Another image slams through the mindspace before I can finish the thought. Her. On top of me. Riding. Controlling the depth and the angle while I grip her hips and watch from below.
That... is an option?
More. From behind. Her face pressed into the furs, her spine curved, her hips tilted up while I grip her mane and drive into her from a position that I did not know was possible.
I tilt my head, looking at the images in front of my mind’s eye.
Dust.I have never once considered any of this. I assumed mating was what we did last dark. My weight pinning her down. The way the instinct demanded.
I had no idea there werevariations.
The images keep coming. Faster. Messier. Some of them involve positions that seem to violate the basic limitations of her skeleton. One of them involves her ankles somewhere near her ownears, which cannot possibly be safe for a creature with her fragile bones.
But I am filing every single one away.
I do not know where she learned this. I do not care. I have fought dust stalkers, led war parties through pitch-black canyon runs, and survived poison without losing my mind. But this small, bruised, completely insatiable human female has just handed me a list of things I did not know existed, and I intend to master every single one of them.
Later.
Right now, she is staring up at me, her thighs trembling around my hips, both of my shafts straining against her slick entrance, and the only image left in the mindspace is the one that matters: me, buried to the hilt inside her, while she screams loud enough to bring the cavern ceiling down.
I line up against her, the blunt head of the primary shaft pressing deep into her slick, swollen sex.
She bears down, tilting her hips upward. The primary breaches her entrance first, pushing a thick inch inside her tight heat. She gasps, her slick pouring over the heavy ridges. Then, I press forward again. The shorter, curved tip of the secondarycatches the stretched edge of her entrance and slides inside right beneath the first.
Her mouth opens. No sound comes out.
I hold perfectly still, every muscle in my body locked rigid, my arms shaking from the effort of not driving forward. She is so tight around me that I can feel her heartbeat through the walls of her body, a rapid, fragile flutter pulsing against both shafts at once.
I could kill her like this. The thought sends a chill through my dra-kir. One careless thrust and I could tear something that does not heal. The dust built me for this, but that does not erase the reality that she weighs less than my bone-axe.
“More,” she projects. Her fingers dig into the muscles of my forearms. “Don’t stop.”
I push deeper. Slowly. Every ridge drags. She makes a sound like the air has been punched out of her lungs. I stop. She shakes her head, pulling me closer with her heels.
So I keep going. Inch by inch. Watching her face for any flicker of pain. There is none. Just her eyes rolling back, her lips parting, her mind flooding the space between us with white-hot sensation that I cannot separate from my own.
I feel what she feels. She feels what I feel. Every nerve she fires, I fire. Every ridge that drags against her swollen walls, I feel the pressure from the inside and the outside at once.
This is what the mated warriors could never explain to me.
I always wondered why Tharn went stupid after claiming Jah-kee. Why Rok would stare at Jus-teen across the fire pit like a warrior who has taken a spear to the skull. Why Sarven, the most disciplined fighter in the clan, would abandon watch if Mih-kay-lah so much as shifted in her sleep.
Now I understand.
This is not mating. This is complete destruction. She is inside my mind. I am inside her body. There is no version of me that exists without her anymore.
When both shafts are fully seated inside her, she stops breathing for six full dra-kirbeats. I count them against the walls of her body.
Then she exhales. “Dios mío.” It is not Een-gleesh. The mindspace gives me her meaning anyway: something between a prayer and a curse.
I begin to move. Slow. Deep.
I could fight a shadowmaw right now and win. I could rip the cavern walls apart with my bare claws. The amount of raw power flooding through my being is alarming.
Also, I am fairly certain the stone shelf is cracking beneath us. I will deal with that later.
She gets louder. I wonder briefly if all human females make this much noise during mating, or if mine is uniquely vocal. I decide it does not matter. I want to hear every sound she makes for the rest of my existence. I want to memorize them. I want to learn which angle produces the sharp, bitten-off gasp versus the long, shuddering moan that vibrates through the mindspace and makes my vision go dark.
