Lifting me bodily, he stands and pushes me against the wall of the chamber. He lines himself up, the head of his cock thick and ridged, and thrusts in, stretching me around him. He holds me by the hips, lifts me up and down, using my body like a tool, like a weapon, like the only thing in the world that matters. The wall of the nexus ripples, vines shifting around us.
He fucks me hard and fast. His usual finesse is replaced by pure drive. I’m lost in it as his drive, his pleasure, howls in my head, louder than my own thoughts. It’s the closest we’ve ever been joined. Rythar is in my mind, the jungle is in my mind, andI can’t tell where they end and I begin. My thoughts curl around his. The connection is as easy as breath, as desperate as the urgency I feel as I need him to pound into me over and over.
I come, hard, clenching around him, nails digging crescents into his shoulders. I’m in his mind, still, and he feels it, just like I feel his response. He growls, buries himself to the hilt, and I feel the flood of his orgasm inside me, pulsing.
He bites my throat, holds me through the aftershocks, then lowers us both to the floor, never letting go.
We lie there, tangled, bodies shaking.
He presses his lips to my forehead, then my mouth, then each eyebrow.
I laugh, shaky and wild. “You were in my mind,” I say. “Without the coil from the mating room.”
He holds me against him, murmuring. “You were in mine. You still are.”
The mate bond vibrates. In his mind, I see every sunrise alone. Every meal eaten across an empty table. Every night in a bed built for two, occupied by one. The nursery he carved by hand, room by room, for children he had no reason to believe would ever exist.
I pull my mind back. His arms tighten. “Watch,” he whispers. I see the entire Green Reach in his mind.
Under it, I feel the psychic connection to the others, wider than before, and something new threaded through it—his strength, running in my own veins now. I’m not only flesh and bone anymore. I don’t open the link. But I know I could, much wider than before. When I’m ready.
Slowly, we let the world shrink back to this room.
I wake up on the bed in the jungle house. Rythar’s body is a furnace behind me, arm a dead weight over my ribs. My skin is sticky with green-tinged sweat.
Green.
The mate bond is quieted, but under it, something sharp is building.
He’s already awake. I feel it before I open my eyes, in the connection we have here.
I roll onto my back and stare up at the ceiling. The roots up there pulse slow, steady, like a warning light on standby. I follow the pulse with my eyes, trace the path down the walls, then look over at him.
He’s propped on one elbow, head in hand, watching me. His eyes are gold and dark, less molten now and more like a coin. The green light plays over his coppery skin and green sweat, cooling the tone.
“We both seem to be sweating green. This is a first for me. I feel ok,” I say.
He doesn’t say anything at first. Just looks.
When he speaks, his voice is so low it barely registers. “You shared my gift, Elena. I don’t know what it means. What will happen in the other biomes if the other rulers experience this with their Starfallen Brides. The Concord Stone wasn’t originally designed for this.”
I frown. “For what?”
He glances away. “Gifts given to Starfallen women. A gift amplified by a warlord mate.”
He says it like an accusation, but not at me.
He sits up, hair wild, muscles mapped in shifting light. He rubs something from the scar on his jaw, then turns back to me, face shuttered.
“The Concord Stone was designed to select brides for balance. Never for power. Never for dominance.” He touches my shoulder, the gentleness at odds with his words. “Your presence shows this has changed.”
I breathe. “You think I’m dangerous.”
He laughs, short and rough. “Right now, as far as Xytheos is concerned, you are the most dangerous thing in this Reach. I am engineered, firmly designed, to preserve the stability of Xytheos. To prefer my biome. You are not, my little human female. You reach out to the others, and now you touch my power.”
“I didn’t mean to do it. It just happened.”
He plays his fingers along my arm. “I meant for you to do it. If you use my power, Jarrett will eventually sense it. He will move to contain the threat. But if you do not, the world will pick off your friends, one at a time.”
