Grogan follows two paces behind me, his silence heavy as stones in my pockets.
We crash through the underbrush toward my cabin, branches whipping my thighs and releasing the sharp scent of crushed pine needles. Neither of us speaks.
The bond between us vibrates with suppressed violence, humming against my sternum like a plucked wire. I feel raw, flayed open, desperate to hurt something that can bleed back.
I spin at the cabin door, my hand shaking on the rough-hewn latch. Splinters bite into my palm. "You forced me."
Grogan freezes mid-step. Moonlight catches his gray eyes, widening them into pools of liquid mercury. His silver hair glows like a halo of knives against the dark forest. "What?"
"In the forest." My voice cracks, harsh and accusing, scraping my throat raw. "The first night. I screamed, I fought, and you pinned me down and took me anyway. You tell yourself it was the bond, the compulsion, but you wanted it."
His face shutters, then ignites. He surges forward, his boots crunching on dead leaves, caging me against the door with his forearms.
The wood presses cold and unyielding against my spine. His body becomes a wall of infernal heat and fury, his scent—ancient, leather-bound, threaded with wild musk—enveloping me until I can’t breathe anything else.
"I begged you to run," he growls, his aristocratic composure shredding like wet paper.
His breath gusts hot and damp against my lips, smelling of clove and rage.
"I told you to flee while I had the strength to let you go. But you wrapped your legs around me. You pulled me closer. You wanted it just as badly as the magic demanded it. Admit it."
The truth hangs between us, ugly and gleaming, pulsing in the dark.
"I wanted it," I snarl, the admission tasting like copper and ash. "I hated myself for wanting it. I wanted to tear you apart for making me feel trapped and hungry and yours before I even had a choice."
I slap him.
The crack echoes through the clearing like a gunshot. His head snaps to the side, the impact stinging my palm, leaving it buzzing with phantom heat.
A red handprint blooms on his pale cheek immediately, rising like a brand in the moonlight. A drop of blood wells at the corner of his mouth where his elongated fang has split the skin.
He turns back slowly, his eyes blown wide, black swallowing gray until only a silver ring remains. His tongue darts out, thick and obscene, tasting the crimson bead with a deliberation that makes my stomach clench.
The scent of his blood hits my nostrils, and something inside me snaps, hot and reckless.
I grab fistfuls of his silver hair—coarse as silk thread, cool against my fevered skin—and drag his mouth to mine.
The kiss is war.
His lips crush against mine, his teeth drawing blood immediately, the copper taste mixing between us, coating our tongues. He growls, a sound ripped from the depths of his chest that vibrates through my teeth and down my spine.
His hands fist in my cotton shirt, and with a wrenching tear that sounds like screaming, the fabric gives way. Cool night air bites my suddenly exposed skin, pebbling my nipples into aching points.
"You want to hate me?" he snarls against my throat, his voice gone guttural and ruined.
His hands shove my pants down my hips roughly, the denim scraping my flesh, leaving burning friction in its wake.
"Hate me while I fuck you."
"Shut up," I gasp, but I’m already turning, already presenting my back to him, pressing my palms flat against the rough wooden door.
The planks are weathered, splintered, digging into my palms with sharp, protesting bites.
"Do it from behind. Like an animal that you are."
He makes a wounded, starving sound—part snarl, part sob.
Behind me, I hear the violent tear of his own clothes, buttons pinging off into the dark like shrapnel, the desperate fumbling of a belt buckle.
Then his hands—rough, ancient, trembling with restraint—span my naked waist, gripping hard enough to leave purple bruises that will bloom come morning. His thumbs dig into the dimples above my ass, spreading me open to the cool air.
He enters me in one brutal thrust.
The force drives the air from my lungs in a sharp whoosh and slams my forehead against the door. My cheek presses against splintered wood, smelling of pine sap and old rot.
He’s thick and burning hot, stretching me around him with a slick friction that borders on pain, and he doesn’t stop, doesn’t wait for me to adjust. He pulls back, the head of his cock dragging against sensitive inner walls, and drives in again with a savagery that rattles my teeth and echoes off the cabin walls.
The slapping sound of skin against skin fills the clearing—wet, rhythmic, obscene. The scent of our arousal rises into the night: musk and salt and the iron tang of the blood where he bit my lip.
Sweat slicks my back, making his chest slide against me in a glide of fevered skin on skin.
"You’re mine," he growls in my ear, his chest plastered to my back, his heartbeat hammering a frantic rhythm I can feel through my shoulder blades.
His hand fists in my hair at the crown, wrenching my head back until my throat is exposed, vulnerable, while his hips snap against mine with meaty, punishing impacts that make my bones sing.
"You were mine from the moment I smelled you in that forest. You’ll be mine when we’re dust."
I push back against him, meeting his thrusts, forcing him deeper until I see stars bursting behind my eyelids.
It’s angry, it’s desperate, it’s the consummation of everything we’ve been avoiding—the violence of our beginning, the cage of the bond, the terrible certainty that we destroyed each other’s lives and rebuilt something monstrous and holy from the wreckage.
His free hand slides around my hip, calloused fingers finding my clit with unerring accuracy. He rubs tight, cruel circles that make my legs shake and threaten to give out, my knees buckling against the unyielding door.
I’m sobbing with it, keening, the pleasure sharp as a knife’s edge against the backdrop of pain, my fingernails splintering against the wood as he pounds into me, the slap of his balls against my skin adding to the symphony of flesh.
"Say it," he demands, his lips dragging against the shell of my ear, his fangs—sharp as scalpels—grazing the tendon of my neck. "Say you wanted it. Say you wanted me to take you."
"I wanted it," I scream into the night air, the confession tearing out of me alongside my climax. It hits like a tidal wave, my inner muscles clamping down in rhythmic pulses that draw out his own release. "I wanted you. I wanted this—"
He bites down on my shoulder, and white-hot pain detonates my orgasm into something cataclysmic. I convulse around him, seeing white, tasting lightning, my body jerking uncontrollably as he roars against my flesh—a guttural, animal sound—and spills into me in hot, endless waves, coating my insides with liquid heat that seems to burn.
We collapse against the door, gasping, bleeding, sweating. His weight presses me into the rough wood so hard I can’t tell where I end and he begins. His tongue laps lazily at the wound on my shoulder, sealing it with strokes that make me shiver.
The bond between us—the first, the oldest, the most complicated—flares blindingly bright, golden and permanent, sealing something that had remained cracked and jagged between us since that first night.
I open my eyes, my cheek pressed to the sweat-slicked door, my vision swimmy with aftershocks. The wood smells of sex and pine and blood now, marked by us.
And through the clearing mist, I see them.
Rhett, massive and scarred, his dark eyes burning with banked want, his chest heaving with suppressed breaths. Theron, golden and coiled, his hand palming his own arousal through his pants, his lips parted in uncharacteristic need. Jarek, pale and precise, his pupils blown wide, his analytical mask shattered. Hrollok, fierce and furious, tears of jealousy and desire tracking silver lines down his face, his body trembling with restraint.
They stand in the shadows, witnesses to our violence and our healing, bound to me through the threads that now sing in perfect harmony—five points of light burning in my chest, calling out to their source.
I reach out one trembling hand, my fingers glistening with sweat and blood and Grogan’s seed, shimmering in the moonlight.
"Come," I whisper, my voice raw and commanding, Alpha and Omega, beginning and end. "All of you. Come here."
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