The pleasure was so intense that it was almost unbearable. She had to bite her lip hard enough to draw blood to keep her orgasm at bay.
Brandt released her braid, his hand sliding to her throat. Claws pricked into her skin as he squeezed lightly, cutting off her air just enough to make her dizzy. Her vision blurred as he leaned in close, his chest pressed against her shoulders. lips brushing the crown of her head. “You can’t fight it,” he whispered harshly. “You’re mine again, and I’ll take what I want from you.”
The combination of his words and the necklace of pressure on her throat was too much. Her body convulsed as release rippedthrough her, the waves of ecstasy so intense her vision went black. She felt him snarl in satisfaction, his pace increasing as he chased his own climax.
And then she felt the telltale swelling at the base of his cock as his knot began to form. He pressed forward ruthlessly, forcing it inside her, and she whimpered at the additional stretch. Her body clamped down around him involuntarily, holding him in place as he came with a roar, his seed filling her in hot bursts.
The bite came at the peak. His jaws clamped her shoulder in the exact spot as before, his sharp teeth sinking into her flesh. Pain seared through her, but worse was what followed: his mind crashing into hers like a boulder through glass.
Walls. So many walls. Some cracked and crumbled, others so tall she couldn’t find the top. Every direction she turned was blocked.
She felt his confusion, the constant sense of missing pieces. The frustration of reaching for memories that scattered like smoke. The bone-deep exhaustion of fighting his own mind every moment.
She was also awash with his pleasure. Not just the physical pleasure of their mating but the pleasure of revenge on her. The deep satisfaction of having a mate again. But louder than that all that was the sense of betrayal that drowned out everything else.
Not just hers, but the Tower’s. His mother’s. The masons’. The world’s cruelty in taking everything and leaving only scars.
She sobbed into the furs, overwhelmed by the weight of his suffering. This was what she’d done to him. This was the cost of her choices, and now she had to pay it. This was the rest of her life.
“Now you know,” he said against her shoulder, tongue soothing the bite even as his knot kept them locked together. “Now you understand.”
Chapter 28
Brandt
The moment his teeth pierced her shoulder and the bond reignited, he was in her mind as much as she was in his. His ever-present rage, the sense of betrayal that had become his closest companion, the desperate need for revenge—all of it faded into the background. It was a welcome respite to be awash in her emotions instead of his own.
Her regret hit first. It decorated everything, like a layer of fog over a landscape. When he brushed it aside, he found loneliness, six years of it, raising their son while mourning her mate, notknowing whether he lived or died. Resignation to his hatred. Desire for his retribution. Fear that he would take Loïc away.
But underneath it all, vast as the night sky, was her love for him.
It staggered him. He’d remembered her loving him through the bond, yes, but this was more. This was oceanic. It filled every corner of her mind, colored every thought. She loved him with the kind of devotion he’d only imagined in martyrs and madmen. Even now, even as he’d claimed her in anger, even as she bore the weight of his fractured mind through their bond, her love persisted. Deepened.
“You still love me.” His voice cracked. “After everything, still?”
“Yes.” The word was whispered into the furs where she’d pressed her face to hide it. She turned her head to the side and added, “I told you, I broke the bond because I loved you. Everything I’ve done since then, too. Everything I am. I can’t remember who I was before I loved you.”
Something in his chest shifted, stone cracking into flesh and the dust falling away, as though his heart was waking from daysleep. He rolled them to their sides and pulled her closer, his nostrils flared at the coppery tang in the air. Her fresh mate mark was still bleeding. He had been so rough with her.
“Stop,” she murmured, feeling his regret.
He licked over her torn flesh, tending it, and was gratified when the blood clotted fully a minutes later. He was just as gratified that, even when fully healed, his mark on her would not fade this time. Never again would he build a mind wall around their bond. If she tried to sever it, he would know instantly and stop her.
His knot eventually softened and slipped out, and she turned to face him. She cupped his jaw in her hands and brushed her lips across his. He let his cheek rest in her palm.
It was wrong to take comfort from his destroyer, but what a comfort it was. Oh, the ache they shared as she traced over the new wound he’d scribed on his chest to mourn her.
“I have my salve with me if you want this to heal without a scar,” she offered.
He shook his head, moving her hand aside. “I want it. I earned that. I paid in blood for it.”
She kissed along the raw edges, and he closed his eyes and let her tend it in her way, understanding the impulse. When she finished with it, she moved on to his other scars, anointing each one with her lips and breath.
When she reached the deep one on his ribs, the one that marked when his watchmate Janusz had died, the tiny twinge of residual pain made a memory crash through him.
The ambush. Goblins diving from the cliffs above, too many, too fast. The screaming. Janusz throwing himself between Brandt and a poison blade. The wet sound of metal piercing flesh. Holding his watchmate as life drained from his eyes, unable to stop the bleeding, unable to do anything but pack his own wound with moss to carry the loss forever.
The flooded memory through the bond, and he couldn’t stop it. Idabel stiffened in his arms as she felt the panic, the copper taste of terror, the gutting reality of watching someone die.
