Just stands there, frozen, one hand coming up to touch his throat. His fingers come away slick and dark. He stares at the blood coating his palm like he's never seen his own before. Like he can't quite believe I drew it from him.
Then he looks at me.
And smiles.
It's the most terrifying thing I've ever seen. All teeth—too many teeth, canines elongated into fangs that gleam red with his own blood. All hunger. All violence. All desperate, savage joy.
The smile of something that's been starving for three hundred years and finally found prey that bites back.
"Yes," he breathes, and the word is barely human. "Yes."
His beast roars.
The sound explodes through the grove—pure dragon-voiced fury that resonates in my chest like thunder, like the earth itselfis splitting open beneath us. The force of it is physical. Leaves rip from branches. Wood cracks and falls. The altar shakes so hard beneath me that I feel my bones rattle against the stone.
Every animal instinct I possess screams run.
I bare my bloody teeth and snarl at him instead.
Then he's on me.
Moving faster than anything that size should move. One moment he's standing there with blood running down his chest in dark rivers. The next he's right there, his body a wall of heat and violence, blocking out the last of the dying light.
I slash at him with the knife. Wild. Desperate. Catch his chest—two shallow cuts across his pectorals that open like hungry mouths.
He doesn't even flinch.
His hand closes around my wrist like an iron shackle and slams it down against the stone. Something cracks—bone or ancient rock, I can't tell which. White-hot pain explodes up my arm from wrist to shoulder. My fingers spasm open, nerveless and useless.
The knife falls.
Clatters away across blood-warm stone. Spins once. Stops just out of reach.
Gone.
Fuck.
I lunge for it with my free hand, fingers scrabbling at smooth stone slick with our mingled blood. So close. Almost?—
He catches my other wrist. Pins it down beside the first. Holds both my hands trapped against the altar while his body settles over mine, caging me in heat and muscle and three hundred years of predator instinct.
I'm caught.
Pinned beneath a rut so violent it radiates off him in waves I can taste on my tongue—smoke and need and something that makes my hindbrain whimper.
I should be terrified.
Instead my heat spikes so hard I nearly shatter from that alone.
The fever is unbearable now, a wildfire raging beneath my skin. Every inch of me feels too tight, too hot, like I'm being cooked from the inside out. Sweat runs down my temples, between my breasts, pools in the hollow of my throat like an offering.
And I can feel everything.
Every scar under my palms where he's pinned my wrists—raised ridges and smooth valleys, a braille history of damage done and healed over centuries. Every muscle pressing into me like he's trying to fuse us together. His chest against mine, solid as the altar stone and burning twice as hot. His thighs bracketing mine like a cage. His stomach against my belly, defined ridges flexing with each harsh breath he takes.
The furnace-heat of him. He's impossibly warm, like lying too close to a bonfire, like pressing my palm to sun-heated metal. It should be unbearable.
Instead it feels perfect against my fever-skin. Like we were made to burn together.
