Page 56 of Claimed By the Wolf Heir

The orgasm hits her in a wave that locks her body around mine, her inner muscles seizing in contractions so strong I can feel them in my spine. She comes with her face pressed into the crook of my neck and a cry she buries in my skin because the cry belongs to the omega and the omega has never been allowed to be this loud.

I don't stop. I thrust through the contractions, through the clenching that grips me so tight each stroke is a battle, through the aftershocks that ripple through her in waves. The omega milks me with rhythmic, involuntary pulses, and my wolf howls behind my teeth because the body underneath mine is doing exactly what it was built for.

The knot begins to form.

The swelling builds at the root, the pressure that's caught against her entrance and been forced down in every time before. This time I don't force it down.

With each thrust the base stretches wider, and I feel her body respond with a fresh flood of slick, the omega recognizing what's coming and preparing for the lock with a biological urgency that mirrors my own. The thickening catches at her entrance, stretching her around the widening base, and the stretch pulls a sound from her throat that I'll remember until the day I stop breathing.

"The knot." My voice doesn't sound like mine. "It's forming."

Her eyes lock on mine. The clinical mind surfaces for one instant behind the blown pupils and the flushed skin, long enough to register what she already knows: a knot locks, it can't be undone until the biology releases, the forced stillness lasts. She can feel me hesitate, feel the old reflex to clench my jaw and force the swelling down the way I've forced it down before.

"Don't stop."

I thrust deep one final time and the knot locks.

The base swells past withdrawal, sealing inside her with a pressure that empties the air from both of us. The sensation floods outward from the root, where her muscles clamp down on the swollen base, rippling through my spine, my chest, the backs of my hands. I can feel every millimeter of the seal, the tight ring of her body gripping the widest point, the heat and the wet and the fullness of being locked inside a woman whose biology was designed to hold me exactly here.

The lock triggers a second orgasm. The knot stretches her from the inside, and the stretch sets off contractions so deep they feel like they start at the base of her spine and roll through her entire body. She comes around the knot with her nails in my shoulders and her omega pouring off her skin in waves that saturate the cottage air.

I come with her because the clenching around the swollen base makes holding back a physical impossibility. I spill inside her in long, shuddering pulses that her body wrings from me with the relentless grip of omega biology completing its function.

The pleasure rips through me with a force that borders on pain, and the border is where I want to live.

We can't move.

The knot holds us together with a biological insistence that doesn't negotiate with patience or distance. I'm inside her, locked, and neither of us can retreat.

The stillness is the most honest we've ever been.

She can't fold her arms and step back. She can't pick up the pestle and grind herself into the performance. She's locked to me by biology that doesn't care about pharmaceutical barriers or the careful, measured distance she's maintained since her mother first taught her to hide.

And I can't deflect. I can't fill the silence with stories about my father or the color of the Drakfell mountains. The silence is too full for words, and the fullness is her body and my body and the locked place between them where neither of us can pretend.

Her forehead drops against my shoulder. The breath leaves her in a long, shuddering exhale. The orgasm is still pulsing through both of us, but the exhale isn't about that. It's the sound of a woman releasing a weight she's carried so long it became part of her posture.

The omega is still clenching around the knot in slow, involuntary contractions that send aftershocks through both of us. Each pulse draws a sound from one of us or both.

I can feel myself twitching inside her in response, my body releasing in small, helpless spurts that her muscles pull from me. I give it. I give her everything.

I hold her. My arms wrap around her back with the knot sealed inside her. The holding is what I've wanted since the first night I lay on her cot watching her grind compounds by candlelight, when I closed my left fist and didn't understand yet what I was holding.

Her fingers find the bonding site on my throat. She presses there, reading my pulse.

She's touching the place I bared for her on the cottage floor, the place I offered when I dropped to my knees, and she's not pulling away. She's measuring. The measuring is the most intimate thing anyone has ever done to me.

The knot holds. The fire crackles. The cottage holds both sounds and two wolves who have stopped pretending.

The knot subsides with the gradual release of biology completing its cycle. I soften inside her, the swelling receding, the lock easing, and the vulnerability of the easing surprises me because the forced honesty is ending and the choice to stay honest is now voluntary.

She stays.

Her forehead stays on my shoulder. Her fingers stay on my throat. Her breathing stays even, and the evenness isn't clinical control. It's the breathing of a woman who has stopped fighting the air in her own lungs.

"If you tell anyone I made that sound," she says against my shoulder, "I'll suture your mouth shut."

"Which sound? The first one, the second one, or the one in the middle that I'm going to think about every time I close my eyes for the rest of my life?"