And there he was: the most enormous, terrifying, death-dealing monster that nature and warlock magic and pure ragecould produce on this Earth, coming to rescue me. And suddenly I could breathe again, here in the present moment.
“You were the scariest fucking thing I’d ever seen.” Calder traced the rim of my hole with his tongue encouragingly, and now I couldn’t breathe, but in a good way. Everything between my legs lit up with the magic of his touch. “And you belonged to me. All mine. And I fucking loved you, so much. I didn’t realize it until then.”
Silence fell for a moment. Tension sang through him, the muscles of his arms like iron under my legs. “Jared,” he murmured, and his voice cracked, and maybe I’d have said…I didn’t know what.
But he shoved my legs even further apart and pressed his mouth to my hole, thrusting his tongue into me and sucking on my skin and turning me inside out, and I moaned and writhed and begged while he held me down and gave me everything, forcing me to accept it, and accept that I deserved it.
It went on for what felt like hours, what could’ve been an eternity, because he had too tight a grip on my cock and balls for me to come. I throbbed and ached, thrashing, pushing my ass down into his face. Finally he lifted his head. Silence fell except for my hitching half-sobs.
I could barely open my eyes to watch him kneel up between my legs, reaching off to the side and producing a bottle of lube. Oh gods, he intended to kill me.
“Oh, no, please, fuck,” I choked. “Fuck me, just fuck me. I don’t need that!”
“You would if you’d never taken a cock before,” he said, entirely too calmly. But no—not so calm. He had the hugest, most frustrated-looking erection in the world standing up almost straight in a gravity-defying feat of alpha lust. Stubborn fucking bastard. “Four fingers. Then I’ll fuck you.”
“F—four, fuck, f—oh, gods, you fucking asshole!” He corkscrewed two fingers into me, laughing, and I let go of the blankets to clutch at his arms, caught between annoyance and helpless arousal and joy that I got to hear that laugh, that he laughed at all when he’d spent seven years thinking he never would again. “Calder, don’t torture me!”
“I started with two fingers, not one. I’m not trying to torture you.”
But then he bent down, his mouth now free to roam over my body, and licked my cock, sucked my nipples, pressed open-mouthed kisses to my sweat-damp skin, ignoring my hands in his hair trying to push him where I wanted him.
“Fuck me, fuck me, please, or I’ll never blow you again,” I lied through my clenched teeth, groaning and tugging on his hair as he reamed me open with three fingers now, the pressure unbearable and not nearly enough. “Come on, four might as well be your whole hand! Three is plenty, fuck!”
“Don’t tempt me,” he growled against my stomach, and then bit me. I startled and yelped and that pushed his fingers against all kinds of spots inside me, and gods, what if he had that whole fist in me…and then I arched again as I came all over myself and his chest, clamping down on his fingers, stars flying behind my closed eyelids.
I subsided, shaking and sweat-slick, wrung out and wrecked.
“You know I always keep my word,” he said, and pulled out enough to add that fourth finger. The wet, squelching sound my hole made as he forced most of his hand into me had me shuddering all over again with shame and fresh longing for his knot.
By the time he pulled his hand out and thankfully, finally lined up between my trembling legs, I’d been reduced to nothing but a limp, whining thing for him to use however he wanted.
I cracked my eyelids open to see him looming over me, limned by firelight and big enough to break me, and with that eerie silver gaze fixed hungrily on my face. My pink, sweaty face, with my overlong hair stuck to me in all directions…but his expression would’ve worked for a lover of fine art seeing the Mona Lisa for the first time.
“You want to know when I fell in love with you?” he asked.
“Sometime before you were willing to die for me, I guess?” I tried to smile, but the intensity of his gaze had me almost afraid to. “Yeah, I want to know.”
His lips quirked at one corner, but I could feel his trepidation through the bond. Whatever it was he meant to say, he didn’t know how I’d react.
“When you looked into my eyes,” he said.
What? “When I—but I do that a hundred times a day.”
He sucked in a deep breath, his fingers tightening on my thigh. “The first time, Jared,” he said, very low. “The first time you looked into my eyes.”
“That was—that was—” My own eyes were widening with disbelief. The first time? The first time had been the morning after our captors threw me into his cell for him to kill me. I’d spent the night waiting for him to do it, huddled against the wall, filthy and dry-mouthed and sweating and desperately needing to piss, stinking of fear. “No one could’ve loved me like that.”
Calder laughed a little, shaking his head. “I’d never wanted anyone the way I wanted you.” He leaned down, the head of his cock pushing into my slick hole. So thick, gods. Even after four fingers, it felt like almost too much. “I knew I’d end up killing you.” An inch slid into me, then another, and I wriggled around him, adjusting to it the best I could. “I didn’t think the gods could be any crueler. But you saved me, Jared. The last shred of humanity I had left.”
He sank into me all the way to the hilt, lowering his weight down, wrapping one massive arm under my body to press me to his. My arms slid around his back, nails digging in.
“I love you,” I murmured into his shoulder. It was that or cry. My chest hitched; it might not be one or the other, fuck.
He didn’t reply—not with words, anyway. Apparently he’d said everything he needed to. Calder clamped me tightly to him and thrust, inhumanly hard, pounding his gods knew how many fucking inches so deeply into my body that there’d be no room for anything else.
No room for doubt, or pain, or bad memories, or fear. Only my mate. And the way he’d loved me when I’d have sworn he didn’t have anything in him but hatred. When I’d hated myself even more.
When his knot swelled, filling me so far beyond my capacity I could barely spread my legs enough, I came a third time, and it almost didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but Calder inside my body, our bond wrapped around my soul, made blindingly bright by our magic and our love.
