Page 140 of Property of Scar

“Scar.” His name comes out low, half plea, half warning.

“I hear you,” he murmurs, and shifts his hips forward by degrees, slow, so slow, giving me every inch of him one at a time until I’m gripping his shoulders. My breath is coming in shallow pulls, and my whole body is adjusting to the overwhelming, consuming fullness of him.

He stops when he’s sitting fully upright and lets his forehead fall against mine. The contact stole whatever words I had left. We stay like that, breathing hard, covered in the remains of a battle that should have taken both of us. The bond burns bright between us. I feel it in my veins, in my chest, in every place he’s touched and every place he’s changed.

His blood runs through me.

Mine runs through him.

The connection settles deeper with every second we’re pressed together, locking into place with a certainty that makes my throat tighten.

After everything we’ve survived, there is nothing left between us now.

No secrets.

No running.

No place left to hide.

I feel him everywhere. In my bloodstream, my bones, and the warm, permanent hum of everything we made irrevocable this morning, and the combination of all of it is so much that my eyes sting with it, and I press my face briefly into the curve of his neck so he can’t see.

He turns his head and presses his lips to my temple. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t need to.

“Me too,” I say softly, into his skin. An answer to a three-word statement neither of us said aloud.

He slowly thrusts inside me and begins to move, and I stop trying to find words for any of it.

He sets a slow rhythm at first, his hands framing my face, his eyes staying on mine like he’s refusing to let me disappear into my own head. Every time I try to close my eyes, he says my name quietly, and I open them again and find him right there, present, certain, and absolutely focused on me in a way that is somehow more intimate than everything else combined.

“Scar.” His name leaves me on a broken exhale as he drives deeper, and something in his jaw tightens at the sound of it.

“Again,” he says, low and rough.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” I murmur and feel the low rumble of his laugh against my skin even as he proves, very thoroughly, that flattery has nothing to do with it.

He picks up the pace, and the careful control he’s been maintaining starts to fray at the edges in ways I feel everywhere. I wrap my legs around him and pull him deeper, and his eyes go briefly, beautifully dark with it.

“You’re not going anywhere,” he says against my temple, low and rough. Not a question, a fact he’s decided, delivered in that infuriating tone he uses when he already knows he’s right.

“Oh, so now you’re observant,” I manage, breathless.

“I’ve always been observant.” His mouth drags against my jaw. “You’re just usually better at hiding it.”

I would have a response to that if he weren’t currently making coherent thought structurally impossible.

His mouth drops to the curve of my throat, and I feel the press of his fangs against my skin—a question he’s asking without words.

“Don’t ask,” I say, before he can, because I know what’s coming and I’d rather die than make him feel like he has to. “Just, yes. Always yes.”

He goes still for just a second, something moving through his expression that he doesn’t let fully form, and then his mouth finds my throat, and he bites down.

The sensation is a shock and then a warmth that floods through me in a wave, spreading outward from where his mouth is pressed to my throat. The bond flares brilliant and hot between us like something that’s been waiting for exactly this—his blood in me and mine in him—the oldest intimacy a vampire has to offer, given freely and without hesitation. A sound tears out of me while his arms tighten around me, one hand cradling the back of my head, holding me with a carefulness that undoes me even as everything else is coming apart.

He moves with me, deeper, harder, the bite, the bond, and the coolness of him all compounding into something that obliterates thought entirely. I cling to him and stop trying to be composed about any of it, nails biting into his shoulders, his name leaving my mouth on a broken exhale. I feel through the bond that he’s close, that the thread of his control has finally burned all the way down, and the knowledge of that tips me right over the edge alongside him.

My whole body draws tight all at once, every muscle locking, and then I shatter in a way that has nothing dignified or contained about it. His name tears out of me a second time, louder than the first. “Fuck, Scar!” My back arches hard off the mattress, my thighs clamp around him, and I am distantly aware that I am shaking. My hands have fisted so hard in his hair that I should probably apologize for it later. The bond between us has gone absolutely incandescent, blazing white and brilliant, and so overwhelmingly present that I cannot tell where it ends and I begin.

He follows me over the edge a breath behind, and the way it takes him undoes me almost as completely as my own climax did. The control he has been exercising all night fractures all at once. I feel it go through the bond before I hear it in the rough, broken sound that leaves him against my throat. His entire body shudders, his hips driving deep and stilling there as he comes apart with his arms locked around me and my name on his lips like something sacred and something wrecked in equal measure. “Cali!” His hands grip me like I am the only solid thing he has access to, and he holds on. I hold back just as hard, and for a long, suspended moment, the entire world narrows down to the two of us and the blazing warmth of everything we made permanent this morning pulsing between us like a second heartbeat.