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Then she opens her mouth and takes the head in.

Her mouth’s hot. After the rain it’s so hot my fangs click shut on nothing, and the claws on my left hand go so deep into the bark I’ll have to work them out later. Her tongue moves under the head, and she sucks, and all I’m doing is keeping my hips still.

She pulls off with her hand still cupping my balls. “That’s not all going in. I’m telling you now.”

“No.”

Her eyes narrow at me. She wraps her hand around the part she can’t take, gets her mouth over the rest, and works them together. She doesn’t need all of it. She doesn’t need any of it. She could kneel there and look at me and I’d—

Her other hand goes down between her own legs. She doesn’t lift that arm, she lets it hang and turns the wrist in, low where the shoulder doesn’t pull, and I can see her fingers moving on herself from up here. She’s touching herself. With my cock in her mouth. She moans around me when she finds her clit, and I feel it in my balls.

I put my right hand on her head, blunt fingers only, the claws held up off her, and I don’t push. I want to. Her hair’s soaked and cold under my palm, and the sounds she’s making carry over the rain.

There are two wolves on my slope, and I can’t hear them, and I’ve stopped listening for them.

I’m not going to last. I wasn’t going to in her hand either.

“Kestria.” I pull at her hair, not hard. “I’m going to—”

She looks up at me with her mouth full of me and doesn’t stop. Both her hands go faster.

In her mouth. She means for me to—in her mouth.

I shut my jaw on the noise, and the growl comes anyway, long and low, and the rain on the hide takes it. I come in her mouth in long pulses, with my claws in the tree and my knees barely holding and her eyes open on my face the whole time. She swallows. I watch her throat do it, and I come harder.

She takes everything, and when there’s nothing left she keeps me in her mouth, gentler, with her fingers still going between her legs. I don’t throw her hand off this time. I don’t do anything. I couldn’t if I wanted to. I stand there with my hand on her wet head and let her finish herself with my cock softening on her tongue, and when she comes it’s with a whine around me and her forehead pressed to my hip.

She lets me go and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, then looks at the hand and licks the side of her thumb.

She swallowed it. All of it.

I’m going to think about that until I die.

I get her up by her good arm. Her knees are red from the ground. I had a cloth right there. She rests her cheek against my chest, and we stand there with my trousers around my knees and my claws still in the tree.

Chapter 25

Rauk gets halfway off his hearthstone, then puts his hand back down.

I stop tying my foot wrap and watch him. His claws scrape the edge of the stone while he gets a better grip, and when he does push himself up, he stays bent over it. I don’t like the look of that.

“What are you getting?”

“Wood.”

There are a few sticks left by the hearth, and he’s still leaning on that hand.

It’s been four days since the rain and that ridiculous shower. Yesterday he stopped halfway through bringing the wood in, put it down outside the passage, and sat next to it. When I came out to look, he said he was taking a break.

Rauk doesn’t take breaks.

The new moon’s tonight. He told me what it does to them, weak and slow and sick in the legs. There’s plenty of wood sitting under the overhang, and nothing out there needs him today.

I finish the wrap and get up.

“I’ll bring it. Sit down.”

He takes his hand off the stone and straightens the rest of the way.