EliRonan is inventive in the way storms are. Whatever the room offers, he turns into a weapon, a stage, a lesson.Against the wall first. My spine thuds against the logs hard enough that dust shakes loose, his mouth crushing mine. His hand locks around my throat, cutting me down to the sound of my own pulse under his grip. “Breathe,” he growls, and I do, shoving air past his palm, the burn of it as sharp as the ache in my chest. Tasting obedience and oxygen at the same time.He lifts me like I’m nothing. My legs clamp over his hips, the wide muscle of them grinding between my thighs. His cock drives up into me, brutal, blunt, unstoppable. I’m slick already, my body won’t stop producing while my Alpha needs me, and it gushes more with every thrust, spilling down my ass, painting his skin, splattering the wall. He uses it, pistoning harder, each push a wet, obscene slap. He forces me wide open, the stretch biting, the ache sweet, his knot swelling at the base and grinding against me a
EliThe cabin learns our names in a hundred new ways until the walls carry them like scars. The fire burns down. Ronan burns hotter. He doesn’t speak sentences anymore. Only the words a storm uses.“Mine.”“Down.”“More.”“Come.”He is in his human shape, but the wolf has swallowed the man whole. Hunger wears a body and that body fits me like a glove.The first cycle is violence turned worship. No pause, no courtesy, only weight and heat and the steady, unarguable insistence of a claim that never ends. I stop thinking about whether I can take it and start thinking about how long I can stand it, and then I stop thinking about that too because he has found a rhythm inside me that erases questions.I don’t need to do anything. That’s the revelation. He moves me where he wants me. Wall, table, bed, floor, wall again. Hands sure, impatient, demanding. When I sag, he growls, and my spine finds steel. When I fight, he pins me with one palm at my throat and the world goes very quiet, and I
EliRonan doesn’t walk. He hunts.Every step closer rattles something deep in me, that bond screaming between us like a live wire about to snap. My thighs are already trembling, my cock hard and dripping.His hand slams against my chest, pinning me flat to the wall. His palm finds my throat next, hot and rough, squeezing just enough that my lungs stutter. My mouth falls open on instinct, a sound torn out of me that isn’t protest.His cock drags against my thigh, heavy, leaking, hot enough to scald. He snarls my name into my jaw, teeth scraping hard enough that I know I’ll wear the bruise later.“Mine.”It’s not a word. It’s law.The next second he’s grinding me into the wall, rut-dumb and reckless. His hand doesn’t leave my throat. He licks me like he’s trying to taste the marrow through my skin. When he pulls back, his eyes are blown wide, all wolf, all need.“Knees.”My legs fold before my brain catches up. The stone floor bites my skin. I don’t care. I want this. Gods, I want it. H
EliRonan looks at me like I’m water and he’s been dying for days.He’s taken me three times already and with each release his need only seems to increase.Something in him slips. I can see it go. The last thread of leashed control, snapping silent as spider silk. His pupils blow wide, gold eating the dark, and then there’s nothing left but appetite wearing his face.“Mine,” he says.Not a sentence. An environment.My body answers before the rest of me catches up. Shiver, heat, pulse stuttering into a sprint. This is the thing I pretend to be afraid of and dream about anyway.He’s on me again without ceremony, a storm that forgot how to hold rain. The first impact knocks the breath out of me. My back hits the wall, shoulders slam hard enough that the wood creaks. His hand closes around my throat and holds. Not simply to take air. To take everything. Sound leaves him in a shudder. He bites my jaw and licks the sting like he can put the hurt back in and keep it. The smell of him rolls
EliWe cross the line into Blackthorn and the air changes.Not the temperature, the weight. The world seems to lean toward Ronan like iron to a magnet. The bond kicks under my skin. Ronan stumbles once. It’s small, a hitch only someone looking for it would see.I’m always looking for him.“Keep moving,” Jace says, low and clipped, eyes hunting the treeline behind us. “We’re not safe yet.”Ronan breathes like the forest owes him air and it isn’t paying fast enough. He hasn’t let go of the back of my neck since leaving the Redmaw camp.Fingers hot, steady, possessive enough that something traitorous in me quiets. Then his grip tightens, a not-human growl scraping his throat, and my name drags out of him like it has teeth.“Eli.”He stops dead. The hand on my nape turns to iron. Gold eats his pupils.Jace swears softly. “Rut.”Hazel blows out a breath that is eighty percent relief and twenty percent mischief. “Finally.”Mara flicks me a look that says are you alright and also I told you
EliThe ropes fall and my arms go dead.Pins and needles riot down to my wrists. Ronan catches me before my knees hit the ground and the world does that awful slow-tilt thing. Outside, Redmaw howls.Inside, Ronan is very close and the pain ebbs everywhere he touches me.“Can you stand?” he asks, voice a grindstone.“Not gracefully,” I rasp.His mouth twitches like a broken attempt at a smile. “Grace is optional.”Ronan slides my arm over his shoulder and hauls me up like I weigh nothing. Pain sizzles through my ribs and I bite it down so I don’t embarrass myself by crying out.“Knife,” he says, and tucks steel into my palm. The hilt is warm from his body. “If they touch you, you open them.”The bond thrums, weak but present under the chemical damp they painted on me. It hurts in a way that isn’t quite pain.Redmaw’s camp is a basin of fire and shadow. Wolves flood toward us in a ragged semicircle, faces eager, hungry, certain of the sport they were promised. Two bodies already blee