He rises over me, positions himself, pushes in slow.
The stretch is familiar now—perfect, devastating, exactly what I need. I wrap my legs around him and pull him deeper, feel him bottom out, watch his eyes flutter closed with the pleasure of it.
"Move," I tell him. "We don't have time for slow."
So he moves.
Not the desperate rutting of the early days, but something better. Confident. Certain. The rhythm of two people who know each other's bodies completely, who've earned every moment of pleasure through months of trust rebuilt and promises kept.
I come again with him inside me—clenching around his cock, crying out his name, feeling him follow me over with a groan that vibrates through both of us. The knot swells, locks us together, and I feel him spill inside me while aftershocks ripple through my core.
We lie tangled together, breathing hard, the knot pulsing between us.
"Forty-five minutes," he murmurs against my neck. "Not bad."
"We're getting more efficient."
"Practice makes perfect."
I laugh—bright and real, the sound startling in its ease. Six months ago I didn't know if I'd ever laugh like this again. Didn't know if we'd survive the ritual, the battle, the aftermath. Didn't know if trust could be rebuilt from the ashes of betrayal.
Now I know.
It can. It was. It is, every day, in every choice we make together.
"I love you," I tell him, because I can. Because the words come easy now in a way they didn't before.
"I love you too." He presses a kiss to my temple, to my jaw, to the claiming bite that scarred over months ago. "More than I knew I could love anything. More than three hundred years of loneliness taught me was possible."
"Sap."
"Your sap."
"Unfortunately."
He laughs, and I feel it everywhere—through the bond, through the knot still locking us together, through the place in my chest where the curse has settled into something almost peaceful.
From down the hall, a small voice starts fussing.
"Your turn," he says.
"We're literally knotted together."
"Then I guess we wait."
I settle against him, content to do exactly that. The fussing quiets—Cade soothing himself back to sleep the way he sometimes does. Sera stays silent, probably plotting world domination in her dreams.
Our children. Our future. Our family, built from the wreckage of curses and betrayals and three centuries of pain.
It's not perfect. It might never be perfect.
But it's ours.
And that's more than enough.
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