"I know. Look at you. Taking it so well."
His face is wet. His mouth is open. His hands are still locked above his head where I told him to keep them—Christ, he's good, he's so good—and his cock is trapped between us, dark and leaking and twitching every time my knot pulses inside him.
I plant one hand flat on his lower belly. Just below his navel. Press down slow.
He yelps.
"There it is."
"Atlas—oh—oh—"
I roll my hips. Just a little. Drag the knot a fraction of an inch deeper, grind against the spot I just found from the inside and the outside both—my hand pressing down, my knot pressing up—and his whole body locks.
"That's it, sweetheart. Right there."
"Atlas—I can't—I'm—"
"You can. Come for me, baby."
I press down harder. Roll my hips again. Slower this time, deeper, the knot rocking against him from the inside, my palm working him from above.
He breaks.
He comes between us with my hand on his belly and my knot lodged against his prostate and his cock untouched, hands still above his head where I told him to keep them. His release pulses up his stomach in long thick stripes, hot against my palm, and the clench of him around my knot draws a second pulse out of me—shorter, deeper, my hips jerking forward into him without my permission. He cries out. I groan into his throat. The bond between us flares so wide and bright I lose the room for a second.
When I come back into my body, he's wrecked underneath me. Boneless. Breath ragged. His come is cooling on his belly, his cock still twitching weakly against his stomach, the bond between us soft and dazed and pulsing slow.
I don't ease back the way I would any other night.
I reach across him to the nightstand. There's a small black case sitting next to the dish of sweets, the kind I keep in my breast pocket every time I'm out of the house. I unscrew the cap with one hand. Bring it to my nose. Breathe in once, slow.
The effect hits in three seconds.
My knot, locked thick inside him, releases—not gently, the way it would on its own time, but fast, the swell going down inside me the way a held breath goes out of a body. I pull free of him in one long smooth motion and his rim flutters around the loss, slick and come spilling down onto the duvet, his whole body twitching at the sudden empty.
He blinks up at me, dazed.
"...Atlas? What was—"
I flip him.
Hand at his hip, hand at his shoulder—I roll him onto his stomach in one motion, drag him up onto his knees, palm flat between his shoulder blades to push his chest down into the pillow with his ass up. He gasps. Doesn't fight. Hands scrabbling for purchase in the duvet on either side of his head.
"Atlas—"
I drive in.
Hard. Deep. To the hilt in one stroke and then deeper, hips slamming flush against the back of his thighs, the angle pushing me somewhere I haven't been all night. The breath punches out of his lungs in a sound that isn't a word.
"Atlas—"
"Something new we're rolling out, sweetheart." My voice has gone hoarse, dropped into the alpha-low register I haven't been using all night. "Cuts the recovery to nothing. Handy, isn't it?"
"What—"
"You said you wanted to feel me after I was done with you."
I fist his hair. Pull his head back off the pillow.
