Her body locks around me. The clench of her is so hard that my vision fails and I see nothing for a second. She screams — not my name, not a word, just a sound, raw, feral, a wolf in the grip of something her body can’t hold.
Hold. Hold it. Not yet.
I can’t.
The knot swells. I feel it building, the base of my cock thickening inside her, stretching her further while she’s still clenching from the orgasm. The squeeze of her body around the knot is so tight that my arms almost give out.
“Garrett—” Panic in her voice. She feels it. “You’re—”
“I know.” The voice that comes out is not mine. Deep. The wolf talking. “Take it.”
“I can’t—”
“You can. You are right now.”
She is. Her body is stretching around the engorged flesh, the resistance dragging a sound out of both of us that’s half pain and half something with no name.
“Oh, God.” Her face drops to the moss. “Oh God, it’s—”
The knot locks.
Full. Sealed. The pressure radiates through my pelvic floor, up my spine, into my chest. I can feel her heartbeat through it. The pulse of her body around me, fast and hard. Each pulse squeezes me, and the pleasure of it doesn’t peak because it can’t — the lock keeps the sensation held in, rolling, relentless, and I’m drowning in it.
My wolf takes over.
The growl that tears from my chest shakes the ground under us. Deep, possessive, alpha — and her wolf answers. Her muscles go slack. Her head turns. Her throat bares.
My fangs have extended. I feel the points against my lower lip. My mate mark is there below me — still ragged, the shape of my teeth.
Jesus. Did I do that?
My wolf doesn’t feel a shred of remorse. The more visible it is, the better.
My mouth finds the mark without my deciding. Lips on the scar, then my tongue, then a low growl from the back of my throat that I can’t hold in. She shudders, and the walls around me pulse tighter. Every hair on her body rises against my chest.
I don’t bite again. I don’t need to. The mark is mine. It was mine from the first time. The sheer sense of ownership flares inside me, tugging in my groin.
I come.
It explodes. My cock pulses inside her — thick, hot, endless. Each spurt met by the lock’s grip and her body’s pressure, milking me, pulling it out of me in waves I don’t control. My hips grind against her, driving deep, and I feel myself emptying into her with a thoroughness that isn’t just physical.
She feels what I feel. I feel what she feels. The fullness. The lock. The maddening pressure. Neither of us can tell where one body ends and the other begins. I hold her flat, my full weight on her, my mouth on the scar I made ten days ago, and I have never been closer to another person in my life.
Minutes pass.
The knot holds. Still hard. Still thick. Every small shift of my weight makes us both twitch. She’s breathing hard underneath me, her cheek pressed into the moss. There are tears on her face — not sobbing. Just a body’s overflow. Too much sensation pushed through a channel too small to carry it.
My hand moves from her hip to her hair. Not pulling. Brushing it back from her face. Tucking the wet strands behind her ear.
She opens one eye. Looks at me over her shoulder.
Whatever face I usually wear has been fucked off me, and I don’t have anything to rebuild it with. I keep stroking her hair back.
She closes her eye. But she doesn’t tell me to stop.
The knot softens. Slowly. Agonizingly. When I finally slip free, the loss of her hits me — a hollow in the center of my chest where she was a second ago.
I roll onto my back in the moss. Stars through the canopy. My cock wet and softening. My hands shaking. My wolf curled up inside me with the deep satisfaction of an animal that has done what it came to do.