The altar is hard beneath my back, unforgiving stone that's absorbed three hundred years of blood and death and dark magic. It radiates heat into my spine while he radiates heat from above, and I'm caught between two fires, burning, being forged into something new with every brutal thrust.
The chains rattle.
I'd forgotten about them—iron manacles still locked around my wrists even though his hands have left them. They bite into flesh with every impact, another layer of pain that blends with the pain of his claws in my hips, his cock stretching me, my own teeth cutting my lip as I bite down on him.
Layer upon layer of hurt transmuted into pleasure I don't want to feel.
But I do feel it.
Can't help feeling it.
My body responds in ways I can't control, like a puppet whose strings are being pulled by my heat. Inner walls rippling around him. Hips tilting up to take him deeper. Back arching off the stone to press more of my skin against more of his.
Betrayed by biology.
Betrayed by heat.
Betrayed by the traitorous part of me that's purring at the feeling of alpha cock inside me, filling the emptiness, even while the rest of me screams to fight.
He sets a rhythm. Brutal and deep. Pulling almost completely out before slamming back in with enough force to shake the ancient altar, to make the chains sing, to drive the breath from my lungs. The wet sounds of our joining fill the grove—obscene, primitive, older than language. Flesh against flesh. Blood and slick mixing into something new. His harsh breathing. My desperate, broken cries.
"You feel incredible," he groans against my hair, his lips moving against my temple. "Three hundred years and nothing—no one—has ever felt like this. Like you were made for me."
I don't want to hear that. Don't want his words making this mean something more than heat and hate and survival.
I rake my nails down his back again. Harder this time. Deep enough that I feel them catch against the ridges of his spine.
Making him hurt.
Making him bleed.
Making him mine even as he makes me his.
His rhythm falters for half a second—just long enough for me to feel how close he is to losing what's left of his control completely.
Good.
I release his throat. Blood runs freely from the wound, streaming down his chest in dark rivers with every beat of his heart.
Before he can catch his breath, I sink my teeth into his shoulder again. Different spot. Fresh meat. I bite until I feel my canines grind against the ball of his shoulder joint, until I taste the deeper blood that lives near bone.
His whole body convulses like he's been shot.
The thrust that follows is savage—deeper than before, harder, punishing. He hits something inside me that makes stars explode behind my eyes, that makes my vision white out at the edges.
There.
Right there.
"There?" His voice is guttural, barely recognizable as human. "Right there, little wolf?"
He does it again. And again. Angling his hips to hit that spot with every thrust, with ruthless precision despite the feral black of his eyes.
My vision goes white. When it comes back, the pleasure building at the base of my spine is unbearable, a coiling pressure that threatens to shatter me from the inside out.
I'm going to come.
I don't want to come.
