“Beautiful.”The word came out on a moan.“You’re so beautiful like this.”
The orgasm hit us both, and I felt the knot swell at the base of my cock.The pressure was impossible, growing, stretching her open around me until she gasped, her nails digging into my shoulders.The knot locked us together, sealed us, made escape impossible even if either of us wanted it.
Mine, the wolf roared.She cannot run now.Cannot escape.Ours forever.
“What…” she breathed the word against my shoulder, her body clenching around the knot in rhythmic waves that made my vision blur.
“Wolf thing.”I was shaking, overwhelmed by the sensation of being tied to her, trapped inside her heat.“It means you’re mine.Means I can’t leave until it goes down.Means every part of me knows you belong to me.”
She laughed, breathless and wondering.“How long?”
“Long enough.”
I buried my face in her neck, teeth grazing the place where the claiming bite would go.My fangs had lengthened without my permission, pressing against her skin.The wolf was screaming inside me:Now.Bite her NOW.Make her ours forever.
The agony of holding back was worse than any beating the Pakhan’s enforcers had delivered.My wolf howled in protest, in need, in a grief so profound it reverberated through my bones.
Not yet.Not tonight.I still did not trust myself enough.Could not risk becoming my father with my teeth buried in her throat.
But I let myself hope that someday I might.
We lay together afterward, firelight dancing across her skin.She traced patterns on my chest while I breathed in her scent, now mingled with mine in a way that made the wolf purr.
“What happens now?”she asked.
“Now you know what I am.What this is.”I tightened my arm around her.“The choice is yours.Run from the monster, or stay with the man.”
She lifted her head to look at me.Her eyes, that impossible blue, held no fear.No revulsion.Only the same terrifying recognition we had found that night on the couch.
“I already made my choice.”She pressed a kiss to the place above my heart.“I’m not running anywhere.”
She had no idea what those words did to me.How completely she could destroy me now, with the full truth laid bare between us.She knew what I was.Knew about the bond, the wolf, the claiming.If she ever realized how much power that knowledge gave her, she could break me with a whisper.
I hoped she never figured it out.And I hoped she did.
The wolf howled in triumph, silent and fierce and finally satisfied.
I held her tighter and let myself believe.
19
LENA
I woke to sunlight instead of firelight, and the weight of a man who was also a wolf.
Raphael’s arm was heavy across my waist, his chest warm against my back.His breath stirred my hair in a slow, even rhythm.Sleeping.Vulnerable in a way I had never seen him before last night.His scent surrounded me, along with that masculine heat I now understood was partly wolf, partly man, entirely him.
I did not move.Just lay there, processing.
My husband was a wolf shifter.A massive black wolf with silver threading through his fur and eyes that glowed amber in the dark.He had chased me through the woods, caught me, bound my wrists with his belt, and then lost control so completely that his body had reshaped itself into something other than human.Bones cracking.Fur rippling.The man I had married becoming a creature from a fairy tale.
And I had stayed.
The faint marks on my wrists were already fading, pink lines where the leather had pressed.I studied them in the morning light filtering through the cabin windows, remembering.The chase.The catch.The rough bark against my cheek as he took me from behind.The way his body had swelled inside me, locking us together.The knot, he had called it.A wolf thing.
I had never questioned it before.Never wondered why his body did that, why we stayed joined long after he finished.Raphael was the only man I had ever been with.I had nothing to compare him to, no frame of reference that would have told me normal men did not swell and lock inside their partners.I had assumed it was just how sex worked.Now I understood it was how sex worked with him.With wolves.Another piece of the puzzle clicking into place.
I turned my head slowly, careful not to wake him, and studied his face.