“You’re too big,” I gasp, but there’s no complaint in it. It’s awe.
“Good,” he replies, and the possessive word slashes through the air. “You belong around me.”
We find a pace that leaves both of us teetering—his thrusts deliberate, deep; my back arching to meet him, fingers splayed on the stone, toes curling. I place my hands on his thighs, feeling violent heat and the mechanical seams of his prosthetic, and I meet him: pushing back, grinding down, matching his power with my own human stubbornness.
Between breaths we speak. “Harder,” I tell him. My voice is ragged and bright. “Please.”
He obliges. The intensity turns sharper, closer to the jagged pleasure of breaking waves. The pain sharpens into heat, and that heat melts into something ecstatic. He slams into me and the world narrows to the sound of us—breathing, skin against skin, the wet slap of his cock meeting my pussy. He pins me with a hand at the nape of my neck, not cruelly but to keep mesteady, and his other hand kneads my thigh. Each stroke takes me higher, closer to a cliff edge I’m desperate to fall from.
“Jaela,” he grunts, and there’s fear there now—fear of losing control, fear of letting go. “Say my name if you’re mine.”
“I’m yours,” I cry, and it is everything: surrender, claim, hunger.
His thrusts deepen, a violent rhythm that hits nerve and bone and leaves me seeing stars. My walls tighten, clench around him, and the world explodes in white heat. I come with a scream that tears out of me, body convulsing, fingers clawing at his back as electricity forks through my limbs. Kyldak follows, a howl that sounds like a battle cry and a lover’s moan, his seed flooding me in thick, hot waves that make my muscles clamp around him.
We collapse together against the stone, breathless and sticky, a tangle of scales and human skin. He presses his forehead to mine and for a long minute we simply exist in the aftermath—raw, exposed, irrevocably changed.
“I would move planets,” Kyldak whispers, voice rough with spent ardor. “For this.”
“You already did,” I answer, voice small and stunned. “Just—stay.”
He cups my face with a hand that is both alien and impossibly gentle. “I will stay.” His red eye softens to something like the vulnerability I’d been afraid to ask for. “If you let me.”
I let him. I let the world shrink to the space between our chests and the steadying press of his arm around my waist. We lie together as the campfire dies down to embers, and the night wraps us in its cold and in the warmth we make. There are secrets still, lies that hover at the edges of my mouth, but for this hour he is mine and I am his—and that, for now, is enough.
CHAPTER 16
KYLDAK
She’s alive.
I keep telling myself that, but the words slide off my brain like oil on steel.
Jaela.Alive. Inmy camp.
It doesn’t feel real. My hands keep curling into fists just to ground myself—feel the bite of my own claws. The way she looks at me, like I’m both the man she used to love and the monster she never stopped running from—it chews through my insides like acid.
I can’t breathe around her.
She stalks across my command platform like she owns the place, muttering curses under her breath in languages half my crew wouldn’t dare fake understanding. She’s wearing my jacket again, sleeves rolled to her elbows, grease on her cheek, hair tied back in that same messy knot she wore the day she disappeared from my life like smoke off a battlefield.
My second-in-command tries to report on the western patrols.
I wave him off.
“Out. All of you.”
There’s no hesitation. They scatter like shadows under floodlight. Smart.
She doesn’t flinch as I walk toward her. Doesn’t blink. But her fingers twitch at her sides like she’s weighing whether to go for a blade or a lie.
I stop two feet from her. Close enough to smell ozone and engine oil and her. Always her.
“Start talking.”
She crosses her arms. “You gonna bark or bite, Red Eye?”
My jaw ticks.
