Page 40 of Incarnate

I trace the scar with my fingertip, filling with authority that I actually have a mark on him. His hands tighten on my waist. I can feel the bind between us vibrating like a struck bell, the frequency climbing.

He lifts me after removing his pants. My legs wrap around his waist, and his mouth finds my neck, pressing against the place where I’m aware a mating bite used to be, some concepts of a former life barely attainable, but there.

He lays me on the bed, his weight settling over me, and for a moment we're just breathing. His forehead against mine. His hands framing my face. Then his lips graze against mine, and I’m overwhelmed with a memory of the first time I did this, of kissing a demon who had found me, broken. Who was pure obsession.

I press my lips harder, wanting to devour his lust. To remind him of the mate he has. Kallúm enters me slowly, my legs spread apart around him, and I groan into his mouth.

He wasted no time.

My body knows him, knows the weight of him. Knows the sound he makes when he buries himself fully and holds there, his mouth open against my collarbone. My body is at pure ease and pleasure, falling further into memories of when we first made love. Of how I held out so stubbornly, enraged that he had forced the bind on me.

And yet when those dangerous, impervious eyes had completely fallen apart at seeing me before him, I knew I had found a worshipper.

Kallúm moves harder, deeper, as if he can feel me returning, his hips flush with the back of my thighs as I throw my head back and moan. The bind is screaming now, a sustained note that fills the room⁠—

I’m next aware of being Nara.

Of how small Penelope feels.

My hands rise and grab his face with a strength that isn't Penelope's. And yet who am I, now? I don’t recall my life with my pantheon, but I know what it’s like to be one with the ocean.

Kallúm slows to a halt, his hard cock flexing inside of me. His eyes widen, the gold flaring. He knows. He can feel the difference. The grip on his face, the power behind it, the way my body suddenly holds him instead of yielding.

"You know I loved you, Kallúm, despite what happened," I say, my voice deeper, resonant. "Now ease my ache."

The sound that tears from him is not human.

He drives into me with a force that rattles the bed frame, his hands gripping my hips like he’s envisioned hearing that for years and years, pulling me against him with each thrust. The bite mark on my neck ignites with a searing, white-hot burn that’s deeper than skin, all the way into the soul, and I scream as the bind reseals.

The broken threads weave back together, the tether between us thickening, solidifying, becoming something unbreakable. His soul crashes into mine like a wave against a cliff. For one blinding moment I can feel everything he feels—the decades of loneliness, the fury, the grief, the desperate love that never dimmed, never wavered, never once considered the possibility that I wouldn't come back, and yet was terrified he was somehow wrong.

An orgasm rises within me, Kallúm grabbing my wrists and holding me down with one hand pinned over my head as he has his way, watching my face with blinding certainty. I squeeze against his flesh, my body overcome with pleasure that only a mate could provide.

My back arches against him, overcome with ecstasy as my climax consumes me. His mouth crashes down on mine, his tongue sweeping inside to press against my own, sucking on my lip.

Then his body goes rigid as he’s as flush as possible, growling out as his own pleasure washes over him. The bite mark on my neck pulses once, twice, and then settles into a steady burn that matches his heartbeat exactly.

I lie beneath him, gasping, and he releases my wrists. I don’t fully feel like Nara, and yet I’m conclusively no longer just Penelope.

Kallúm's face is pressed against my neck, against the old bite, licking it before kissing his mark.

"You came back to me," he whispers.

I touch his face once more, tracing the line of his jaw. I feel the bind humming between us, steady and whole, a bridge rebuilt after decades of ruin.

I can recall the need to leave, the desperate attempt to return to my pantheon. If I died in this Realm, I could be reincarnated as a human, and Moriganna would have found me, just as she did at the fruit stand dressed as a crone.

Oh, how she knows me… she knew I’d return here.

"I came back," I say.

He presses his forehead to mine and breathes, and we stay like that as the ocean gently washes against the shore outside.

P E N E L O P E

I wake with the ocean in my chest.

It’s more than the bind, or the waves outside. This is different. Deeper. A tidal rhythm rises and falls with my breathing, as if my lungs are connected to something vast and ancient that exists beyond the walls of this room.