Page 29 of Heat Lightning

I remembered the screams ringing through the wall before he showed up and the flash of someone fleeing when he broke down the door. Judging by what had almost happened to me, it wasn’t a stretch to imagine what the Masked Man interrupted.

What he stopped.

I sighed heavily. “Say, I believe you. How do we even go about breaking a bond that’s not fully sealed?” I asked quietly.

The Masked Man shuffled on his feet. “I need you to know I looked into this. A lot.”

My stomach sank. “Please tell me it’s not some kind of bloodletting ceremony,” I said. I couldn’t handle the idea of rituals or magic or any of that woo-woo shit.

“No! No, nothing like that.” The tension in his shoulders didn’t dissipate.

My eyes narrowed. “Then what?”

“I’ve already tried literally everything else. I wouldn’t have come here otherwise.”

“Just spit it out. You’re acting like one of us will be dead at the end of this.”

He gave a pointed glance at the knife in my hand. “Unless you plan on actually using that, there’s no death involved. Quite the opposite, actually.”

Confused, I shook my head. “What are you talking about? The opposite of death? Birth?”

Given we’d only known each other for a handful of minutes, I was getting pretty good at reading the expressions on a third of his face. Like right now, he raised a “Come on, are you being serious?” eyebrow.

“Heat, Max,” he said. “We need to share a heat and reject the mating bite. The bond will break, and we’ll go our separate ways. Permanently.”

NINE

MAX

Oh. Oh.

“Share a heat? As in… have sex? Knotting sex?” I squeaked. Fucking hell, I sounded like a middle schooler being told about my changing body for the first time.

“Yes, that would be involved.” He didn’t sound much better. He cleared his throat, and I swore the very tops of his cheeks, just visible in the cut out of the mask, turned red.

Was he thinking about it? Right now?

Was he imagining the way we’d fit together, with his big, thick cock stuffed right up to my breeding gland until we were as close as two people could be? Would his knot stimulate my prostate when it grew, locking us together so I could come over and over while he rocked us together?

What would it feel like to be intimate with a predator like him? I imagined myself splayed out beneath him, neck bared with his teeth at my throat while he rolled his hips into mine, thrusting in, and out… in, and out…

He could do anything he wanted to me. Anything at all.

And yet, his eyes were full of the desperate need to give me pleasure, not pain. Those hands, coated in the blood of society’s worst, would worship me; they’d cradle my waist and pull me into him so I took him deeper. They’d wrap around my cock and bring me to release alongside him, before sinking his teeth into my neck and tying us together forever because we were mates.

Mates, mates, mates…

Oh, God.

I shook my head. “No,” I croaked. The degree to which I wanted and feared that reality swirled together in my head, knocking me off kilter.

He was a stranger. A murdering stranger. “No,” I repeated. “That’s—we can’t.”

“Max, please. I can’t live like this anymore. I can’t⁠—”

“But I don’t even know you,” I interrupted. “Besides, I don’t have heats anymore, remember?”

They were stolen from me before I even had the chance to share one with anyone else. And now he was proposing they’d miraculously return? And that I spend my first with him?