LOGINTHEODOSA.I stared at her, lost for a moment .“I didn’t think I was eligible for a heat,” I whispered. Afnie sat quietly beside me, taking it in like it wasn’t the craziest thing she’d ever heard, and somehow that made it worse.“Is it truly, truly possible?” I panicked, glancing between the both of the’m. “I thought a mated couple had to be fully marked before the female could go into heat.”“That’s usually the case,” Nala said. She put her hand under her chin.“When a male marks his female it disrupts her biology,” she said. “Her hormones, her instincts, basically everything shifts. It intensifies the need to mate with him until the bond is fully completed. Nature’s doing.” She paused. “But another thing is this… the timeline depends on the strength of the bond. For example, an alpha male could send his mate into heat way quicker than a beta blooded male, or any lower rank.”Afnie and I stared at each other, then at Nala.“But Xahen never marked Theo,” Afnie said.“That’s true,” N
THEODOSA.My door flew open and I jerked awake.A second later the blinds went up and sunlight came straight at my face like it had a personal grievance with me."Rise and shine!"I got my hand up over my eyes and squinted through my fingers at Nala, who was standing at the window looking entirely too pleased with herself for this hour of the morning. Whatever she'd had for breakfast, I needed to stay away from it permanently.She crossed to the bed, grabbed both my arms and pulled until I was sitting upright."Wait one second," she said, already heading back for the door. "I'll be right back."She was gone before I could respond.I sat there blinking at the wall.She came back with a steaming cup and set it on the side table next to me.I looked at it. "What is that?"Her brows furrowed. "Coffee."That couldn’t be right. Nala made things in cups, hot things that steamed and smelled strange and tasted like whatever plant had wronged her most recently. Coffee was not something she wa
XAHEN.She was still coming down from it.Her scent was buried in my nose, thick and sweet and completely inescapable. Her arousal was sitting on my cock like a reminder I didn't need. My shoulder burned where her nails had been. I didn't look at the marks.My canines were throbbing with the urge to sink into her skin, and that was exactly the problem.This needed to stop.I pulled off her immediately and stood up on unsteady legs. Her blue eyes widened and I looked away a second too late. She was spread across my bed with her hair everywhere, her chest heaving and her thighs still parted, looking like an invitation I couldn't afford to accept. Her breasts were heavy flushed swells connected to a slender waist, forming a milky and freckled path downward to those reddish curls covering her pale pink pussy.It was the most inviting site in the world. I turned my back to her and shoved myself back into my slacks, tucking away what was currently making clear thinking impossible. The p
**ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO.**XAHEN.Kane had talked for the better part of the morning.I let him finish because it was faster than cutting him off and arguing through the parts he hadn't said yet. He laid everything out in order, the way he always did, and when he was done I told him I was going anyway. He ran out of words. That didn't happen often with Kane.The councilors weren't coming. The current set were all past sixty, half of them used canes, and the Pitts would finish them before a feral got the chance. A guard detail would slow me down. I'd planned to go alone.My wife wouldn't have it.I watched her back as she moved through the trees ahead of me.She knew this terrain in the way people knew things they'd learned the hard way.Her feet found solid ground without her looking down, stepping around the soft patches without breaking stride. I caught the smell every few minutes — low and chemical and wrong in a way that the upper level didn't have, that nothing down here seemed to
THEODOSA. The anger in his voice moved through me before I could intercept it, and I was immediately annoyed at myself for how my body received it, the heat that traveled straight down my spine in response to his irritation specifically. He was being demanding and difficult and I was responding to it exactly the way I shouldn’t be. I was filing that away for later. My other hand joined the first. There was no belt. I worked his button open and pulled the zipper down and he wasn’t wearing anything underneath, and his cock pushed free between us, heavy and hot where it settled against my lower belly, thick from base to tip with the head shiny in the low light. His piercings pressed cold into my skin, that ladder of gold bars I’d been not-thinking-about for weeks. The breath that left me was not controlled. I wrapped my hand around him properly, his piercings shifting cold against my palm, and the weight and specific hardware of him made something settle low and warm in me that
THEODOSA. I swallowed and followed him. The path through his cabin sat in my body like a memory I hadn’t asked to keep. Same route Kane had walked me down in the dark the very first night. My stomach pulled tight walking into the bedroom. The last time I’d been in this room I’d run out of it while he destroyed furniture behind me. The time before that I’d been too focused on surviving to look at anything properly. Both times I’d been moving through on borrowed time, too afraid or too desperate to actually see the place. I took it in now. Every surface was wood, handmade by the look of the grain and the joints but finished to a standard that didn’t match anything handmade I’d ever seen. The bed was massive. The dresser was massive. Everything in the space was built for someone his size. I walked toward the bed as Xahen pulled a drawer from the dresser, reached inside and worked something open. He picked something out, slammed the tin shut, and pushed the drawer back into place
XAHEN.I couldn't focus on a single fucking word being said.It was on days like this that I hated the fact that I didn't deal transport with Duskmire and Lucenia.Maybe if I didn't move important cargo between realms, I wouldn't have to sit here and listen to my council bicker around me while my h
THEODOSA. Let him kill me without a fight. The words kept repeating in my head as I stared up at him. He was asking me to agree to my own death. To just stand there and let him end me if he decided I was a threat. No defense. No escape. Just acceptance. And the worst part was that I was actual
THEODOSA.I stayed on my knees.I couldn't move. Couldn't think. Couldn't do anything but stare at him while his words echoed in my skull.I decline.He'd made me kneel. Made me humiliate myself in front of him. And then he'd said no like it was nothing. Like I was nothing."Why?"The word came out
THEODOSA. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking. Nala walked beside me with a pace that said she wasn’t going to slow down no matter how much I dragged my feet. The path toward the palace grounds stretched out ahead of us like a death march. “You wanted this,” Nala said without looking at me. “I know.







