Turn 15 of 21

Tell him you're ready

MC holds his gaze. Her hand is still on his jaw, feeling the tremor there, the effort of holding still while every instinct he has is screaming at him to move. His eyes are black voids set in a face that no longer pretends to be human, and the tenderness in them is almost unbearable — the rawness of someone who has kept himself locked behind a mask for so long that he doesn't know what his face looks like without it.

"I'm ready," she says.

Valko's breath leaves him in a single, shuddering exhale that washes hot across her face. His forehead drops to hers, and for one long moment he just breathes against her mouth, the points of his canines catching on her lower lip with each inhale, and she can feel the war in him — the instinct to take warring with the need to be gentle, the animal and the man still not fully reconciled, still negotiating the terms of coexistence inside a body that belongs to both of them. His hand on her hip tightens, and she can feel the curved nails pressing through the fabric bunched at her thighs, and the grip is trembling on the edge of something irreversible.

"I need you to hear me," he says, and the words are pressed into the space between their mouths, barely voiced, more vibration than language. "Once I start — once I — there's a point where I won't be able to stop. Where my body won't let me stop. And you need to know that before —"

"I know," MC says. Her legs tighten around his hips, pulling him closer, and the contact makes his whole body seize, every muscle locking at once, a full-body contraction that she can feel through the mat and into the floor.

"I know, Valko. I'm not asking you to be careful with me anymore."

Something in him breaks. Not the restraint — that's already gone, shattered on the floor of this gym alongside the training contract and the professional distance and six months of pretending he didn't want this. What breaks is something deeper, some last internal wall he'd built to protect her from what he is, and when it falls, the sound he makes is devastating — a groan that drops below the range of his already inhuman voice and into something she feels in her bones, in the fillings of her teeth, in the fluid of her inner ear. His mouth finds the junction of her neck and shoulder and presses there, teeth resting against her pulse, not biting, not yet, holding, and the gesture is so loaded with meaning that her body responds before her mind can catch up — her back arches, her hands fist in his hair, and a sound comes out of her that she has never made before.

He enters her in one slow, devastating push. The heat of him is immediate and consuming, a temperature that shouldn't be survivable and is instead overwhelming in a way that whites out every other sensation — the mat beneath her back, the dead air of the gym, the distant shimmer of the mirrors, all of it dissolved into the single fact of him moving into her body with a control that is clearly costing him everything he has left. His jaw is clenched, the tendons in his neck standing out like cables, and the growl that escapes through his teeth is sustained and constant, a frequency that vibrates through her chest cavity and resonates against her ribs. She can feel him shaking — not his arms, not his hands, but something deeper, something structural, as though the act of being inside her while transformed is a load his body wasn't certain it could bear.

"Stay," Valko says against her throat, and the word is barely a word, more air than sound, more prayer than request. His hips draw back and press forward again, and the rhythm he sets is slow and deep and relentless, each push a full-body commitment that drives the breath out of her lungs. The pigment lines on his torso pulse against her bare skin where they're pressed together, and she can feel his heartbeat through them — accelerating now, climbing toward something, each beat a concussive thud that shakes the air between them.