Page 273 of Claimed by the Ghost Warrior

He watched me watching him. “You don’t have to⁠—”

“I know what I don’t have to do.” I met his eyes. “I’m choosing.”

I slid down the bed and wrapped my hand around him. He was hard as a rock, and thick—thicker than my wrist, thicker than any human man I’d ever touched. The kuvak pulsed under my palm, warm and alien, that faint silver glow threading along its length. I stroked him once, slow, learning the shape of him, and he made a low sound in his chest. A bead of fluid welled at the tip and I bent to it, catching it with my tongue—salty, warm, nothing like human sweat—and he groaned, hips lifting off the mattress.

Then I took him into my mouth.

He made a sharp, choked sound, one hand tangling in my hair—not forcing, just holding on. His other arm came up to cover his eyes, as if he couldn’t bear to watch, but his hips shifted under my palms, a shallow, involuntary thrust. I could feel the tension coiling in him, the restraint he always wore like armor finally beginning to fracture. The ŭre flared silver across his skin, pulsing in time with the ragged rhythm of his breath.

Something cracked in his expression. He lifted himself, fisted a hand in my hair, and wrenched my face up to his—not gentle, not this time—and kissed me like he was fighting for air. His teeth caught my lower lip. He tasted of salt and that low silver heat. When he rolled us, dragging me under him, the mattress groaned and he didn’t care, settling his full weight between my thighs. I felt the shift in him, something feral and desperate rising beneath the careful surface—the restraint he’d worn for years coming apart at the seams, and only me here to catch it.

“Tell me to stop,” he whispered against my mouth, “and I will. I will, Talia, I swear-”

I wrapped my legs around his hips and pulled him closer. “Don't stop.”

The ŭre crested, blinding, as he pushed inside me-not smoothly, not with practiced grace, but with a need so raw it bordered on violence. I gasped, nails digging into his shoulders, and he froze, trembling, every muscle locked with the effort of holding back.

“Move,” I told him, and he did—a raw, desperate thrust that tore a cry from my throat.

His rhythm was not gentle. It was a claiming, a shattering of the last of his control. He drove into me deep, withdrew, drove in again, and I took every inch of him each time, my hips rising to meet his. He held my gaze through all of it—didn’t look away, didn’t close his eyes—and neither did I. Silver light rolled off him in waves with every thrust, and I watched it wash over my skin, watched his face come apart piece by piece as he gave up the last of what he’d kept from me.

The knot at the base of his kuvak began to swell, pressing against me with an intensity that bordered on pain, a friction so profound it felt like being remade. I clawed at his back, urging him deeper, and felt the ŭre flare into a searing silver light as the knot locked us together. A sound tore from his throat, raw and stripped of control, as my own cry shattered against his shoulder. The universe collapsed to the frantic rhythm of his hips and the searing, molten heat that fused us together.

After, we lay tangled in the narrow bed, sweat cooling on our skin, the ŭre reduced to a slow pulse like a heartbeat heard from inside the womb.

His hand traced patterns on my hip, meaningless shapes that might have been letters in a language he never learned.

I listened to his breathing even out, felt the tension drain from him degree by degree, and knew that for the first time since I'd found him in that alley, Veyr was truly still.

Not waiting. Not watching. Just present, beside me.

I didn't know how long we lay there. Long enough for the light to shift, for the room to grow colder, for the reality to set in.

The cold blue light of the terminal screen bled back into my vision, followed by the phantom weight of the stolen files in my bag, the maddening encryption on the prince’s records, the suffocating knowledge that the Veil was everywhere. This wasn’t running anymore. It was hiding. A different rented room with the same smell of stale air and recycled water. Another smuggler promising a clear route north. Always almost caught, never actually getting anywhere. We were surviving—not solving.

I pushed upright.

Veyr mirrored me instantly. “What is it?”