I bring my arms down and wrap them around his neck. “I love you, Drazex. I think I have since you hummed your mother's song and thought I couldn't hear.”
His entire body shudders. His hands frame my face, tilting my gaze up to meet his, and what lives in his expression strips me bare.
“I didn't know I could.” His thumb traces my cheekbone. “I didn't know there was anything left in me capable of it.”
His hips shift, withdrawing before sliding home again. The ridges drag against every nerve ending, and I gasp at the sensation.
“And you proved him wrong.” Another thrust, deeper this time.
“So good.” The words rumble from his chest as he drives into me. “You take me so well. Perfect. Mine.”
“Yours.” I arch into his next thrust, claiming him back. “And you're mine.”
“Always.” He seals the promise with a kiss, his tongue stroking against mine in the same rhythm as his hips. “I love you, Maeve Vance. I will love you until the stars burn out and the universe forgets how to breathe.”
The intensity builds. His pace increases, and the bed protests beneath us. His fangs graze my throat. Not biting. The threat and the trust coexisting in the measured scrape of points that never break skin.
I drag my nails down his back, and he groans at the sensation. The scales give beneath pressure, leaving marks that will heal but prove I was here. Prove he's mine as much as I'm his.
“Harder.” The demand tears from my throat. “I need... Drazex, please...”
He obeys. His hips snap forward in a rhythm that drives the breath from my lungs, that fills the room with the sound of flesh meeting flesh. His hand slides between us, finding my clit, and his thumb circles with a pressure that makes my vision blur.
“Come for me.” His voice has dropped into the register that scrapes along my spine. “Come on my cock, Maeve. Let me feel you.”
The orgasm builds from the base of my spine and expands outward until I'm nothing but sensation, nothing but the place where his body moves inside mine. I shatter around him, walls clenching, his name torn from my throat.
He follows me over. The swelling at his base presses against my entrance, stretching, demanding, and I push back into it instead of tensing away. I crave his knot this time. Crave the pressure that locks us together, the tie that holds him inside me while his body decides we're finished.
“Yes.” The word escapes on a breath I barely have left. “Give me all of it. I want to feel you locked inside me.”
He drives forward one final time, and his knot catches. Locks. Swells inside me until I'm impossibly full, and another orgasm cascades through me.
“Maeve.” My name breaks on his lips as his release floods my body in pulses that go on and on. Each throb grinds his knot against oversensitized flesh and drags helpless sounds from my lips. “Mine. My Chosen. My heart.”
He buries his face in my throat. The purr-hum builds in his chest, vibrating through both our bodies, and the sensation echoes in places still quivering with aftershocks.
His knot holds him inside me, neither of us is capable of moving apart, and I don't want the link to break. Time blurs. I lose track of everything except his heartbeat against my chest and his breath warming my hair and the slow pulse of his cock inside me as his body works through the aftershocks.
“I never knew it could be this,” he whispers.
“What did you think it would be?”
“Possession. Hunger. The satisfaction of claiming what's mine.” He plants his elbows either side of me and rises to look down at me, and the movement sends sensation rippling through my over-sensitized body. “I didn't expect to find a reason to exist beyond what my father permitted.”
I card through his hair, watching the way the dim light catches on the silver threading through black. “He permitted you nothing.”
“Violence. Duty. The cold satisfaction of being useful.” He traces my forearm scar, his claw following the raised line with a gentleness that makes my breath catch. “Everything else, he carved out before I was old enough to understand what I was losing.”
“What did he carve out?”
“Hope.” He presses his lips to the scar, and the tenderness of the gesture undoes me more than the hours of pleasure that came before. “The belief that I could be more than what he made me.”
“You are more.” I cup his face, tilt his gaze to mine. “You've always been more. He tried to kill it, but he failed. The strays. The humming. The way you stood outside my door. All of it proof that he never destroyed you completely.”
He's quiet for a moment. His throat works, and when he speaks again, his voice has changed. Rougher. More vulnerable than I've ever heard it.
“My mother wasn't a traitor.”
