mind. I’ve never met a man so restrained before, so in control.
I don’t want that. I want him unhinged. I want him shouting my name for all the world to hear.
With all of my strength, I hook my leg around his, forcing him to the side, then onto his back, replacing my position on the stairs. I straddle him, but he stops me before I can slide down onto his cock, his hand splayed flat against my breasts, and his eyes… Goddess.
I’m out of control. This is… this is hurting him.
“Why can’t we?” I whisper, shattered by the defeated, almost panicked look in his eyes. “What–what did you mean?”
“I can’t get you pregnant–”
“I don’t–whether we have kids or not is the furthest thing from my mind at the moment–”
His lips part, but he hesitates, and then I get it. What he told me earlier. The wings.
“You wouldn’t survive the birth,” he says so softly I almost miss it. “It would kill you and the baby. It would destroy you, and I won’t–I can’t take the risk. Not when you’re in heat, and my wolf is begging me to claim you, to breed you, because that’s all I want to do right now.”
I balance on his thighs as he sits up, his cock still hard between us, hot like heated steel. I smooth my hand down his length, and he closes his eyes, hissing out a breath.
“I want you,” he confirms with effort. “Fuck, I… have to be inside of you. I can’t stop thinking about it. The taste of you, Lexa… I can’t stop.”
I ease down a step, then another, cold stairs biting into my knees. I’ve never done this before, but every fiber of my being melds to his, and I know exactly what to do when I kneel for the Alpha King of the Glade and lick up his shaft, my eyes meeting his in the dim light. He licks his lips, transfixed, in absolute awe when I close my lips around him and suck.
He arches his neck, every muscle flexed, and reaches for me, gripping the back of my head and tangling his fingers in my hair.
It’s amazing. My body is on fire while I pleasure him with my tongue, sucking him down my throat until he groans my name. I brace my arms on his thighs, moaning with each involuntary thrust of his hips, taking him deeper, savoring the taste of him.
He loses himself, finally lets go of the chains keeping him bound, and it’s as beautiful as it is heartbreaking.
But suddenly… something shifts. I feel it in our bond. He can’t take this–this wanting. This desperation for me, to be inside of me, claiming me. I pick up the pace, moaning around his cock, whimpering as he presses against my head while he thrusts deep and pulls out, yanking my hair back to force me to let him go with a pop that echoes all around us…
And then he’s dragging me into his lap, my legs splayed over his thighs.
“Fuck it,” he curses and sits me fully on his cock.
I nearly scream at the feeling of him forcing me open, stretching me to my limits, but that feeling quickly subsides, replaced by a feral need to take him, to take him as mine. I straddle him, writhing my hips, my toes curling as the sharp ache bleeds into an acute, white-hot kind of pleasure that takes up every thought in my mind.
“Is this what you wanted?” he rasps, pulling me down so we’re nose to nose, his lips brushing mine.
“Yes!” I cry out, riding him like we’ve done this before, like our bodies were meant to always move like this. Tension coils deep in my belly. I flatten my hands to his chest, moaning and gasping. His body tightens beneath mine, his jaw flexed, his fingers digging into my hips.
In a smooth, controlled motion, he flips us over, his hand splayed wide over my spine, protecting me from the bite of the rough stone beneath us. I don’t care if I’ll have new bruises. I don’t care about anything but the feeling of him, his body rising over mine, his cock thrusting in and out at a pace that has me blubbering incoherently, overwhelmed by the heat of it.
His hands are everywhere–gripping my breasts, splaying my legs further apart. He’s completely overcome by lust, greedily slamming into me and pulling out slowly, loving the way I whimper, begging him for more.
He leans down to nibble my neck, sucking a bruise so deep it’ll still be there in the morning, and that’s enough to send me spiraling over the edge into oblivion, and I come harder than I ever have before.
“Kaleb!” I cry out, my legs locked, the tension almost painful as warmth blooms through my center and expands in ripples of pure pleasure. My inner walls clench his cock, spasming and throbbing. He pumps into me, growling the filthiest, most depraved things I’ve ever heard against my skin.
He pulls out at the last possible second, his cock pressed between us, and spills himself on my stomach. His grunt of pleasure is short-lived and broken by what I only describe as frustration, like he wants to yell, curse whoever did this to him, to us.
I am most definitely in heat. That’s the only explanation for the feeling of emptiness, dread, and rejection now flooding my system, erasing the echoes of pleasure still traveling through my body.
Kaleb pulls away, shrugging out of his shirt, his face cast in cold shadow. He uses the remnants of my atrocious ballgown to clean me up, and then drapes the shirt over my shoulders and scoops me off the steps.
I’m exhausted but left wanting as he carries me upstairs and into the unfamiliar, thankfully empty, house. He knows where he’s going because he turns into a room that faintly smells like him, like he’s been here before, slept on the massive fourposter bed he’s now laying me on. I grab his hand before he pulls away completely. “Stay.”
“I need to go back to the Glade for a few hours and make sure no one is killing each other while the shields are down,” he says, and I can hear the vitriol in his voice, the frustration lacing through every syllable. “I’ll come back. You’re safe here.”
“Is there no one else around?”
“No. There shouldn’t be. Silas took his household staff with him, and his guest is not here tonight.”
“His guest?” This conversation is trivial, meaningless. I want to draw him back to bed to… I don’t know, fix this? Somehow? Try to work through the damning revelation that we’re mates and the world around us is actively burning to the ground?
He turns around, giving me his back.
A cold kind of dread steals any other thought from my mind when those twin scars on either side of his spine catch the lamplight.
“You had wings,” I whisper.
He lowers his head, adjusting his belt. His failure to reply is answer enough.
“What–what happened to them?” I ask, my lower lip trembling as he slowly turns to face me.
“I was a halfling born from a slave father. I wasn’t allowed to keep them. They were cut off when I was born.”
My chest convulses, but he edges toward the bed, reaching for me. I lean into his palm as he caresses my cheek, smoothing his thumb over my lower lip.
“We’ll discuss this later.”
“Will we still feel the bond in the morning?”
“I don’t think so,” he says with heartbreaking quiet, and then he leaves me in the dark, alone.