I move.
Hard. Deep. The kind of driving rhythm the rut demands and her heat answers, her hips rising to meet every thrust. She's loud—louder than the controlled, precise woman who sat across my negotiation table three hours ago—and every cry spurs me harder. The bed hits the wall. Her nails score lines down my back that burn like brands. She demands more. Demands harder. Hooks her ankle behind my back to change the angle and the sound I make is animal—raw and completely beyond my control.
But I hold her back from the edge.
Every time she gets close—and I know, because the bond is already singing between us, because her body broadcasts its building crescendo through every point where our skin connects—I shift. The angle. The pressure. The pace. Pulling her back from the cliff with a precision that has nothing to do with crueltyand everything to do with the one thing I need more than release.
She curses me. Her nails dig crescents into my shoulders. She tries to grind against me to finish herself and I pin her hips to the mattress with one hand, my mouth dropping to her ear.
“Say it.”
Her head shakes. Jaw locked. Stubborn. Even now, even with her body trembling and her thighs clamped around my waist and her heat clenching around me in a way that nearly shatters my own control.
“Say it, Henderson.”
“Go to—” Her breath hitches when I roll my hips. Slow. Deep. Hitting the place that makes her spine arch. I hold her there—right at the edge, right where the pleasure is so acute it borders on agony—and wait.
Her hands stop pushing. Start pulling. Her head tips back against the pillows, exposing the long line of her throat, the hammering pulse beneath her dark skin. Her breath hitches on a sound that isn't surrender—it's admission. The difference matters more than anything.
“I'm your omega.”
Three words. Barely audible. Dragged from somewhere so deep inside her that the woman who walked into this lodge would not recognize the voice that speaks them.
They detonate through me.
I stop holding back. Give her everything—the full depth, the full force, the full weight of an alpha who just heard the only words that will ever matter. She shatters. The orgasm rips through her so violently her whole body seizes, her back bowing off the mattress, and the sound she makes reverberates through the timber walls and the stone foundation and probably the trees outside.
I follow her over. My knot swells and locks and I come with a violence that nearly takes me off my knees, spilling inside her in pulses that seem endless, my forehead pressed against her spine, my breath ragged, my body shaking with something that goes deeper than release.
And then—right at my ear, so quiet I almost miss it, her lips brushing the shell of my ear, her breath still shuddering—she whispers:
“For now.”
Two words. A loophole in the contract she just signed with her body. The lawyer in her, still fighting, still negotiating the terms of her own surrender even as my knot holds us locked together.
It should make me furious. Instead, my chest cracks open. Because for now means she knows it's real. She just isn't ready to make it permanent.
I press my mouth to her shoulder. Breathe her in. Let the two words sit between us like a verdict under appeal.
The knot holds us locked together and time collapses into the space between heartbeats. Her breathing evens out. My body curls around hers—and the warmth of her back against my chest is so fundamentally right that the rational mind can't even mount a counterargument.
My mouth rests against the junction of her neck and shoulder. The skin there is warm. Unmarked. I press my lips to it and her pulse jumps beneath them—fast, erratic.
The urge builds.
Not a thought. A tide. Rising from somewhere beneath cognition, beneath language, beneath every system I have ever built to manage this exact biological impulse. My jaw aches. My teeth are there, right there against the skin that covers her scent gland, and every cell in my body is screaming one word on a frequency I can't shut off.
I fight it.
My jaw locks. My breath comes through my nose in short, controlled bursts. I am the man who told this woman, fifteen minutes ago, I don't bite. I won't bite. I will taste. Just taste that delicious aroma. Inhale it in my mouth and savor it. My teeth are against her skin. I hold. Seconds that stretch into something that resembles hours, my entire body rigid with the effort of not doing the one thing it's destined to do.
Biology wins.
I bite down.
Her whole body seizes. The scent gland beneath her skin ruptures under my teeth and the taste of her—salt and iron and something sweet that's only hers—floods my mouth. The mating mark burns into her flesh, permanent and irreversible. Biological fact written in scar tissue on the body of the woman trying to destroy my legacy.
She doesn't scream. Doesn't make a sound. Just goes perfectly, terrifyingly still beneath me, her fingers clawing the sheets, her breathing stopped. An exhale. So quiet, so devastated, it guts me worse than any scream ever could.
