Page 66 of The Florist and Her Alphas

She shatters.

Her back bows sharply off the bed. A long, broken cry tears out of her, echoing off the ceiling, and her pussy clamps down on my cock so hard I see stars. She comes around me in pulsing waves, milking me, dragging me over the edge with her.

“Fuck!” I roar, exploding inside of her.

I bury myself to the hilt one final time and stay there. My cock stretches her entrance, tying us together, and I come inside her in long, devastating pulses that feel endless.

Hot cum floods her, pumping deep, and I cannot pull out. Cannot move.

I am locked deep inside her, my knot pulsing, pumping more and more of me into her with every clench of her pussy, and she is sobbing softly underneath me, her hands clutching my shoulders, her face buried against my neck.

I hold myself above her on shaking forearms.

My muscles are trembling with the effort, sweat dripping from my temples, and I kiss her hair. Her temple. The corner of her eye where a tear has spilled out.

“Liana,” I whisper. Her name like a prayer. “I love you. You are my queen. You are the queen of my pack, and no one is ever going to touch you again the way you have been touched before.”

She starts crying. Silent, shaking sobs that I feel against my chest, and I pull back enough to look at her face. Her eyes are red, wet, her lower lip bitten raw.

“What’s wrong?” I ask. Gently. My heart in my throat. “Are you hurt?”

She shakes her head. Tries to say nothing. Tries to hide, the way she has hidden for years, and I wait. I don’t let her hide. I hold her gaze, my hands framing her face, and I wait.

After a long moment, she looks up at me. Her wet eyes find mine, and her voice, when it comes, is tiny and trembling.

“It feels like love. This type of sex,” she whispers. “I didn’t know it was supposed to feel like this.”

My chest tightens. Something cold and heavy settles behind my sternum. “It should always feel like love. Even when sex is rough and quick.”

“For three years,” she says, each word careful, like she’s picking her way through broken glass, “sex was a thing that happened to my body. Not a thing I participated in.” A tear tracks down her temple. “Magnus and his pack didn’t make love. They bullied me. They made me feel less than. Sex was about domination. About reminding me where I belonged.”

I cannot speak. My jaw is so hard it aches. My cock is locked inside her, and I cannot move, and I cannot breathe, and the thing she has just told me is the worst thing anyone has ever said to me.

“That’s horrible,” I say softly in her ear as I try to process what she said.

“I used to count the cracks in the ceiling. And wait for it to be over. I never made a sound. Making sounds meant they got harder. Longer. Meaner.” She swallows.

The cold thing in my chest cracks. Splinters. Becomes rage so white and pure it blinds me for a second, and I have to close my eyes and breathe through it because if I don’t, I will get out of this bed and find Silus Thornton and put my hands around his throat and not stop until his spine breaks.

When I can finally speak, my voice is rough. Low. Each word measured.

“What your ex-pack did to you,” I say. “It wasn’t love. It was assault.”

She flinches. “You’re right.”

I press my forehead to hers. “I am going to spend every day of the rest of my life making sure you never have to count a single ceiling crack again.”

She is sobbing quietly into my shoulder. I hold her. I stay inside her. My knot pulses gently, still locked, still tied, and I kiss the side of her face. Her hair. Her temple. Her wet eyelashes.

“You are safe,” I whisper. “Get some sleep, baby.”

The knot will not release for at least a half hour. I will not move when it does. I will stay inside her body until she wakes in the morning.

She nods against my shoulder. Her breathing slows. Her tears dry against my skin as she falls into a deep sleep. And I finally allow myself to crack as I weep silently in her hair, envisioning how horribly she was treated in the past.

Seventeen

LIANA