She propped herself on one elbow, breathing hard, the crimson light catching the angles of her face. Her eyes found his in the dark—not the glassy, unfocused look of a female lost to sensation. Clear. Present. The navigator, calculating even now.
Good. Stay with me. Know what you’re choosing.
“Yes.” The word came out steady. Certain. “Yes. Yours.Now.”
The beast shattered its chains.
Sylas surged over her in a single motion that was half lunge, half controlled fall, catching his weight on one forearm while the other hooked beneath her thigh and hitched her hips up to meet his. The angle pressed them flush—her back arched off the crimson cape, her legs wrapping around his waist with a fierceness that matched the grip of her fingers in his fur.
His cock slid free of the sheath fully, heavy and aching, the cool air of the chamber a shock against the flushed, sensitive skin. He was harder than he’d ever been—the Blood Moon and the bond and the scent of her arousal conspiring to drive blood south until he throbbed with it, the ridge along his length already swelling toward the base where the knot would form. Cyan against the crimson light, flushed dark with need, and so large against the scale of her body that the king’s terror surged up his throat like bile.
Too much. You’re too much for her. You’ll—
Her hips rolled against him. Deliberate. Demanding.
The terror drowned in a wave of something hotter.
He notched himself at her entrance and felt the bond seize. Hers and his—a mutual intake of breath, a shared clench of muscle, the awareness between them compressing to a single white-hot point of contact. She was wet. Soaked. Her body ready in ways her mind was still catching up to, the Blood Moon’s influence and his worship and the primal chemistry between them conspiring to ease what should have been impossible.
Sylas pushed in.
Slow. A single, measured inch that cost him more than any wound he’d ever taken. Her body stretched around him—tight, impossibly tight, the heat of her clenching down on the broad head of his cock in a grip that made his arms tremble and his vision split. Through the bond, he felt the sharp edge of pain thread through her pleasure, felt her body adjusting, accommodating, working to take what shouldn’t fit.
He stopped.
“Don’t—” She panted beneath him, nails digging crescents into his shoulders through the fur. “Don’t youdarestop.”
A growl vibrated through his chest. Not the beast’s mindless hunger. Something rawer. The sound of a male being unmade by the creature beneath him.
He fed himself into her by degrees. An inch. Another. Reading her through the bond with every fractional advance—the flare of pain that melted into pressure, the pressure that shifted into fullness, the fullness that became a pleasure so intense it fed back through the connection and hit him in the base of his spine like a psydagger strike. His hips shook with the effort of not driving forward, not burying himself to the hilt in one savage thrust the way the beast howled for him to do.
She took him. All of him—slowly, stubbornly, with the same determined refusal to quit that had carried her through the chase and the crash and every impossible thing this world had thrown at her. Her body opened for his, muscles releasing in stages, and when he finally seated himself fully—his hips flush against hers, the emerging swell of the knot pressed against her entrance but not yet locked—the sound she made wasn’t pain.
It was wonder.
Sylas held himself motionless inside her, arms braced, chest heaving, every nerve in his body screaming. The fit was devastating. Hot and slick and so tight that each micro-shift of her hips sent lightning up his spine. Through the bond, her sensations layered over his own—fullness, stretch, the exquisite ache of being filled beyond capacity and finding pleasure in the excess. He could feel her pulse from the inside, rapid and strong, and the intimacy of it nearly ended him before he’d begun.
“Move.” Her voice was wrecked. “Sylas,move.”
He moved.
Not gentle. The Blood Moon wouldn’t allow gentle, and the beast had been held back too long to settle for careful. He withdrew and thrust forward in a single driving stroke that punched the breath from her lungs and tore a groan from the deepest part of his chest. The crimson cape bunched beneath her. Her spine arched. The chamber’s ancient stone absorbedthe sound of their collision and returned it as a low, resonant echo that felt like the mountain itself was bearing witness.
Again. Harder. Finding a rhythm that was half instinct and half the bond’s brutal feedback loop—every thrust registering twice, once in his body and once in hers, the dual sensation building into something that transcended the physical. He could feel what she needed before she knew it herself. Deeper angle—her breath hitched, pleasure spiking sharp and bright. Slower pull—her hips chased him, unwilling to lose the contact. Faster, harder, the slap of flesh on fur obscene in the chamber’s sacred silence—and the noise she made was the most profane prayer he’d ever received.
His claws scored the stone beside her head. Furrows in ancient rock, precise parallel lines carved by a predator channeling every ounce of savage force away from the body beneath him and into the mountain’s bones. His restraint lived in those marks. Every gouge a testament to the thing he wouldn’t do—wouldn’t claw, wouldn’t crush, wouldn’t let the beast’s violence touch the one creature in the world he needed more than air.
Elsa didn’t seem to care about his restraint.
She met him. Thrust for thrust, her hips rising to take him deeper, her legs locked around his waist with a strength that shouldn’t have been possible in a body that small. Her nails raked through his fur, scoring the skin beneath, and the sting of it sent a bolt of savage pleasure through the bond that made him snarl against her throat.
Not passive. Not prey. A mate who fights for what she wants.
The realization did something to the architecture of his chest. Cracked a wall he hadn’t known that had remained standing. Because he’d feared this—feared that the Blood Moon would reduce her to something to be taken, that the beast’s powerwould overwhelm her agency and leave him holding the ruins of the trust she’d built, brick by painful brick, since the day he’d first put chains on her.
Instead, she burned.
Burned beneath him and against him and through the bond until the heat of her was indistinguishable from his own. She bit his shoulder—blunt human teeth that barely dented his hide but sent a shock of possessive fury through the bond that was entirelyhers, not his, and the realization that she wanted to mark him the way he would mark her—