Page 28 of Monster Queen Rising

"Yes."

He bites.

Right where no one else ever has, his canines going through skin and into the one place on me that was still waiting. Blood, sharp and instant. He's biting me and pouring into me in the same beat, his cock pulsing deep, his groan going into my chest through his teeth.

He drags his teeth out slow. Licks me blood. Under it the patch is setting darker and deeper, taking the shape his teeth just left. A mark that won't fade. His.

His side of the line is sealed. Mine is still open, still pulling, and now it's the only thing in the world that pulls.

I get a fistful of his hair and pull his head up off my chest. He comes up loose, wrung out, still riding the aftershocks. I push at his shoulder. He goes with it — rolls onto his back without a second of resistance, lets me put him under me, because the bond is screaming at both of us that I'm not done.

I brace over him, my mouth finding the center of his chest, the same place his teeth found on me. His eyes go black again, the shift rising just from my weight on him and the teeth that close — and he does not throw me, does not buck, does not take. Hebares it to me. He drops his hands flat to the bed and gives me his chest and holds himself open for the one thing he was built to never let anything do — put teeth in him.

"Mine," I tell him.

I bite.

My canines drive into his sternum and his blood floods my tongue and his whole body locks under me, a sound tearing out of him that isn't pain.

And the bond snaps.

Not slow. Not a swell. It closes like a circuit, the sixth and last thread slamming home, and all six light at once inside me — Thaw, Crull, Harek, Dean, Daron, Fen — every line I carry going live in the same instant, and it is too much, it is everything, and for one beat there is no edge where I stop. The horns come up at my hairline, all the way. The slate floods my arms past the elbow. My vision whites at the edges and I am in all six of them and they are in me, and I make a sound against his chest I have never made before.

Then it settles back into one body. Mine.

I let go. I lick the blood the way he licked mine, and he shudders all the way down, and the shift drains out of his skin at last as the seal takes him too.

I ease down onto his chest. He wraps his arms all the way around me and holds, still inside me, both of us bleeding and spent and sealed.

He doesn't move for a long time.

His face turns into my hair and his arms lock across my back and he starts to shake, and the shaking turns into something quieter. He's crying. Not loud. Not hard. Breath moving against the side of my head, his chest hitching under my cheek.

I don't say anything. I bring a hand up and cradle his head to me.

He cries for a long time. I hold him through all of it.

He stops, eventually. His breath evens out and I feel him come the rest of the way back. I lift my head up, and he tips his face up out of my hair to find me. His eyes are red-rimmed, there's blood at the corner of his mouth.

He looks up at me. And when he speaks the words come — easier, the seal handing his voice back a piece at a time.

"I chose," he says. "Tonight."

"I chose you too. Always."

His breath steadies. The line between us sits quiet and full.

"Always," he says. "With you. I'm still me."

The words go through me.

I hold his face. I let him see I believe him.

He lifts up under me and kisses me, slow, no canines, no shift, just the man, and he tastes like my blood and his and salt, and there's more of him here than there's been in months.

He brushes a piece of hair off my face.

"Stay," he says.