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Onyx

Lucas sleeps with my marks on his skin. The sight should settle me—it does not.

He lies on his stomach in the center of the bed, one arm shoved beneath the pillow, the other hanging over the side as if reaching for the floor where I once slept because the bed was too soft and the den-that-is-not-my-den had not yet learned my shape.

The sheet is tangled low over his hips. His back is bare to me in the moonlight, broad and warm and marked in places where he asked me to put my mouth, my hands, my teeth. Not the sealing mark at his shoulder, but smaller claims scattered across shoulder, ribs, hip, the inside of one thigh hidden now beneath the sheet.

Human skin remembers easily. It blooms under wanting. He had wanted that tonight. He had looked at me with his face flushed and his voice rough, city polish gone almost entirely under the twang that comes when he is too tired to smooth himself down, and he had told me he wanted to feel me afterward.

I gave him what he asked; too much, perhaps.

I sit beside him on the too-soft bed and stare at the shape of my hand resting near his shoulder, careful not to touch, though I want to. If I touch him, he may wake. If he wakes, he will look at me with those tired green eyes and ask what is wrong, and I do not know how to answer without bruising the warmth still sleeping in him.

What is wrong?

His old mate came to his den.

The thought rises ugly and immediate, and my claws press beneath the human shape of my nails. Old mate is not the right word. I know that. Lucas would correct me. He would frown, perhaps soften, perhaps sigh and say, “She was my ex, Onyx, not my mate,” and he would be right in every way that matters to humans.

She did not carry his mark. She did not know his true scent beneath soap and sadness. She did not hear the bond. She did not touch the deep place in him that answered me from first sight.

But she stood at his porch.

She looked at the door he had denied her.

She looked at my mark.

She smelled of old claim and regret, and the moment I scented her sadness curled around manipulation, something in me went dark.

I wanted to remove her.

Not only frighten her. Not only stand between her and Lucas. Not only make the clearing itself reject her until she returned to the road with no memory of why she came. I wanted my hands on the shape of the threat. I wanted her scent gone from his porch, his stairs, the air near him. I wanted the forest to swallow every trace of the pain she had left in him and give nothing back.

…but that is not like me.

I have killed. I will not soften that truth. Lucas knows some of it, though not enough. I have ended men who came with fire. Men who laid poison near dens, who shot wolves for sport and left them rotting because the body on the ground meant less to them than the story at the tavern. Men who crossed old boundaries again and again after warning, who tried to break land that had not belonged to them in any true way.

My violence has always had a root: protection, balance, and punishment, where punishment kept more harm from growing.

Tonight felt different. Tonight, when I kissed Lucas after she left, the bond roared with mine until I barely knew where thought ended and instinct began. He answered me—Aestrata, help me—he answered me so beautifully. He pulled me into the den-that-is-not-my-den and told me he knew what he wanted, and the thing that had been pacing under my ribs for two months broke loose.

I held him. I marked him again because he asked for marks. I let him feel wanted without softness hiding the teeth beneath it. I was wild, and he liked me wild. He said my name as if it held him together and pulled me apart at once.

Lucas is not fragile. He is not something made to sit above a hearth and be admired from a safe distance. He is a man with strong hands, stubborn eyes, and a mouth sharp enough to cut fear into pieces he can laugh at.

He asked, and I listened. When he told me harder, I gave harder. When his breath caught wrong, I stopped. When his hand pressed flat to my chest, I stilled so quickly the bed creaked under the force of it. I did not hurt him beyond what he chose and wanted.

Still, the rage remains. It sits behind my teeth now that he sleeps. It tastes too close to something old.

My brother liked human fear. He liked the moment a human understood the old story had found them. He liked the sounds that came when soft bodies learned there would be no mercy. He became Varkhyn not in one great breaking, not in a storm of blood that made the earth cry out all at once, but by small permissions.

A little more delight in panic. A little less care for balance. A little hunger that had nothing to do with need. One day, perhaps, he looked at his own reflection in dark water and saw only what had always waited beneath.

I look at Lucas sleeping, covered in marks he wanted, and fear coils through me with a new face.

What if Lucas wakes the same wrongness in me?