LOGINTHEODOSA.He stood up before I’d fully gotten my legs back under me.The loss of his mouth left cool air where heat had been, and for a second I just stayed there with my back to the door and my pulse still hammering between my legs. His ability to rid me of my very sense of being needed to be studied. Then his hands found my hips and turned me, and my palms hit the wood hard enough to sting. His body came in behind mine before I’d finished processing the new position — solid and hot, the rough fabric of his trousers dragging against the backs of my bare thighs as he got them open with one hand and kept me pinned with the other.I felt him against me.Thick. Hard. Already smearing through the wetness he’d left with his mouth, the head of his cock dragging through my folds in a slow deliberate pass that made my fingers curl against the door.“Xahen—”“Quiet.” His voice was rough against the back of my neck. “I’ve got you.”He lined himself up and started pushing in, and the stretch
THEODOSA. His tongue dragged through me once and my balance failed so fast I had to grab his hair with both hands. He made a low sound against my skin that wasn’t a word. It sat somewhere between satisfaction and hunger. His mouth opened over me after that, hot and wet, and he licked into me with no rush at all. The first real stroke pulled my hips forward before I could stop them. Both of his hands pinned them back to the door and held them there while he kept going. He took his time. That was what undid me faster than force would’ve. He licked through my cunt in long passes that ended with his mouth sealing over my clit and sucking until my thighs shook around his head. He only held me tighter for it. Every time a sound got out of me he hummed into my skin and the vibration of it sat right where his tongue was working. I stopped bracing somewhere in the middle of that. There was no clean decision in it. My weight settled into his hands and he took it, adjusted his hold, and
THEODOSA.I let out a slow breath.Xahen’s hand settled over my stomach. The injured one, large enough that his palm covered most of the space between my ribs and the belt of my robe. He didn’t look up at me. His eyes followed his own hand instead, watching as he pressed into the soft give of me, feeling it like he’d been waiting to.His fingers found the belt.He started pulling it loose, slow, almost distractedly, and the words came out low under his breath.“Are you going to stop me?”I swallowed. The belt came free. The robe opened, and underneath was the cotton camisole he’d torn the hem off of earlier when he’d needed something for the wound. Cool air touched my skin. His palm was still on my stomach, still pressing into the softness, still moving like that was the only thing in the bathroom worth his attention.“We shouldn’t,” I breathed.“We should.” He countered. I shook my head. His palm spread over my stomach again, slower, taking more of me with each pass.“We’re blurring
THEODOSA.I'd changed out of the dress.That was the only productive thing I'd done in the last three hours. I'd come home, gone upstairs, stood in the middle of the room still in the ruined wedding dress for longer than I'd like to admit, and then I'd taken it off and put on something that didn't smell like smoke and wasn't evidence of the worst day I'd had in recent memory.Then I'd sat on the bed and waited.That was it. That was the whole of my evening. Me, sitting on the bed, listening to the house, telling myself every twenty minutes that I wasn't worried, that I was simply awake because sleep wasn't an option yet, that the thing sitting in my chest was residual adrenaline from the ferals and the fire and the general catastrophe of the day and had nothing to do with the specific fact that Xahen still wasn't home.Hours.It had been hours.I heard the front door.I was off the bed before I'd made a conscious decision about it, which I noted and chose not to examine, and I was in
THEODOSAI'd worn a path in the floor of the waiting room. Probably. I couldn't see the floor anymore, I was just moving across it, turning, moving back, because standing still was something my body had decided it wasn't capable of right now and I wasn't going to argue with it.The room was one of the palace's side halls — high ceilings, long windows, the kind of space that was meant for something ceremonial and was currently being used to hold everyone who'd made it out of the hall and had nowhere specific to go.Nala was on a bench against the wall with Afnie beside her. Pippa was near the window. A handful of Obsidian guards stood at the door, not blocking, just present, watching the room with the calibrated attention of people who'd received new instructions in the last hour.Binny was pacing.He was doing it differently than me. He was doing it with his hands at the back of his neck and his jaw moving and occasional sounds coming out that weren't quite words, the specific energy
XAHENThe first one came at me before I'd fully cleared the crowd.I put my hand through its chest.It went down. I kept moving.The hall was worse from inside the chaos than it had looked from the altar. The fire had eaten through the center aisle bunting and was working on the left support beam now, throwing everything in orange and shadow, and in that light the ferals were everywhere — not a handful, not a contained situation I could end in under a minute, but dozens of them, streaming in through gaps in the walls I hadn't known existed, moving with the specific wrongness of things that had stopped being wolves somewhere along the way and hadn't become anything better.My shadows came up without asking.That was the thing about the wolf being quiet for once. My own gift moved freely. The shadows rolled off me in a wave, dark and cold, and three ferals coming from my left hit the edge of it and stopped like they'd run into stone.They hadn't.They just understood what they were look







