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That fucking does it.

The orgasm rips through me so hard I barely recognize the sound I make. My body bows, thighs shaking against his shoulders, cock pulsing in his fist as he lowers his mouth back over me and swallows me down.

I come into his mouth, onto his tongue, into the bond, everywhere at once, and Onyx takes every bit of it with a deep, possessive sound that feels like being claimed all over again.

He doesn’t stop immediately, but he eases me down, and that somehow makes it worse. Better. I don’t know. My brain has left the forest entirely. He strokes me through the last pulses with slow, gentle passes, licking me clean with the same filthy devotion he used to break me.

When his tongue withdraws, I twitch hard and make a pathetic sound I would deny if I had any chance of getting away with it.

Onyx kisses the inside of my thigh, then my hip, then the soft skin below my stomach. Each kiss turns slower as he moves up me, his mouth warm and wet, his body heavy with satisfaction. When he reaches my shoulder, he licks over the mark once, and I shudder so hard my hand slips from his hair to his shoulder.

Done, he sends, and the word is firm in a way my body does not appreciate. You are too sore for me.

I blink at the den’s ceiling.

The words take several seconds to reach the part of my brain that handles meaning. When they do, irritation sparks through the haze. Not real anger, more like my pride dragging itself across the floor with one arm because apparently it refuses to die even after what his tongue just did to me.

I stare at him hovering above me, long hair falling around his face, mouth wet, eyes too bright and satisfied. His cock is hard against my hip, obviously hard. Painfully hard, if the tension in his jaw means anything. And he’s looking at me like he expects me to accept that he just wrecked me with his mouth and then intends to sit there nobly with an erection because I’m sore.

“No,” I say.

His brow draws down. Lucas.

The tone is warning and tenderness at once. It annoys the hell out of me.

I shove at his shoulder. I don’t know what either of us expects, but it clearly isn’t that. Onyx lets himself move because he has to; there’s no other explanation. I know damn well I cannot physically push him anywhere he doesn’t want to go. Still, he falls back onto the furs with a low, surprised sound, eyes widening as I straddle his hips.

The position sends a dull ache through me, enough to make my breath hitch, but not enough to stop. Onyx’s hands fly to my thighs to steady me as if he’s afraid I’ll hurt myself sitting on him.

That is so irritatingly sweet I almost want to bite him.

You are sore, he sends again, and there is actual distress under the words now. No more taking.

“I’m not takin’,” I say, voice hoarse, still halfway dazed and annoyed at him for being noble while looking like something that crawled out of the darkest dream in the world and decided to learn tenderness. “I’m lookin’ at my mate.”

As I say it, I realize that I’ve never had time to look at him like this. Not really.

Onyx is massive even in human shape. I know that. I’ve known it since the first time he stood in the clearing and made the trees behind him feel small. But seeing him spread out under me does something different to my head.

Long black hair spills over the furs around his shoulders. His chest is broad, marked with those dark patterns that run over slate skin, down his ribs, across his stomach in branching lines that look too natural to be tattoos. They follow the shape of him, not decorative, not placed for beauty, but grown into him. Part of him.

My gaze moves lower, pulling his pants down as I go, and I freeze.

“Oh,” I whisper when I notice the same markings continue downward.

Not just over his hips, or along the sharp muscle at his lower stomach. The dark, tree-growth patterns spread into places I somehow didn’t get a proper look at last night. They curl along the root of his cock, branching over the heavy length of him in dark ridges that are not flat at all. The lines wrap, split, and sink into him.

My mouth goes dry as I stare. His fucking cock is ribbed—holy shit.

Then I look back up at his face with what must be blatant betrayal. “I did not feel that last night.”

Something flickers in his expression. Surprise first, then confusion and a strange, almost shy restraint that has no right belonging to a creature who just had his impossible tongue inside me.

You were fevered, he sends carefully. And slick. And full of the bond. I held the shape softer.

“You held the shape softer,” I repeat, still staring down at him, then back at his body, because apparently my brain needs several passes to process this new information. “That’s a thing you can do? You made your cock… smaller and less… like this?”

For you.