my fingers clasped onto her hip, stalling there, as if not touching her was impossible.
“Mmh,” she hummed. She reached down to my hand, nudging the metal band with a fingertip. “If I remove it now, are you going to refuse seconds?”
I arched an eyebrow at her.
“My heat… It takes more than one time to sate it.” She gave me a smile filled with the kind of promise that tightened my body with primal urgency.
I gripped her hip harder, enough that it would leave another set of bruises next to the ones already starting to bloom there. “I’ll sate your heat. You know as much.”
She did know—understood on a primitive level what her delicious scent did to my lizard brain. Even if I’d been inclined to fight the bond now tying me to her, I’d be unable to resist her body’s call to mine.
A sliver of darkness pierced the now-warm place in my chest. I knew the futility in fighting the call to mate.
“Grim,” she murmured, the softness in her tone pulling my focus back to her face. I saw it in her eyes then. The understanding. The empathy.
But this was nothing like then.
She was nothing like it.
I moved without thought, rolling her onto her back and pressing myself down over her, letting her pelvis bear my weight. She mewed and wrapped her legs around my hamstrings, desire sparking behind her hazy eyes. She submitted so readily for me. She may have been wrought from fire and steel, but beneath me, she was soft, yielding flesh; a warm, thornless embrace.
“Remove the ring and I’ll give you seconds,” I purred.
She grinned up at me, and the shock of it struck deep. A glimmer of genuine happiness. Here, in this place. Despite everything that had happened to her—and still would. It resonated in my chest, the sensation alien, yet dangerously addictive.
Annabel didn’t pay my dumbstruck expression any mind. She looked to my hand now resting next to her head and reached for it. I let her lift it and place it between her breasts, my fingers brushing the soft mounds. Heat rose from where my cock lay along her center, sparking images of my lips around one of those dusky pink nipples.
“I’d like you to,” she said, her voice hoarse, and I realized my thoughts must have been written all over my face. “If you want.”
Want.
I forced my gaze from her breasts to her face, staring at her, into her, until the bond between us thrummed.
Annabel didn’t say anything more, but she held my gaze, chest rising and falling in rapid waves underneath my palm as she slowly wrapped her fingers around the ring on my thumb and pulled.
It slid off with ease, the void where my magic had been numbed springing to life. I groaned at the sensation, the darkness of it flooding through my veins and pouring straight through my bond into Annabel.
She gasped, her eyes going wide, and blind panic seized me by the throat. Hissing, I yanked it out of her and back into the place inside me where I kept it safely locked away—but where I expected agony to follow, only curiosity did.
“Do that again,” she said.
“What?” was all I managed through gritted teeth still clenched with the remnants of terror.
Light flooded through our bond in response, rushing into me until it illuminated every dark corner of my mind. I gasped and jerked in reflex, but it wasn’t painful. It was…
I groaned and squeezed my eyes shut as my magic rose to meet hers, whirling around her light in smoky tendrils, curiously examining the golden glow—her very essence.
Soulmate.
It throbbed in my mind, so similar to the word that’d filled me after I’d claimed her, yet… not the same. Her body was her own, a sacred space she allowed me to share, but this? Her soul? Feeling her very essence inside of me was like a soothing balm smeared over the ragged edges of my own conscience. As if long ago a piece of me had been broken off, and now it was finally being melded back into place.
Her lips skimmed mine, gentle and questioning. I didn’t open my eyes, mindlessly pressing my mouth to hers in hungry demand, even as my focus remained on the wonderous sensation of her magic within me.
Annabel moaned softly, parting her lips in invitation. The touch of her soft tongue against mine made me shiver, and when I deepened my kiss, I let my dark power well through the bond and back into