His free hand came down on my hip, holding me still, and his expression did the thing—the firm set of his jaw that happened when Braham Wolfe had found something he wanted and was preparing to take it.
Two fingers. Then three. Careful and thorough, working me open until I was loose and slick and pulling at his wrist with my good hand and telling him in very specific terms that I was done waiting, done being patient, done with the performance of restraint when what I wanted was him inside me right the fuck now.
He pushed in slowly, giving me time, letting my body adjust to the stretch and the heat and the particular fullness of being taken by a man Braham’s size.
I exhaled long and deliberate, my ribs protesting the expansion, and then I rolled my hips in invitation—one deliberate movement that said, in the clearest language my body possessed, that I was ready and he was welcome and whatever came next was exactly what I’d been asking for.
He let go.
The sex was rough and consuming and feral in a way that lived somewhere beyond civilized and several miles past careful. Braham drove into me hard and steady, one hand gripping my hip with enough force to leave marks, the other braced beside my head, his weight a solid, specific fact against me.
Each thrust traveled through my body like a live wire, lighting up nerves I didn’t know I had, and I took it and gave it back—nails scoring down his back, my legs locked around his waist, meeting every drive with the stubborn physicality of a man who did not surrender easily and was choosing to surrender now.
The pain in my ribs was minimal compared to the pleasure moving through my entire body. I could handle the pain because I wanted the pleasure, desperately.
His mouth found my throat. My jaw. My collarbone. His teeth grazed the curve where my neck met my shoulder—the place where the claiming bite would go—and I felt him pull back. Once. Twice.
The restraint in it lived in the set of his shoulders and the tight line of his jaw, and I could feel what it cost him. The tension of a wolf holding back from something his biology had been built to do.
I turned my head. Chin up. Eyes on his face. Deliberate. Certain.
“Do it.”
He went still above me. Gold eyes dark, jaw tight enough to break, the muscle along his hinge standing out like cord under skin. His hips kept moving—slow, deep, the rhythm unbroken—but everything else stopped. The room held its breath. The fire murmured. The timber ceiling watched us with the patient indifference of something that had been standing here longer than either of us had been alive.
“You’re sure.” Not a question. A verification.
“I said it once.” My voice was steady. Steadier than it had any right to be with Braham Wolfe inside me and his teeth inches from my throat and the warmth of the thread already humming somewhere in my chest like a door I hadn’t known existed was starting to open. “I’m not saying it again. Do it or don’t.”
He did it.
The bite was sharp and deep. His teeth broke skin at the curve of my throat and shoulder, and the pain was immediate and bright—a white-hot line that traveled from the point of contact through my chest and down my arms—and then something else hit. Warmth. Spreading outward from the bite through my chest, my limbs, the backs of my hands, like a door swinging open in a room I’d been standing outside of for weeks.
The thread.
I understood, suddenly and completely, what Braham had been feeling since I entered his office. The certainty of it. The weight. It settled into me like it had always been there, humming quietly somewhere below my sternum, a live connection that felt less like something new and more like something that had been waiting for me to notice it.
The sound Braham made against my skin was the most undone thing I had ever heard from him. Low and broken and raw, the satisfied noise of a man who had been holdingsomething back for so long that the release of it came with its own gravity.
His forehead pressed to my temple, his breath hot and ragged against my skin, and his hips drove deep and held there as the knot began to swell.
I felt it through every nerve.
The fullness of it, the stretch and the heat and the absolute, biological certainty of being locked together. Braham’s knot pressed against me, swelling, locking us in place, and the completion of it traveled through my body like a circuit closing.
I came hard—Braham’s name in my mouth, my back arching off the mattress, my good hand fisted in the sheets—and he followed immediately, his forehead pressed to my temple, his breathing rough against my skin, one hand spread flat over the bite mark like he was holding it there on purpose.
We stayed knotted. My pulse slowed against his chest. The thread hummed quietly somewhere in my sternum, warm and unfamiliar and already somehow familiar, like a language I’d been hearing fragments of and had finally learned to speak.
I took inventory. Bruised ribs, throbbing in time with my heartbeat. Torn shoulder, the bandaging probably compromised. Split lip, definitely reopened. Bite mark at the curve of my throat that was going to be spectacular in the morning, purple and angry and visible to every wolf in the territory who caught my scent.
I felt, objectively, terrible. My body was a catalogue of damage that would take weeks to heal, and I was lying in a pool of sweat on ruined sheets with a Prime Alpha wolf knotted inside me and a claiming mark on my throat that would never, ever fade.
I also felt—and I would rather die than say this out loud, to Braham or to anyone, ever—completely fine. Better than fine.The kind of fine that lived somewhere beyond physical comfort and several miles past rational thought.
“You said ‘do it,’” Braham said. Very quietly. His voice was rough, spent, the sound of a man who had just come harder than he’d intended to and was still processing the aftermath.
“I did.”
