“I know it’s your bloody hand,” I sobbed, struggling uselessly beneath him.
“Lysa, I—“ He looked from the letter to me, and the terror in his gaze seemed real. “I don’t remember.”
“You don’t remember calling me a bloody chore?” I said.
“My memory,” he said, shaking his head. “There are holes. Great, gaping blanks. I see the ink. I see the loop of the ‘L’. It looks like mine.” He closed his eyes, his forehead dropping to rest against my shoulder. “Gods, I think I wrote it. I must have.”
I went limp beneath him. The fight drained out of my limbs, leaving only a hollow ache in my chest.
“Get off!”
He didn’t move.
Instead, a shudder wrecked through him, violent enough to rattle his teeth. The shadow beast probably sensed the despairradiating off me and surged. The silver veins on his torso flared blindingly bright, and the heat radiating from him spiked from ‘fever’ to ‘furnace.’
“I said get off!”
“I can’t!” he roared, his head snapping up.
The man was gone. The silver in his eyes swallowed the last grey of his iris. He obviously wasn’t looking at me like I was a chore.
“It wants...” He gasped, his hips grinding down on mine with a desperation that had nothing to do with civilized conversation. “It wants to keep you.”
“Well, tell it I’m resigning!”
“It doesn’t care!” He buried his claws in my hair.
“It wants,” he groaned, the words dragged up from a chest expanding against mine, “to devour you.”
And then the conversation ended.
The shift was instantaneous, a snap of tension that broke the last tether of his control. Fenrik buried his face in the crook of my neck, inhaling so deeply the sound was a rugged tear in the silence, and then his mouth was there. Hot, wet, lethal.
I cried out, a sound that was half-fear, half-prayer, as his teeth grazed the frantic pulse hammering beneath my skin. It wasn’t a bite, not quite. It was a threat. The pressure of his canines against the sensitive cord of my throat sent a jolt of electricity straight to my core, shattering my ability to think.
“Fenrik,” I gasped, my head falling back against the stone floor. I bared my throat to him. Like a fool.
“Mine,” he growled against my skin, the vibration buzzing through my veins. “You are... mine.”
His hand clamped onto my hip, his fingers digging into the soft flesh through my trousers, anchoring me to the floor. The grip was absolute, a predator pinning its prey, but I didn’t want to run. I arched into the pain of it, my body betraying every logical thought I’d possessed a minute ago. His other hand moved. He dragged his palm up my side, a rough friction that burned through the linen of my tunic. I held my breath, waiting for the cut of claws, but he had retracted them. His hand slipped beneath the hem of my shirt, and his palm was fever-hot, rough with work and scales, sliding over my ribs to cup the swell of my breast. My nipples hardened, aching for a touch I had only ever read about in the books I hid under my mattress.
“Please,” I whimpered, though I didn’t know what I was begging for. For him to stop. For him to never stop.
He shifted his weight, his knee driving between my thighs, forcing them apart. And then I felt the heavy ridge of his erection pressing hard against my lower stomach.
Every drop of moisture in my mouth evaporated. The sheer size of him, the hardness pressing through the layers of our clothes, was a reality that hit me harder than the fall. He ground down, a roll of his hips that sought friction, sought relief, and a jagged moan tore from my lips.
My magic surged in response, but it didn’t rise to silence him. It didn’t rush to put the beast to sleep.
My Quieting gift flared gold in my veins, answering his silver chaos with a roar of its own. It wanted this. It wanted the heat, the pressure, the beautiful, terrible weight of him crushing the air from my lungs. My magic wrapped around his, not dampening the fire, but pouring oil onto it. The gold light in the room intensified, pulsing in time with the frantic rhythm of our hearts, urging him on, begging him to finish what the curse had started.
“You feel it,” he rasped, lifting his head. His mouth was swollen, his silver eyes blown wide with hunger. “Tell me you feel it.”
“I feel everything,” I whispered, my hips bucking up to meet his next thrust against the seam of my trousers. “I feel you.”
His hands were everywhere, branding me through the practical linen of my tunic, claiming skin I hadn’t even known was bare. I was drowning in him, in the scent of pine smoke and lightning, in the crushing weight that felt less like oppression and more like a perverse kind of shelter. My hips snapped up again, instinct overriding dignity, seeking friction against the stone-hard ridge of him pressing between my thighs.
I wanted him to break me. I wanted him to shatter the numbness I’d lived in for years.
