He makes a sound against my throat—half snarl, half groan, pleasure and pain woven together into something that makes my inner walls clench around nothing. Then he's rolling us, usinghis weight and leverage to pin me beneath him, my wrists caught above my head in one of his massive hands while the other tears at my training leathers.
"No—" I buck up, trying to throw him off, but he's too heavy, too strong, and some treacherous part of me doesn't really want to escape. "We're fighting, not?—"
"We're doing both." His teeth find my throat—not biting, not yet, just resting there. The promise of it. The threat. I can feel his breath hot against my pulse point, feel the points of his fangs dimpling my skin without breaking it. "This is what you want, isn't it? Violence and fucking tangled together until you can't tell where one ends and the other begins."
Yes.
Gods, yes.
This is what my body was built for. What my bloodline shaped me into across hundreds of generations. Not a gentle omega who soothes her alpha's rage with soft touches and softer words—a warrior who matches him violence for violence, who earns her place in his bed through combat, who takes what she needs instead of waiting for it to be given.
I stop fighting his grip on my wrists. Let my body go soft and pliant beneath him. Let him think he's won.
The moment his hold relaxes, I bring my knee up hard into his ribs.
He curses—a guttural sound in a language I don't know—and his grip loosens. I twist free and lunge for the nearest weapon, not a practice sword this time but a real blade hanging on the wall rack. My fingers close around the leather-wrapped hilt and I pull it free in one smooth motion, steel singing against the bracket.
He freezes.
We both do.
The practice swords were one thing—bruises and maybe cracked ribs, nothing that wouldn't heal in a few days. This is different. This blade is three feet of folded steel, sharp enough to shave with, sharp enough to open a throat to the spine with one good stroke.
Sharp enough to kill even a dragon shifter, if I hit him right.
"Kess." My name in his mouth like a warning, like a prayer. "Put it down."
I look at the sword in my hand, at the way lamplight runs liquid down the blade. At him kneeling three feet away, breathing hard, eyes black with rut and fixed on me with an intensity that makes my skin prickle. Blood runs down his back from the scratches I left, dripping onto the stone floor.
At the space between us that could be closed with one lunge.
At the throat I could open if I wanted to.
This is the moment. The one I've been telling myself I'm waiting for, all these weeks of training and research and pretending I'm still planning to kill him. He's on his knees. His guard is down. His throat is right there.
"No," I say.
Then I toss the sword aside and launch myself at him.
We collide hard enough to knock the breath from both of us. His arms come around me immediately—crushing, possessive, desperate—and my legs wrap around his waist like they belong there. My teeth find his shoulder and I bite down without thinking, hard enough to break skin, hard enough to feel the hot copper flood of his blood across my tongue.
He roars.
The sound is pure dragon—a resonance that vibrates through my bones, that makes something deep in my hindbrain want to bare my throat and submit. Pure beast, pure rut, pure three-hundred-years-of-frustrated-need finally finding an omega who can take it.
His hands find my hips, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise. He's keeping his claws retracted—I can feel the effort it costs him in the fine tremor of his muscles, the way his grip keeps tightening and then consciously loosening. Just his palms against me, broad and burning-hot through my ruined leathers.
He tears what's left of the leather away.
The fabric gives like wet paper, buttons scattering across stone, seams ripping with a sound like small bones breaking. My pants hang in shreds for a moment before he strips those too, and then his hands are on my bare skin and I'm burning alive.
Slick gushes between my thighs—my body's response to an alpha in rut, desperate and undignified and completely beyond my control. I can smell it mixing with his musk, omega-sweet and alpha-dark, the scent of what we're about to do filling the armory like smoke.
"Here," I gasp against his shoulder, his blood still hot on my lips. "Right here, right now?—"
"In the armory—" He sounds wrecked, voice scraped raw. "Anyone could?—"
"You broke the door down. Everyone in the castle heard." I bite him again, right over the wound I already made, and feel him shudder. "No one's coming anywhere near this room. Fuck me here or don't fuck me at all."
