She leaned forward, pressing her forehead against the coarse fur of his chest, and the new angle drove him deeper on the next downstroke. A noise escaped her—something raw and graceless that she would have been mortified by in any other context. Here, pinned between the sound of his snarl and the flood of his approval through the bond, it felt like the most honest thing she’d ever felt.
His free paw came up to cradle the back of her skull. Claws against her scalp, impossibly careful, holding her against his chest while she rode him. The gesture was so tender—so at odds with the size of him, the predatory power coiled in every inch of his body, the monstrous cock buried inside her—that something cracked behind her sternum. A wall she hadn’t realized was still standing.
I could stay here. I could stay right here and never want for anything.
She moved faster. Chased the pressure building at her core, hips rolling in a rhythm that had gone past deliberate into something instinctive. The bond’s feedback loop amplified every sensation—his pleasure layered beneath hers, a harmonic that made the rising wave inside her feel twice as tall, twice as inevitable. The claiming bite blazed. Her inner walls clenched and released in pulses she couldn’t control, gripping his cock in rhythmic waves that drew a sound from him that was more snarl than moan.
But her thighs were shaking.
Not from pleasure. From exhaustion. The Blood Moon chase through the snow, the claiming that had rewritten her body’s understanding of its own limits—all of it catching up with her now, muscles burning with a fatigue that turned her rhythm ragged and her movements unsteady. She tried to compensate, shifting her weight forward, bracing harder against his chest, but her arms trembled and her pace faltered and the orgasm building at the base of her spine slipped just out of reach.
No.
Frustration spiked through the bond—hers, sharp and furious, the navigator’s refusal to fail at anything she’d set her course for. She hated this. Hated that her human body couldn’t match the stamina of the creature beneath her, couldn’t sustain the pace the bond demanded, couldn’t finish what she’d started without her weak, fragile,mortalmuscles giving out.
Sylas felt it. Of course he did—the bond hid nothing now, transmitted every flicker of frustration and self-directed anger with the same brutal clarity it transmitted pleasure. His paw tightened on her hip. His eyes, half-lidded and glowing, sharpened.
“Elsa.”
She tried to roll her hips again. Her thigh cramped. A small, furious sound escaped her throat—half growl, half whimper—and shehatedhow weak it sounded.
He moved.
Not slowly. Not with the trembling reverence of the first claiming. One moment she was astride him, struggling against her own body’s betrayal, and the next his hands were around her waist—both paws now, fingers spanning her torso, lifting her off his cock with a slick, devastating pull that left her gasping at the sudden emptiness.
He flipped her.
The chamber spun. Stone and crimson light blurred at the edges of her vision, and then she was on her hands and knees on the cape, the fabric bunched beneath her palms, volcanic heat rising through the stone to warm her shaking arms. The ease of it—the effortless power required to rearrange a grown woman mid-act like she weighed nothing—should have frightened her. Instead, relief crashed through her so hard her elbows nearly buckled. The bond sang with it, her gratitude tangling with his fierce protectiveness until the two became indistinguishable.
His body covered hers from behind—enormous, furred, radiating a heat that dwarfed the volcanic vents. One paw planted on top of her gathered hands—holding, claiming—claws sinking into stone. The other gripped her hip, positioning her with a precision that had nothing to do with gentleness and everything to do withintent.
His muzzle pressed against the back of her neck. Hot breath. The scrape of fangs along her spine—not biting, not yet, justthere. A reminder of what lived behind his ribs and chose, every second, not to destroy her.
“You are not weak.” A growl pressed into her skin. The words vibrated through her bones, through the bond, settling into the place where her frustration had coiled like a fist. “You chased this. You climbed onto your king and took what you wanted. There is nothing weak in a Luna who demands her mate.”
His hips pressed forward.
The angle was different. Deeper. She was open and swollen and dripping, and his cock slid into her from behind with a thick, relentless push that drove the air from her lungs and bowed her spine toward the stone. Her arms buckled. Her elbows hit the cape, forehead dropping against her crossed wrists, and the position forced her hips higher, forced her to take him at an angle that reached places the first two joinings hadn’t touched.
She cried out. Couldn’t stop it, couldn’t bite it back, the sound ripped from somewhere primal and past the reach of dignity. Through the bond she felt his response—a savage pulse ofyes-mine-again—and then he began to move.
Fast. Hard. The restraint of the first claiming stripped away, replaced by something rawer, something that the Blood Moon had been feeding all night and the bond’s completion had finally unleashed. His paw held her hip in a grip that would bruise, keeping her steady, keeping herupwhen her exhausted muscles tried to collapse. The other braced her hands against the stone, claws scoring fresh furrows beside the ones he’d carved earlier, and the sound of him—the wet slap of flesh, the low, continuous snarl that rolled from his chest, the heavy swing of his furred balls against her with each punishing thrust—filled the chamber until nothing else existed.
Elsa stopped thinking.
Every rational, calculating, stubbornly self-reliant part of her that had kept her alive since theStardanceremergency pod crashed surrendered to the animal truth of this—his body driving into hers, the bond burning between them like a live wire, the building pressure at her core that felt less like pleasure and more like inevitability. Like gravity. Like falling toward something she couldn’t escape and didn’t want to.
He was everywhere. Around her, inside her,throughher—the bond transmitting his sensation on top of her own until she couldn’t parse whose pleasure she was feeling. His grip on her hip, the heat of his fur against her back, the volcanic air burning in her lungs, the obscene fullness of him filling and retreating and filling again in a rhythm that her body had locked onto and refused to release.
She felt the knot begin to swell.
The base of his cock thickened with each thrust—a gradual expansion that pressed against her entrance, spreading herwider, demanding more space than her body should have been able to give. The stretch burned. The burn fed into the bond and came back as pleasure so sharp it bordered on agony, and she heard herself making sounds she didn’t recognize—broken, desperate, animal sounds that belonged to the woman the bond had made her rather than the navigator she’d been.
“Sylas—” His name. The only word left in her vocabulary. “Sylas, I can’t—I’m—”
“You can.” Rough. Certain. His muzzle pressed against the claiming bite, and the contact—fangs against fresh scar tissue—sent a shockwave through the bond that whited out her vision at the edges. “You can take all of me, Luna. You already have.”
The knot locked.