Page 27 of Dark Mate

His breath shortens. The wire pulls tight through him. I know what that means now.

I brace and it doesn’t help.

He drives up into me and the air leaves me in a sound I don’t choose. “Aah!” He’s so big the stretch of his cock is thewhole world for a second, that first deep shove splitting me open around more than my body’s decided it can take. No working up to it. He’s justin, all the way, and my back bows off his chest.

Then he moves, and feeling him move is worse. Better. I can’t tell anymore.

Every drag out leaves me empty, clenching after him. Every drive back fills me past full. I feel his cock forcing my walls apart, the thick of it, the heat of it, the slick of my own body letting him in with a wet sound that fills the dark each time he pulls back and slams home. I’m soaked. I can hear it. I can hearme.

His cock shifts inside me, curls, presses, finds the spot near the front of me that makes my whole body jerk, and stays on it. Drags over it. Again. My hips push back into him without asking me first. I’m chasing it. I hate that I’m chasing it and I do it anyway.

“Oh—oh god?—”

The knot’s swelling at the base. I feel it build against me with every thrust, fatter each time, pushing at the rim of me, asking in. The stretch starts to burn, a bright line of too-much right at the edge, and my body opens for it because it doesn’t know what else to do with him.

Then his wings open over us.

The air changes. The sealed-in hush cracks wide, his breathing bouncing off something huge, the dark going tall above me. All that reach, held up by the same muscle pinning me down.

His chest fills. He drives to the root and holds.

He roars. “RRRAAAHH!”

It goes through the walls, through the furs, through me, through the knot buried in me, so I feel the sound in the place where we’re joined. My ears ache with it. And right there, with him locked deep and roaring and the vibration climbing my spine into my skull, I break.

I come so hard the dark goes white behind my eyes. “Aaah!” My walls clamp down on him in waves I can’t stop, gripping the knot, and it sets and seals and locks us together while I’m still going. Then the knot shakes to life against the spot it’s locked over, and the coming won’t stop, one peak folding into the next while his cum floods me, the fullness tipping me past anything I’ve got words for.

His cock kicks, and his cum spills into me, hot and thick and sealed in, the pressure swelling deep behind my navel until I’m packed full of him. He shudders over me, all that weight emptying. “Grraah.” His mouth drops to the crown of my head.

I’m crying. Not from pain, the venom turns that into a neighbor of good, the burn folding into the pleasure until I can’t pull them apart. I’m crying because the roar cracked something open in my chest and I’ve got nowhere to put what came out.

The wings fold shut. The tall dark drops back to the small warm dark, and he’s just a shape again instead of something that could black out a sky.

His breath rasps against the top of my head.

“I’m okay,” I get out. My voice is shot. “I’m okay. That was just—that was a lot.”

A sound rolls out of his chest. Low. Not a word. But it answers me. His tail comes up and wipes the wet off my cheek, clumsy and careful at the same time, and I let it.

The lull settles over us slow.

I reach up. I want to know what made that sound.

Past his jaw, up to the top of his head, and there they are. His horns. The left one curves back smooth, the whole line clean under my fingers, sweeping to a point. I find the tip. Sharp. I think about the scrape of stone the night the wall came open. This is what made that noise. This is what came through the rock to get to me.

The right one’s wrong.

I find the break partway up—a jag, a chunk gone, the edge rough where it should be smooth. The curve just stops and turns into an angle, shoved forward instead of back. I keep my fingers on the rough part.

“Someone broke this,” I say. Quiet. “It didn’t grow this way. Something snapped it.”

He goes still under my hand.

“And nobody set it. It just—healed however it could.” My thumb moves over the bad edge. “By itself.”

His breath has gone careful.

My hand drifts down without me telling it to. Down the thick column of his neck. And there’s a line there. Raised. Even. Running side to side across the softest part of him, too straight to be a fight, too neat to be an accident.