“Where would you like my claim mark,larkial?” I turned her around, so she was sitting facing me. Her eyes opened slightly, and she listed as if she were drunk. I set my teeth on the other side of her neck, mirroring Thorn’s bite. “Here, angel? Matching marks?”
I bit down and she squirmed, a new line of honeyed slick beginning to drip down her thigh. I set my finger to it, and rubbed the wetness around her folds. Laying her back carefully on the bed, I began to bite gently at every part of her I could reach, each time asking “here?” while my fingers toyed with her clit and traced circles around her opening.
“Altair,” she moaned. “Please… It burns.”
I couldn’t deny her. I placed her back on my lap facing me, and gently lifted her high enough that the head of my erection notched the entrance to her pussy. Slowly, I pressed into her, meeting no resistance. The room filled with the scent of honeyed oranges, and she welcomed me inside, accepting every inch up to my knot. For a moment, I held her there, feeling her body, almost too hot around my cock. Then, I began lifting her away from me and letting her fall back down, again and again, whispering into her ear all the things I wanted to do with her, to her, for her.
I would wake her each morning with my tongue and my hands, watch her drift into sleep after strumming her to climax each night. Take my turns with her mates in satisfying her, in filling her so full that she never felt empty again.
I spoke of how I loved her, and why. Her fierce nature, her passion, her sense of justice. Her fire. “Roya,larkial, you are my angel. My Goddess. I will worship you with my body from now until time ends.”
She roused, beginning to shake. Her orgasm moved through her with tremors that grew stronger until her opening somehow flared wider, and sucked my knot inside. We came together, locked in each other’s arms. I let my teeth gently pierce her flesh at her nape, relishing how she tightened around me, the way she began to babble words of love and praise.
I fell back on the mattress, the darkness taking me. The last thing I saw was her eyes blinking, stark fear and worry replacing the sexual haze. Before I slipped away, I heard her voice calling my name, begging me to stay with her, to wake up.
ROYA
What in the Goddess’s hells had happened after I was poisoned? I blinked, trying to rub the strange blurriness from my eyes. I had woken in a small room with a low ceiling, nothing inside save an enormous bed covered with pillows, blankets, discarded clothing… and unconscious men.
One of whom was still inside me.
I shook Altair’s shoulder. He was sleeping, it looked like, with a smile on his face that I would have described as smug if he were awake. “Altair, wake up!”
“He can’t. He’s taken on your poison.”
“Kavin?” He sat fully clothed on the corner of the mattress. For some reason, seeing him that close to the edge of the room, so far from me, made a part of me gnash its teeth. I clenched my jaw to keep myself from demanding he move to the center of the bed, nearer.
Altair was slipping out of me. I was horrified at the amount of liquid that began to gush from me as he did so. “Yuck!”
Then Kavin was there with a cloth, and a cup of water. “You were in heat,” he explained, “and poisoned by the Guildmaster. With rictal powder.”
I choked on the water. “How am I alive?”
Kavin ran a hand over his gold and red beard. “They saved you.” He gestured to the sleeping men. Goddess, I hoped they were just sleeping. “They claimed you, Roya. Do you remember?”
“Claimed me?” I felt the three spots on me that were burning with invisible fire. The one Icarus had put on my breast, the one on my neck that I instinctively knew was Thorn’s, and then…. My hand went to my nape, and I smelled Altair’s musk and ginger in my mind. “All of you?”
“I d-did not,” Kavin stammered. “I think you have enough. You don’t need me. I’ll… I’ll go.”
The thought of him leaving hit me like a blow. Why should it gut me that he wasn’t mine? Why should it make my insides ache and cramp, a physical demand for something he might not want? Did he not want me as a mate?
“Why are they unconscious?” I managed to ask, pulling a sheet over myself. “I’m awake. Why aren’t they?”
Kavin cleared his throat and refilled my water cup from a carafe at the edge of the bed. One of his feet landed on the floor, and I stifled a growl.What was that about? Roya, control yourself.
“I’m not sure if it was because of your mating bond with Icarus, or your Omega powers. But you shared the effects of the poison with all of them. Icarus fell first, then—”
“Then Thorn,” I said, remembering. “He woke me with…” I licked my lips. “Cofi root?”
Kavin ducked his head. “That was my idea. I’m glad it worked.” He wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“I’m surprised Thorn agreed to mate me,” I murmured, wishing I could remember more of the event. I’d spent enough years dreaming about it; it seemed unfair to be mostly dead during the culmination of a thousand adolescent fantasies. Words flew from lips, before I could stop them. “Why didn’t you try for it? Isn’t that what you were sent for? To claim me? You missed your shot.” My words were harsh, and I tried to smile and pass them off as a joke. It didn’t work.
Kavin’s gaze crackled with anger. “I know you think I have no honor. I can’t help that. But I would never, ever force you or any woman into a mating bond.” He swung his legs over the edge of the mattress. “I’ll get Valerie.”
Valerie? I wanted to see her, but when he stood, his body moving away, something inside me split wide. It felt like my heart was being torn in two, like I was losing a part of me that would never grow back, never heal.
“Stop!”
