Don't want to give him that victory. Don't want to prove that my body wants this, wants him, wants to be claimed and filled and owned.
I tear my teeth free and immediately bite somewhere else. His chest. His other shoulder. His throat again. Anywhere I can reach. Painting him in wounds the way an artist paints a canvas, the way a predator marks territory.
He's losing rhythm now. Thrusts getting erratic, desperate. I can feel the swelling at the base of his cock getting more pronounced with every stroke, catching at my entrance, stretching me wider.
The knot is forming.
Panic slices through the pleasure like a blade through silk.
No.
Not that.
That's permanent. That's claiming. That's?—
"No—" I gasp, genuine terror cutting through the heat for the first time. "Don't?—"
But he's too far gone. Eyes completely black, empty of anything human. Beast fully in control. There's no consciousness left to hear me, no three hundred years of discipline to call upon.
Just rut. Just need. Just ancient biology demanding he knot his mate and fill her full.
"Wait," I try again, but the word comes out broken. Desperate. Useless. "You're too—it's too big—I can't?—"
His rhythm doesn't falter. If anything, he thrusts harder. Faster. Chasing the completion his beast has been starving for since before my grandmother was born.
The swelling catches on my entrance now with every stroke. Dragging. Stretching me wider each time he pulls back. Each time he slams home. A promise of what's coming that makes my body clench in anticipation even as my mind screams in denial.
Too wide.
Wider than should be possible.
It's going to tear me apart.
I'm certain of it. Absolutely certain. The knot is already larger than the rest of him and it's still growing, still swelling, a fist trying to force its way inside me. There's no way it's going to fit. No way my body can accommodate?—
He shifts the angle. Slams in deep and grinds, rotating his hips.
Hits that spot inside me with devastating precision.
And while I'm blind with pleasure-pain, while every muscle in my body locks tight, while I'm too overwhelmed to fight or think or breathe?—
The knot slams inside.
For one endless moment there's nothing but pain.
Blinding. White-hot. Absolute. The kind of pain that exists beyond screaming, beyond thought, beyond anything but pure animal sensation.
The stretch is impossible. I'm being split open from the inside, torn apart, destroyed and remade in the same breath. Every nerve ending I possess is shrieking at once. I can feel myself breaking around him, feel tissue giving way, feel blood flowing where blood shouldn't flow.
I can't breathe. Can't scream. Can't do anything but feel the inexorable pressure as the knot swells to full size inside me. Locking into place. Sealing us together with a finality that's as terrifying as death and as irrevocable as birth.
Then.
The pain transmutes.
Like iron in a forge—heat and pressure changing its fundamental nature, making it into something new. The agony becomes something else entirely. Something I don't have words for in any language.
The knot locks fully and my inner walls spasm around it. Clenching. Rippling. Pulsing in rhythmic waves that start at the place where we're joined and radiate outward through my entire body like ripples from a stone dropped in still water.
