“Then get up here,” she said.
He settled between her thighs, and she felt him, hard and hot, pressing against her but not yet inside. His restraint was coming apart. She could feel it unraveling through the bond, could feel how badly he wanted this, badly enough that it hurt, but he was waiting. Still waiting.
“Alessandro.” She touched his face. “I’m not going to break.”
“I know that.”
“Then stop treating me like I might.”
His expression changed. The careful control didn’t drop; it reorganized, became something less like restraint and more likefocus. He held her gaze and pushed inside her in one steady stroke.
The bond blew open.
Marina felt everything: the stretch and fullness from her own body AND the overwhelming heat from his perspective. Their pleasure braided together until she lost the boundary between them. Every nerve doubled, tripled, sensation building past anything she had a frame of reference for.
“Fuck,” Alessandro said, forehead pressed to hers. “I can feel… everything…”
“I know.” She wrapped her legs around his waist, pulling him deeper. “Move. Please move.”
He did. Found a rhythm that had them both gasping. The bond hummed between them, amplifying everything, and Marina thought distantly that she should have been frightened and wasn’t.
Then his control slipped.
She felt it before she saw it: the careful partition between his human form and whatever lived underneath it, cracking. Heat radiated from his skin, sudden and fierce. Not painful. Like standing too close to a bonfire on a cold night, overwhelming but not unwelcome.
Dark scales rippled along his forearms. A few at first, then spreading, iridescent, catching the late afternoon light from the window, throwing tiny rainbows across the sheets.
Alessandro froze. Horror flooded the bond. Not at her. At himself. At the part of him he’d spent years walling off, now surfacing at the worst possible moment.
“Marina, I’m sorry, I can’t…”
“Don’t you dare stop.” She grabbed his scaled forearms. The scales were smooth and warm under her hands, humming faintly, like touching a guitar string mid-vibration. “You’re beautiful like this.”
He stared at her. Through the bond, she felt his disbelief fracture into something raw and unprotected.
“You’re not afraid.”
“Why would I be afraid? You’re warm, you’re here, and you’re currently inside me. I’ve committed.” She tightened her grip on his arms. “This is you. All of you. I want all of you.”
The laugh that came out of him was broken and wet and real, nothing like the controlled thing he usually allowed himself, and he didn’t try to take it back.
He kissed her hard and moved again, faster, deeper, the restraint gone entirely. The scales spread up his arms in intricate patterns, heat rolling off him in waves that should have been too much and somehow weren’t. She pressed into it. Into him. Felt his fear dissolve into something fiercer—not just desire but the raw, gutted relief of someone who’d expected to be turned away at the door.
“I’m close,” she warned. “Alessandro, I’m…”
“Me too.” His rhythm was faltering, control gone, and she could feel exactly how close he was because the bond made them transparent. “Marina, I can feel you, feel how close you are, it’s…”
She came hard and graceless, clenching around him, making a sound she’d be embarrassed about later. The bond ripped the sensation sideways into him and she felt his control shatter—felt him follow with a ragged groan, his whole body going rigid, the scales on his arms flaring hot and bright before everything went liquid.
The aftershocks hit unevenly. Hers first, then his, then hers again, overlapping and messy, nothing like the synchronized thing she’d half-expected.
Alessandro collapsed beside her, pulling her close. They were both trembling, both trying to remember how breathing worked.The scales on his arms were fading, but she caught his hand before they disappeared completely.
“These,” she said, tracing the last few iridescent scales with her fingertip. “They’re beautiful.”
“You keep saying that.”
“I’ll keep saying it until you believe me.” She pressed a kiss to his scaled knuckles. “I felt it, remember? I felt how scared you were. But Alessandro.” She looked up at him. “This is my favorite part. The part you don’t show anyone. The part that’s just yours.”
