Lykor flinched when Jassyn touched his claw. Instinct snarled to pull back, to hide the monstrous thing he hated more than words.
But Jassyn held his gaze. He didn’t recoil or look at him like something broken or cursed. His fingers wrapped around Lykor’s with the same quiet certainty he used to touch the rest of him. As if this, too, was just another piece of Lykor worth wanting.
Still bracing, Lykor barely breathed as Jassyn guided him lower. Through a haze of disbelief, he watched his own claw—his fuckingclaw—trace the taut lines of Jassyn’s body. Down over flushed skin, across the lean planes of his abdomen.
To the waist of his pants.
Jassyn didn’t push him further. He simply placed Lykor’s palm over the rigid heat beneath the fabric—giving him that choice without shame, without demand—then let go, letting Lykor feel him. Or choose not to.
Lykor’s breath shuddered loose. A tremor chased up his arm as the shock of that contact surged through him—the heat of Jassyn’s body, the unmistakable proof of him wanting back.
For a heartbeat he could only stare up at Jassyn’s eyes, molten like amber in the low light. Wild. Draconic.
And when Jassyn slid his hand beneath Lykor’s waistband, something feral and unguarded broke free in his chest. Anticipation and hunger tangled so tightly he couldn’t tell one from the other. Every thought screamed restraint. Every impulse begged for more.
Fighting the unsteadiness in his claw, Lykor mirrored the motion and followed Jassyn’s path. Careful, so scorching careful, not to scrape him with the edge of his talons.
Jassyn didn’t retreat. If anything, he pressed closer—still straddling Lykor, their hips locking with a rough drag of breath between them. They moved together, slipping beneath the last barriers of cloth.
Skin met skin. Fevered. Trembling.
Lykor’s claw curled around Jassyn’s length just as Jassyn’s hand closed around his. Their bodies jolted together, heat and desire colliding. A snarl tore from Lykor’s throat, fangs extending beyond his control.
Hips bucking, Jassyn drew in a sharp breath. Lykor met the movement with a groan, chasing more—more pressure, more heat, more of that devastating slide where restraint no longer kept pace with want.
Lykor watched Jassyn tilt his head back, curls tumbling across his brow. His mouth parted, eyes fluttering, vertical pupils gleaming. Lykor wanted to drown in that look. To lose himself in every hidden and untamed edge of this male. To burn beneath Jassyn’s hands until his own name turned to ash, until Jassyn’s was the only word left on his tongue.
As Lykor stroked, an unexpected catch of coolness snagged against his palm. Disoriented by the sensation, he blinked, eyes drifting downward.
Metal, smooth and unmistakable, pressed beneath his fingers. He brushed along Jassyn’s tip and found the curve of a ring. And another. Then a laddered line of twin studs running down his rigid length, all glinting faintly with captured illumination, threaded clean through Jassyn’s flesh.
Lykor stilled.
He knew what piercings meant among the wraith—rank marked in their ears. His warriors went further than that and impaled themselves with metal in reckless displays, turning their own bodies into battlegrounds to prove their dominance.
But nothing like this. He would’veheardof such a thing.
Before the pieces even clicked into place, Jassyn tensed. His hand faltered, going slack around Lykor as strength drained from his grip.
Lykor’s gaze snapped back up in time to catch Jassyn glance away before their eyes could meet.
“I–I didn’t think…” Jassyn cleared his throat, lashes casting shadows across the flushed curve of his cheek. “I can take them out. If you want.”
Lykor caught the retreat before the words even settled—in the curving of Jassyn’s shoulders, the breath he dragged inward and held like a shield.
The truth struck Lykor in a brutal blow. These piercings weren’t rebellion or some kind of thrill-seeking defiance. They’d beenforcedinto him.
The knowing staked Lykor’s chest like glacial ice. The air between them answered in frost, his magic lashing out. Rage slammed through his lungs, his breath bursting white, searing from his mouth in a snarl of snow.
Something inside him cracked nearly in half. He would rather have taken a blade to the gut than see the shame Jassyn tried to hide.
Shadows detonated around them—not at Jassyn, never at him—but at the unseen hands that had carved fear so deep it made Jassyn believe he had to apologize. As if he still owed obedience.
Lykor’s lungs burned as he drew a slow breath through his nose, waging war on the swell of fury that urged him to tear the world apart. Every muscle coiled to hunt whoever had dared make Jassyn shake like this, to rend them apart.
But he held the line. For Jassyn. Refusing to let rage devour a moment that needed something other than destruction.
Slowly, Lykor eased his claw away and dispelled his shadows. Then—deliberately where everything in him wanted violence—he gently lifted his hand to cup Jassyn’s cheek. To show he wasn’t flinching. That he saw him. That he wasn’t going anywhere.
