로그인XAHEN.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
THEODOSA. I was a mess. That was the most honest thing I could say about myself right now. I’d been in that bathroom long past the point of reason, standing on cold tiles with the steam long gone, going over the last several hours and finding every single decision questionable. Particularly the one on the shore. Particularly the part where I’d looked at Xahen Ithorno in front of his councilors and said I wanted to honor our deal right now. Why had I done that. His products were all over me. His soap, his shampoo, everything in that shower. I’d used all of it and now I was standing here smelling like him, that earthy scent I’d been trying very hard not to develop opinions about for weeks. It was in my hair and on my skin, and I’d come out of that shower more torn than I’d been going in, which was really saying something. My hands wouldn’t stay still against my thighs. I was just as scared as I was nervous, both sitting in my chest at equal weight, neither one winning, and I didn
XAHEN. The shower had been running for forty-five minutes. I needed to leave my own home. Because that’s where I was. Standing in my living room, unable to sit, unable to stop moving, four attempts deep into talking myself out of going into that spare bathroom and dragging her back out of it before something happened that I hadn’t planned for. I had a reason for agreeing to this deal. A real one, not the kind I manufactured after the fact to make a bad decision feel smarter than it was. Over the week, I’d come to realize keeping distance from Theodosa for weeks on end had proved me to be a coward. It wasn’t being strategic. Or patient. It was being a coward who didn’t want to face what her being alive in my kingdom actually meant for me. So the answer was proximity. Put her close and see if I could handle it. If I could fucking handle her. But it felt like a loosing battle the second she climbed my stairs. She’d walked through the door and I’d pointed at the en-suite w
XAHEN.Nala poured tea into both cups with steady hands. "I know you barely remember the things that happen when you black out or when you shift." She set the teapot down and looked at me. "And I'm starting to think that's reason enough for you to try to put this life behind you."I wished it was t
THEODOSA. I found myself staring at Xahen's sleeping face when the back door creaked open. My entire body jerked at the sound. Nala's harsh whisper cut through the cottage. "Theo!" I looked over and found her crouched by the kitchen with Afnie behind her. Afnie's eyes were so wide I could see t
XAHEN.I leaned back in my chair and stared at her like she'd grown a second head.She couldn't be fucking serious right now."You kept this from me?"Nala didn't even flinch at my tone. "Now that I've told you, what does it change?" She had the nerve to look calm while she said it. "Knowing you, y
XAHEN. My skull was trying to split itself open from the inside.I became aware of that first. The pounding behind my eyes, the pressure building at my temples like something wanted out. Then came the rest of it in pieces. Warmth on my left side. The crackle of a fire. The familiar smell of herbs







