The question hangs between us, a blade balanced on its edge. The answer should be yes, should be the practical solution. My father will demand a yes. The lessons carved into my bones by decades of discipline demand a yes.
My entire life is duty. Obligation. Systematically removing anything that might soften the weapon my father required me to become. I learned to mistake numbness for discipline, isolation for independence, having no one for being strong. I believed him when he said love was weakness. Believed it so thoroughly that I built my life on that single lie, brick by brick, until the walls rose so high I forgot there was anything beyond them.
Now I see those walls for what they are. Not a fortress. A cage.
The hardness my father taught me isn't strength. It's fear dressed in armor, terror of loss so profound that he felt nothing rather than risk feeling too much. He made himself invulnerable by making himself empty, and he tried to carve the same hollowness into me.
Maeve offers a different path. One that demands more courage than any battle I've ever fought. She makes me want to be soft in the places I've kept armored. She strengthens me by making me whole.
My father has it wrong. He's always had it wrong.
“No.”
Her expression shifts, softening into relief before sharpening into concern. “Drazex. If your father threatens me, if he decides I'm a liability...”
“Then he goes through me.” The words tear from a place deeper than my chest, a place I didn't know still existed. “Anyonewho tries to take you away goes through me. I have spent thirty years following duty. Obeying. Building myself into the weapon my father demanded. No more.” I grip her face between my palms, tilting her gaze up to meet mine, and the wetness on her cheeks strips away the last of my resistance. “I protect what is mine. And you are mine. My female. My reason. My Chosen.”
I take her mouth the way I should have taken it from the beginning. Not as a test, not as proof of anything, but as surrender. My tongue strokes against hers in a rhythm that promises what my body intends to deliver, and she opens for me with a sound that vibrates through my bones. She fists her hands in my shirt, dragging me closer, and the taste of her floods my senses until the compound disappears, until Vezra and my father and every threat circling us fades into nothing but this. Her. The salt of her tears and the sweetness beneath. The warmth of her breath mingling with mine.
I walk her backward without breaking the kiss, sliding my hands from her face to her waist to the curve of her hips, learning her through layers of fabric I need gone. The backs of her knees find the mattress, and she sinks onto it, pulling me down with her. She works the fastening of my shirt with urgent fingers, her desperation matching the hunger clawing through my blood.
The fabric parts, and she spreads her palms across my chest. She traces the darker striping that marks my ribs, the pattern that brands me apex predator, and the reverence in her touch cracks me open. No one has ever touched me like this. Like I am worth exploring. Like the body I've used as a weapon my entire life could be more than a tool for violence.
“You're beautiful.” I’m a predator. A threat. The angel of death, but never beautiful. She presses the word into my sternum, her lips warm against my skin.
“And you're my reason,” I say.
I need her bare. Need to see every inch of the skin I claimed hours ago, need to trace the marks I left and add new ones, need to write my ownership into her flesh so deeply that no one who looks at her will question who she belongs to.
I keep my claws sheathed as I strip the clothing from her body, peeling away layers until she lies beneath me wearing nothing but the bruises from our first joining. Purple and rose bloom across her hips where I gripped her, along her throat where my mouth marked her, at the inside of her thighs where I pressed too hard in the grip of pleasure I couldn't control.
“These marks.” I lower my mouth to the bruise at her hip, pressing my lips against the evidence of my possession, and she shivers beneath me. “Every Draveki will scent me on your skin and understand what you are to me.”
“Good.” She threads her fingers through my hair, gripping hard enough to sting. “Let them see. Let them all see.”
The permission destroys whatever restraint I had left. I settle between her thighs, the hard length of my cock pressing against her entrance, and she's already slick with wanting. Her arousal drenches the air between us, sweet and thick, and my fangs ache with the need to sink into her throat and drink her pleasure straight from the source.
“After tonight, there is no going back.” I hold myself at her entrance, every muscle trembling with the effort of not driving forward. “You will carry my scent in your blood. My claiming in your cells. Every male who touches you will know you’re mine. That you belong to someone who will kill to keep you.”
She wraps her legs around my hips and pulls me inside her.
I sink into her body in one long stroke, and the sound she makes empties my mind of everything except her. Tight heat grips my cock, slick and welcoming, and the remnants of my earlier release ease my passage until I bottom out with my hips flush against hers. The ridges along my shaft drag against herinner walls, and she bows off the mattress, carving lines down my back that send sensation ricocheting through me.
“More.” She gasps the word against my throat. “Please. I need more.”
I give her more.
This joining holds none of the desperate frenzy that drove us before. I watch her face as I move inside her, memorizing the way her brow furrows when I hit the spot that makes her gasp, the way she parts her lips around my name when I grind deep and hold, the way her eyes lose focus when pleasure crests and retreats and crests again.
She is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. And she is mine.
“Look at me.” The command rumbles from my chest, and her gaze locks with mine, dark eyes I want to lose myself in. “I want to watch you when you come apart. Want to see my name in your eyes when you fall.”
Her inner walls flutter, the first tremors of her orgasm building where we're joined. I shift my angle, pressing harder against the bundle of nerves that makes her keen, and the sound she releases is half sob, half prayer, my name fractured into syllables that belong only to this moment.
“That's it.” I increase my pace, driving into her in a rhythm that builds us both toward an edge I refuse to reach without her. “Give me everything. Let me have what I do to you.”
Her body clamps around me in waves that drag a roar from my chest, her release flooding over my cock in a rush of heat that destroys the last of my control. My knot swells, pressing against her entrance, demanding entry, and I drive forward one final time as it locks us together in a tie that will not release until my body decides we are finished.
