The air was full of sweat and the ghost of spilled whiskey, the distant thump of the gala band vibrating through the glass. I could have fucked her forever like that, but the monster had its own ideas.
As she started to tense, her body shuddering around my cock, I felt the wolf claw up inside me, demanding to be let out. I gripped her shoulder and, without even thinking, bit down at the join of neck and shoulder—hard, harder than any human lover ever would, but not enough to break the skin. She gasped, froze, then came so hard I thought she’d snap my dick clean off.
The taste of her, the pulse under my teeth, sent me over. I came inside her, deep, my whole body shaking, my jaw still latched at her neck. For a moment, I felt something electric—a jolt of heat, a bright white haze in my brain, like I’d just mainlined pure sunlight. It flooded from my mouth to the rest of me, then into her, a current that linked us from crown to toe.
We stayed like that, pressed together, her arms around my head, my cock still twitching inside her, until the sweat cooled and the windows started to clear. I licked the mark I’d made, then kissed it. She flinched, but only a little.
“What the fuck was that,” she said, her voice shredded.
I couldn’t answer. The animal in me was sated, but the man was scared shitless. I’d marked her a third time, and not in any way that would ever heal right.
She slid off the desk, legs wobbly, and straightened her dress as best she could. The neckline was fucked, but she didn’t bother to cover herself. She found her panties, pulled them on, and shot me a look—equal parts satisfaction and warning.
My pants were still around my knees. I tucked myself in, zipped up, and wiped my mouth. There was blood—just a smear, nothing bad. She saw it, smiled, and wiped it away with her thumb.
We caught our breath together, leaning side by side against the desk. I reached for her hand, but she moved it, grabbing the neck of the closest bourbon bottle and pouring two shots.
We downed them in silence.
She turned, adjusted her hair in the reflection of the window, and said, “We can’t let them see us like this.”
I nodded. “Give it a minute.”
She ducked into a side closet, found a shawl, and wrapped it over her torn dress. She looked almost put-together, except for the bite mark at her neck, already darkening to a bruise.
She looked at me in the glass, her reflection sharper than the real thing. “You okay?”
I wasn’t, but I said, “Yeah.”
She opened the office door a crack, checked for witnesses, then slipped out. I waited sixty seconds, counted every heartbeat, then followed. Us fucking had just saved Marcus’ life, for now.
The party had thinned, the real deals happening now in back rooms and VIP suites. I kept my head down, but eyes followed me anyway—the club tattoos, the bruises on my face, the scent of sex and violence that never quite left after a kill.
I found Carrie by the bar, holding court with a new crop of executives, her voice smooth and unshakable. Nobody looked twice at her dress. Nobody dared.
She caught my eye, and there was a message in it: Don’t you fucking dare leave me alone.
I got a drink, parked myself near the back wall, and kept her in sight. The wolf inside was quiet, for now. But I knew, with a certainty that was almost holy, that this was just the beginning. I’d marked her. We were bound. And nothing—not Marcus, not the industry, not even death—was going to break us apart.
Hours later, after the last bottle was emptied and the last deal inked, we rode home in silence. She pressed her hand to her neck, fingers worrying at the mark. I watched the road, the worldalready looking different with her scent inside me, under my skin.
She would feel it soon. The heat. The hunger. The bond.
And when she did, I’d be ready.
Carrie didn’t come straight to bed after the gala. Instead, she locked herself in the master bath for nearly an hour, and the only sound from behind the door was the soft click of glass on porcelain, repeated over and over. I left her alone—self-preservation, and respect, and also the hope that maybe the space would buy me a second before she started asking questions I couldn’t answer without lying.
Eventually, I heard the water shut off. The door opened, and she padded out in a towel and nothing else. Her skin glistened, but not from the steam. The color was back in her cheeks, the fire in her eye. She carried herself the way she did in the boardroom: at the edge of violence, waiting for an excuse to draw blood.
She didn’t say my name. Didn’t look at me, either. She went straight to the dresser, pulled on a silk nightgown, then turned to face me with her hands on her hips. “Take off your shirt,” she said.
I slipped off the Henley, exposing the swirl of old ink and new bruises, the wolf’s jaw tattoo at my shoulder, the crescent ofbite marks low on my neck. She stared at my chest like she was reading a book in a language she used to know.
She reached out, tracing the bite with her index finger. “It changed,” she said. Her voice was calm, almost clinical.
I looked. The bruise from the gala—where I’d clamped down on her—had deepened, gone almost black, but the shape was different. Instead of the red blob I’d expected, it was a perfect ring of teeth, each point distinct, the pattern inside swirling in a way that looked intentional. Like a tribal tattoo, except alive: the outline was crisp, but the color seemed to shift under the skin.
She poked it. Hard. “It hurts,” she said. “And I can feel it spreading.”
