Page 49 of Fated to the Fang

"And now you have it." I cover his hands with mine. "So don't waste it by dying first. Come back to me. I need you to promise me that. Not 'I'll die for you.' Anybody can die. Come back."

The rain hammers down. Below us the sea keeps tearing itself open on the rocks.

"Say it."

"I will." His forehead drops to mine. "I swear it on the only thing I have left worth swearing on."

"And if there is some version of forever waiting for us, I want the chance to choose it," I say.

I kiss him, and he kisses me back. His mouth is cool, but the rain is colder. I fist his soaked shirt and pull, and he lets me back him against the stone wall, and for a moment the controlled elder is just a man with his hands shaking on my hips.

"Don't," I say against his mouth. "Don't go gentle because I'm breakable. I'm not made of paper."

"You're made of decades I can still lose." His laugh is rough. "Less, if I'm careless."

I laugh with him and drag his hand from my hip to the heat between my legs, over wet denim, and his whole body reciprocates. "I've been dreaming of this every night since the last time. The bond you explained is strong in me. Please. Can we?"

A sound comes out of him that isn't quite human. "I feel everything through that bond," he warns, low, his mouth at my ear now, his fingers pressing where I put them. "Every time you want me. It's been driving me out of my mind. I feel what you feel. Every single thing. Every moment."

"Good." I'm working his belt with cold, clumsy fingers. "Then you'll know I'm not faking it."

He peels my jeans down my wet thighs with hands that aren't gentle anymore, and I gasp when he finds me bare and slick despite the cold, and he groans like the pleasure is his instead of mine. "Tell me yes," he says, rain sheeting between us.

"Yes." I bite it into his neckline. "God, Dorian—yes."

He stops still measuring the storm inside his body against the breakable architecture of mine. I catch his face in both hands. Rain runs over his cheekbones, into his mouth, down the bare column of his throat where I have pulled his shirt open and ruined every last button between us.

"Dorian," I say. "I am choosing this. I am choosing you. Stop holding yourself away from me like restraint is the only proof you love me."

His eyes change. Not softer. Worse. Hungrier, and stripped clean. He tears the rest of his shirt open, and the rain hits his naked chest, runs over muscle and pale skin and all that death-cool skin I have stopped mistaking for distance. I put my mouth there because I need to taste the storm on him, need proof that he is still real and here and mine for this one wild, living second. His hand slides between my thighs again, no denim now, just rain and skin and the slick heat of my pussy opening for him.

"You feel that?" I breathe against his mouth. "That's not the bond making me want you. That's me."

"I know." His voice is wrecked. "I know, Ave."

My hand drops between us and wraps around his cock, and the sound he makes nearly takes my knees out. He is hard and heavy in my palm, the only warm thing about him where my hand works him in the rain. His forehead hits mine. His control is a living thing between us, wounded and snarling.

"Tell me what you want," he says.

"You." I stroke him again and feel his hips jerk. "Inside me. Now. Hard enough that tomorrow remembers who I chose tonight."

"Ave."

I bite his lower lip. "That is permission. That is me telling you not to turn my humanity into a glass box."

The bond opens wider, not like a command, but like a door blown loose in the storm. I feel him feeling me. The ache. The need. The fear under it, bright as lightning. I feel his terror too, not of hurting me now, but of surviving tomorrow without this. Without us.

So I kiss him harder, and he finally breaks. Then he lifts me like I weigh nothing, and I lock my legs around him, and the cold stone meets my back as he pushes into me slow and impossibly full, and the storm stops existing. I rake my nails down his shoulders and he doesn't flinch. He watches my face—finding what I like, finding the exact rhythm that takes me apart. When I tell him harder, he gives me harder. When I tell him I'm close, he gives me his whole weight, his cold clever hands, his mouth on my throat, until I break around him with a cry the wind swallows whole.

He follows me a breath later, shuddering, his face buried in my soaked hair, saying my name like a vow he intends to keep.

Afterward he holds me up because my legs won't, both of us drenched, his cool forehead at my temple, the rain finally thinning to something survivable.

"You're not my weakness," he tells me. "And I won't turn you into my reason to lose my head. I'll walk in there tomorrow to fight, not to atone. I'll come home to you."

"Partners," I say.

"Partners."