He alters the angle slightly, and the head of his cock drags against the spot inside me that makes my vision blur. I cry out and dig my nails into his back, leaving furrows in his skin, marking him even as he prepares to mark me.
The partial bond thrums between us, amplifying every sensation. His pleasure layers over my own, his desperation feeding mine, our need spiraling higher with each thrust. The connection intoxicates, consumes, and it is about to become permanent.
I feel it when his knot begins to swell.
The base of his cock expands, catching on my entrance with each stroke. The stretch increases with every thrust, pressure building toward a point that hovers between agony and ecstasy. My body resists and then yields, accepting more of him with each movement, opening for him in ways I did not know were possible.
"Take it." His teeth are clenched, the cords of his neck standing out with effort. "Take all of me."
"Give it to me." My heels dig into his lower back, urging him deeper. "I want it. I want everything."
He drives forward one final time, and the knot catches.
The fullness consumes me. I am stretched open around the widest part of him, impaled, possessed, utterly claimed. The sensation shatters me, and I cannot tell if I am screaming from pleasure or something beyond it, only that the sound tearing from my throat is not entirely human.
He grinds against me, working the pressure inside me, and the first orgasm hits without warning. My inner walls clench around his knot, and the added pressure sends him over theedge as well. I feel him pulse inside me, his release flooding my womb in hot spurts, and the sensation triggers another wave of pleasure that has me crying his name into the night.
The aftershocks ripple through both of us, each contraction of my body drawing another pulse from his, an endless feedback loop that seems to have no end. The knot locks us together, and I know we will stay this way for hours, connected in the most primal way possible.
His mouth finds the junction of my neck and shoulder, the spot he has been preparing since our first kiss. His tongue traces the skin there, and I feel his fangs descend, sharp points pressing against my flesh. The anticipation coils tight in my belly, every nerve straining toward the moment of completion.
"Mine," he growls against my throat.
"Yours."
His fangs sink deep, breaking skin and muscle, and what should be agony becomes its opposite. Pleasure radiates outward from the wound, flooding my veins like liquid fire, and the bond snaps into place with an almost audible force.
I feel him. Not just his body locked inside mine, not just his pleasure echoing through the partial bond, but his emotions, his soul, the staggering depth of what he feels for me. Love so vast it has no edges. Obsession so complete it borders on madness. Relief so profound it brings tears to my eyes. I feel the beast that lives beneath his skin, ancient and powerful and utterly devoted. I feel the weight of leadership he carries, the burden of protecting his pack, the fear that he might fail them.
I had no idea. I had no idea it ran this deep.
And beneath his emotions pouring into me, I feel myself begin to change.
The wolf stirs in my blood, foreign and familiar at once. She stretches beneath my skin, yawning like a creature roused from long sleep. My senses sharpen until I can hear the heartbeatsof the guards on the distant walls, smell the pine forests that surround the keep, taste the metallic tang of my own blood on the air.
My spine arches as the change ripples through me, not painful exactly, but intense in ways I cannot describe. Stellan holds me through it, his arms wrapped around me, his knot still pulsing inside me, anchoring me to my body while my very cells rewrite themselves.
"I have you." His voice is rough against my throat, his lips pressed to the wound he has made. "I have you, my love. Let it happen. Let yourself become."
I surrender to it.
The moon crawls across the sky, and I mark its passage only by the pulses of pleasure that still ripple through us both. The runes on the standing stones pulse with light, responding to the ancient magic of conversion, and the wolf inside me grows stronger with each passing moment. Stellan stays locked inside me, his knot maintaining our connection, his presence in my mind a constant anchor as the transformation reshapes me from within.
When it finally subsides, several hours have passed. His knot softens at last, and he slips free of my body. We are both trembling, both changed, both bound in ways that can never be undone.
"My mate." He whispers the words against my throat, reverent and awed.
"My Alpha." I turn my head to capture his lips in a kiss that tastes of blood and love and forever.
He pulls back to search my face, and whatever he sees there makes his expression soften. "How do you feel?"
My body feels foreign and familiar at once. The heightened senses. The strength humming beneath my skin. The wolf curls in my chest like she has always belonged there.
"Different," I say. "Stronger. More alive than I have ever felt."
"And the wolf?"
I reach for the presence inside me and feel her respond, eager and restless. "She is there. Waiting." A pause as I probe deeper, feeling her pace beneath my skin, testing the boundaries of this new body. "She is hungry for something. I do not know what yet."
