Her body arches as the bond locks into place. My body answers, taking, giving, merging until there’s no separation left.
No boundary.
No self.
I’m locked against her, cock still working and thrusting inside.
“How are you doing that?” she gasps.
“Extra parts.”
Her fingernails dig deep, wet trails sprouting where she breaks my skin. She trembles and shakes around me, fracturing again and again until the heat of my tattoos is buried faintly beneath her skin. A soft echo.
I smell heated flesh, dip my head to lick her marks, taking some of the sting from their burn.
“Yes,” she cries, arching into me. Sucking me into her until I come.
Deep.
Filling her. Claiming her. Branding her.
Mine. Forever.
The light explodes around us—veins of stone igniting, spiraling outward like something alive.
Our resonance.
The mountains answer.
Chapter
Twenty-Three
ELIZA
Iawaken shivering, burrowing deeper into the blankets Kael piled over us.
But his body heat’s missing, and the rock beneath me is too hard. I sit up, yawning and stretching, feeling the delicious ache that reminds me of what we did earlier.
Feeling him, too. Even before I see him standing at the mouth of the cave, bare-chested and glowing. Not as brilliant and uncontained. But softer, more stable.
The pulse beneath the glyphs is in my blood, behind my sternum as our eyes meet across the darkness.
“Did I wake you?” he asks gruffly, with a lopsided grin.
He stares at me for one breathless moment—reverence floods me, puts a dangerous sting behind my eyes.
Not mine.
His.
I pull the blankets more tightly around me, teeth chattering.
He’s by my side in a moment, pulling me hard against his hot core. I wrap my arms around him, luxuriating in the feel of him until my temperature stabilizes to his warmer one.
“How can you walk around shirtless?” I ask. “It’s freezing in here.”
“Not for me,” he grunts, circling my waist with his arm and pressing his palm flat over my stomach. “Mine.”
