"I can't?—"
"You can." His fingers move faster, his cock hitting that spot with every thrust. "Come on my cock again, Kess. Let me feel it."
The second orgasm builds impossibly fast, pleasure coiling tight in my belly. I'm sobbing now—from the intensity, from the anger, from the grief of everything we've broken between us. His free hand comes up to cup my breast, fingers finding my nipple and pinching hard enough to hurt.
"That's it." His voice is wrecked, ragged. "That's my omega. So fucking tight around me?—"
"Don't—" I choke on a moan. "Don't call me that?—"
"You are, though." He pinches my nipple again, rolls it between his fingers while his cock pounds into me. "My omega. My mate. Carrying my child. Nothing changes that, Kess. Not even this."
The second orgasm rips through me, harder than the first. I scream into my arm, my whole body convulsing, and I feel him swell inside me—the knot starting to catch at my entrance.
"I love you," he gasps against my throat. "I love you, Kess. I'm sorry?—"
"Shut up." I reach back, grab his hip, dig my nails in until I feel skin tear. "Shut up and knot me."
He slams in one last time and the knot forces its way inside.
The stretch is brutal—too fast, too much, my body struggling to accommodate even with the heat making me wet and open. Icry out, half pain and half something darker, and then it catches behind my pubic bone and locks us together.
He comes with a sound that's half roar, half sob.
The first hot pulse of his release floods into me, and I feel it—feel him filling me, marking me from the inside. Another pulse. Another. His hips grind against my ass, working the knot deeper, and each movement sends sparks shooting up my spine. My body clenches around him without permission, milking his cock, and another orgasm rolls through me—smaller than the others but somehow more devastating, pulling tears down my cheeks.
We end up on the ground—I don't know how, don't remember moving. He's on his back in the fallen leaves, I'm sprawled across his chest with his cock still locked inside me. Both of us breathing like we've run for miles. Both of us crying.
The flash heat recedes like a tide going out, leaving me raw and shaking and horribly, devastatingly clear-headed. His rut is still there—I can feel it through the bond, the desperate need—but it's banked now, satisfied enough that he can think again.
Which means we both have to face what we just did.
"I'm sorry," he says into the silence, his voice wrecked. "Kess, I'm so sorry."
"For what?" The bitterness cuts through. "For following me? For the rut? For the tea? For hiding my pregnancy? Which part are you sorry for, Rhystan? Because there's a lot to choose from."
His arms tighten around me—not restraining, just holding on. "All of it. Everything."
"That's not good enough."
"I know."
The knot pulses inside me, another wave of his release, and my body clenches in response despite myself. We're going to be here for a while. Trapped together, his cock locked inside me, nowhere to go and nothing to do but talk or lie in silence.
"Why?" The word tears out of me. "Why didn't you just tell me? About the pregnancy, about the tea, about any of it?"
"Because I was afraid."
"That's not?—"
"Let me finish." His hand comes up to stroke my hair, and I hate that it feels good, hate that I lean into it. "I've watched forty-seven women die, Kess. Forty-seven omegas sent to me as tributes—some willing, most terrified, all of them dead before their first year ended. I held them while they bled out. I carved their names into stone. And every single time, I told myself there was nothing I could have done. That the curse was to blame, not me."
His voice breaks.
"But it was me. I'm the one who claimed them. I'm the one whose blood poisoned them. I'm the monster they were sacrificed to, and I hated myself for it every single day for three hundred years."
The knot pulses inside me. More release, more clenching.
"And then you came. And you were different—stronger, fiercer, more likely to survive than any of them. But you were also pregnant, and transforming, and bonded to me, and every text I could find said that combination would kill you. That your body couldn't handle the strain."
