Page 162 of Nikolay

“Good,” she whispered. “I love you too.”

I kissed her then because words had become insufficient.

When I positioned myself between her thighs, the urgency I had held at bay returned with punishing force. Even so, I entered her slowly. There was no other way I could have borne it. Her eyes stayed on mine the entire time, wide and trusting and shocked by sensation as I gave her every inch with care bordering on agony.

Goddess.

My jaw tightened hard enough to ache. She was heat and welcome and a form of rightness so profound it nearly felt like grief for all the years before I knew it. Maddie breathed my name and held my shoulders, nails biting just enough to remind me I remained in my body and not some fevered vision granted to mock me.

“You all right?” I asked, though the question emerged ragged.

She nodded once, then again, fiercer. “Better than. Move.”

I obeyed.

Her hips rose to meet mine with growing confidence, her breath hitched and helpless and beautiful beneath me. I kissed her whenever I could not bear the sight of her mouth open on my name. I put my face in her throat when the force of her pleasure moving through the bond threatened to strip speech from me altogether.

Her nails dragged down my back. Sharp enough that the sting flared and vanished under greater sensation.

I liked it far too much.

“Maddie,” I said into her skin, half warning, half prayer.

“I know,” she whispered, though I had not said what.

Did she? Perhaps she did. The bond between us no longer felt theoretical or wounded. It felt alive, voracious, eager to complete itself in every way our natures allowed.

I drew back enough to look at her. “May I drink from you?”

The question cost me more effort than any sentence I had spoken that day. Not because I doubted my desire. Because I would rather have torn my own throat open than take from her against her will.

Her answer came at once.

She tipped her chin up and pulled her hair aside.

The sight of that willing throat offered to me, without fear, without hesitation, shook something ancient in me to the roots.

I kissed the place first.

Then, still moving inside her with care that was beginning to fray under need, I let my fangs descend and broke the skin.

She gasped sharply at the first sting. I felt it in her whole body—the bright, quick bloom of pain, real and brief. Then the bond caught fire.

Pleasure followed with such force that her back arched off the bed and a broken cry tore from her. Heat crashed through both of us, not merely bodily but something older, wilder, stranger. Her blood touched my tongue, and the world altered around its sweetness. Maddie flooded me—her love, her fierce relief, the stubborn faith she had somehow kept through all my failures, and beneath all of it the deep instinctive certainty of mate, mate, mate.

I drank more deeply, not enough to weaken, only enough to join. Her body convulsed around me as another climax took her, harder than the first. My own control nearly shattered under the combined ecstasy of her blood and her body, and the bond now locking into place with relentless finality.

When I lifted my mouth at last, her pulse fluttered wildly under the two small wounds already beginning to seal.

Her canines had descended.

The sight of them in that sweet, flushed face undid something final in me.

She looked up at me, breathless and utterly certain. “Mark you?”

I could not answer for a second.

Then I understood.