Page 169 of Griffin Food

The world spins.

When I rouse myself from the detonation, I’m face down over the table with a cock lodged in my pussy. The thick swelling butting enticingly against my entrance tells me it is Lark.

Lark

I don’t remember Darrion leaving, nor my shift to human form. I don’t even remember how Violet came to be face down over Atlas’s desk, with my cock buried inside her soft cunt all the way to the knot. I only know that that is where she is. And this is where I am. And we are both fucking close.

I love this woman wholly, completely, deeply. I didn’t know that kind of love existed until she entered my life. The past few weeks of distance, while understandable, existed as an echo of the many times before when we loved her through her heat. And then she forgot.

I told myself it was not the same. But the heart is not always rational, and past hurts can linger.

And now all this talk of barbing? Gods. My fingers grip her hips tightly. She is making cute little mewling sounds and humping back for more. My knot is hard and engorged to the point of misery and pleasure in equal degree.

There’s a moment of resistance when I push before it just slips right in and nestles there. And my entire world narrows to the focus of where the two of us are joined, the pulsing beat of our two heartbeats, where we become one. She cries out as her channel begins fisting over the knot in a way that compels me to follow through.

My hips jerk, and I grind against her, shuddering in the throes of my release, growling and tempering the urge to half-shift. I want to be human this time—need her to feel me as a man.

Violet

“Do you remember me now, mate?”

Lark’s words carry a wound that sparks through the bond. One that bears echoes of the past and our days of traveling… and the many times when I forgot.

“I do. Always. I could never forget again.” Guilt mixes with the pleasure of our intimate connection. How they cared for me, quietly, and without reservation—how they never once pressed the advantage they had. With different men, such a situation could have played out tragically. “The memory will never be locked away again. Not now we are bonded forever.”

“Damn right, lass,” he grits out. “But sometimes a man still needs to press a point. The deeper kind of reminder, just because he chooses to, and he can.”

“Oh,” I gasp, a frisson of fear and arousal as I feel him kick inside me… and begin to grow. Bigger, harder, thicker.

“What exactly are you doing today?” Atlas says coolly.

I had almost forgotten he was there, even though he was holding me, fingers against my nape as I clutch his other hand.

“Partial shift,” Lark hisses through his teeth.

Atlas chuckles darkly.

The pleasure turns deep and twisty. So full. Pulsing together, as I once more come apart.

Then I feel the snap.

Not a decision. Not even a choice. More like a wall giving way… the kind that has held for so long.

Atlas moves. Nothing like the deliberate patience I have come to know as him. He lifts me from the desk and Lark’s embrace. His hands are everywhere, rough with urgency. I feel the rumble move through him before I hear it—something between a growl and a groan, deep and unguarded.

“Atlas—“

“Quiet,” he says. His voice has lost its careful register. Raw at the edges. Almost warning me not to name what is happening, lest the naming of it restore his sense.

As if I would. Not when I have craved this for so long, the side he shielded me from, and yet which I now demand he reveal.

His wings snap wider, casting a shadow… Aldric clacks his beak once in what might be the griffin equivalent of losing his mind entirely.

Atlas

She is back. She is with us. I feel her essence through the bond as both a balm and a raging fire. The control I pride myself upon is shattered. But that is what happens when the woman you love begs you to give her your barb.

She wants to be bred.