Page 297 of Pucking Feral: Part Two

There is nothing here.

My vision grays at the edges and my lungs lock. His teeth are still buried in my shoulder, his knot still pulsing inside me, but my entire reality breaks away and what's left is the bond tearing open between us.

I feel… nothing, and everything all at once.

Valek's suffering isn't a single wound I can hope to soothe and cradle.

There is only a vast, echoing emptiness where I somehow know fear and horror should be, and the drive to fight fiercely until we never feel anything again.

Until we destroy everything that hurt us.

But I am not empty.

I push back.

I don't know if it's even possible or if I'm just an omega running on sheer fucking stubbornness and love. But I shove everything I have through the bond like I'm packing a wound.

The smell of the pack house kitchen in the morning. Plague's secret tea he thinks Valek hasn't discovered. Whiskey's booming laugh shaking the fucking light fixtures. Wraith's warm, strong body wrapped protectively around me. Thane's gentle touch and possessive stubbled kisses.

The nest, with all of them in it.

With Valek in it.

Bodies tangled, heartbeats overlapping, the loft warm and dark and safe.

Blood fills my mouth again. Only this time, it isn't phantom blood from his buried memories.

It's his.

Coursing in hot rivers from where my teeth have sank into his shoulder, binding him to me in a frantic last-ditch effort to pull him out of the deep.

And the slightest flicker lights up the dark.

Chapter 61

Valek

I'm drowning.

The bond is tearing me apart from the inside, a chest wound with no exit, spilling everything I've spent so many fucking years bricking up behind walls so thick I forgot what was behind them.

And she's in it.

She's in the black. In the nothing. Swimming through the bloodied wreckage of every fucked-up thing I've ever done and been and survived, and I feel her inside my chest, in every cell, the tendrils of our shaky bond piercing into my very marrow.

My teeth are still buried in her shoulder.

I can't let go.

I have to. Have to pull my teeth free and slam the door shut and shove everything back down in the yawning pit inside me where it belongs. My jaw is locked so tight it's hurting me, it must be hurting her, and her warm blood is so copper-sweet on my tongue there's nothing else I ever want to taste again.

But she's doing something to me.

I don't know what.

She's dragging me into the warmth like I'm a dog she's dragging into a warm house by the collar, coaxing me over a threshold without once letting go of me, my claws digging furrows.

She forces me into the light with sheer stubborn determination.