Page 27 of Monster Queen Rising

"I know. Breathe."

His shoulders heave. The shift climbs higher, crests, and then comes down, because he decides it will. He breathes. The lines pull back. The gold comes back into the black by degrees.

He turns around.

"Almost came at you."

"You didn't. Come back."

He comes. Between my knees again, unsteady still, the shift only half down, but him, behind his own eyes, looking at me.

He gets the words out. "In you."

"Yes."

"In the cell—" It breaks off. He can't carry it.

I take it off him. "Bite me at the end."

He nods, ragged with relief that I said it for him. "At the end."

He climbs onto the bed and lays me back into the pillows and settles his hips between my thighs, and for a second he only holds there, forehead to mine, the hardened length of him against me, both of us breathing the bond like it's air.

"Jen."

"Now."

He pushes in.

Slow, because he's making it slow, his jaw locked, his arms shaking on either side of my head, and my body opens around him because the line is wide and I've been ready since he said my name in the doorway. He's thick, and the stretch pulls a sound out of me, and he takes the sound. He seats himself all the way and stops. Buried. Not moving. His face down in my neck, breathing like he ran here.

"Fen, I've got you."

He gathers himself against me, his forehead at my temple, and holds there one beat longer.

Then he moves.

Slow doesn't survive. He builds — out almost to the tip and back deep, again, the drag of him hitting the place that winds me tight. The bed is small and there's nowhere to go and the room fills with the sound of him driving into me, the wet slide, the low broken growl in his chest on every stroke.

"Harder," I tell him.

He gives it to me. His hands lock on my hips and he fucks into me hard enough to put the headboard against the wall, and I'm climbing fast, my heels dug into the backs of his thighs, my nails down his ribs as I clench. My whole body tight and I let loose screaming his name.

That breaks him.

The shift roars all the way up. Lines, claws pressed into my hips without breaking skin, the black flooding his eyes, his lip peeling off his teeth. His hips stutter and lock, because he's rightat the edge of coming and right at the edge of going under, and he's caught between them.

"Fen."

His eyes find mine.

"Stay with me. I'm yours. Stay."

He stays.

The shift hangs at full and goes no higher. He's looking at me through the black and my name in his mouth is the leash and he lets it hold him. Then he moves again, no tremor left in it, just power, his hands clamped on my hips and his cock driving deep, and I'm cresting, again.

"I'm going to—"