by Vivian Arend
Cooper didn’t fight against Mad Dog, but he did struggle. It seemed to be a fight against himself. He was writhing, groaning.
I ran to The Lodge’s front office, wet down a towel in the bathroom sink. There was nobody to stop me from taking it. Nobody had really run The Lodge as long as I’d been there.
Within moments, I returned to wipe the blood off of Cooper’s face and chest. He wasn’t healing. He also didn’t look at me as I wiped him off. It was like he had sunk deep into a fever haze. “What’s wrong with him?” I asked, wringing out the towel. Bloody water spattered on the dirt.
“Nothing,” Mad Dog said. He lit a joint and gestured at Cooper with it. “The silver knuckles wouldn’t have left any metal inside of him, so he’ll heal as soon as he changes. But young werewolves have a few rough hours on the nights of the full and new moons. Feel like shit for hours. He’s still got at least until midnight before he gets all the hair.”
“What about you?”
“I’m fresh, but not as fresh as him. I’ll change around the same time. It just doesn’t hurt as bad in the meantime.” He took a long drag on the joint, then offered it to me. I hesitated. “The curse isn’t transferred by saliva, or you’d already be fucked.”
I dropped the towel and took the joint. Inhaling it, catching the smoke in my lungs, made my head spin pleasantly. Warmth suffused my veins. My eyes dropped closed. The relaxation settled over me bit by bit, and I gave into it. I needed that calm.
“What about Peyton?” I asked, passing the joint back.
“Not your problem,” Mad Dog said. “Not anymore. And nobody’s gonna give a fuck and a half that he’s dead, so he won’t be Trouble’s problem, either. No consequences.”
“Good,” I said.
Mad Dog’s nose brushed along the back of my neck. “There’s something about you, Ofelia. Especially tonight. You smell like…” He took another long whiff. “Better than weed. Better than pussy.”
“Cooper killed Peyton for thinking that he could touch me,” I said.
“I wouldn’t. You don’t smell like you’re mine.” He jerked his chin at the other werewolf. “You’re his.” Cooper groaned as he stirred, head rolling on his shoulders.
My heart skipped a beat. “His what?”
“I don’t know,” Mad Dog said. “Never smelled something like you before.” He brushed his hand down my arm, and this time, I didn’t stop him. Goosebumps lifted on my skin. “You can help him. When he changes, he’s going to get all tangled up in his clothes.” His eyes sparked with dark mirth. “Take them off.”
I swayed on my feet. “Take them off,” I echoed, swallowing hard.
Cooper was straining against the chains now. He looked like he was suffering from fever, sickly and sweaty. His muscles glistened.
“Here.” Mad Dog stuck the joint in the corner of his mouth and drew a switchblade. “Help him, Ofelia.”
I took it, but didn’t move. “Won’t he change and…hurt me?”
“No. I don’t think he’s going to hurt you.” He brushed his hand over me again, over my braids, almost like petting me. “Whatever you are, Ofelia—I don’t think any of us could hurt you.”
He was right. I knew I was safe with Cooper, even if I couldn’t put into words why that might be. He was a wild beast. An animal trapped inside a man. Before midnight—less than an hour away—he was going to shift into something four-legged and furred with fangs longer than my thumb. Yet there was a current between us. A sense of belonging.
With the switchblade heavy in my hand, I moved to kneel between Cooper’s legs. He was a little cleaner now that I’d wiped him down, but blood still caked the lines of his skin.
At my touch, Cooper’s eyes opened to slits. “Ofelia,” he said. His tongue sounded heavy, clumsy, like he was already forgetting how to speak.
“I’m here,” I said, spreading my hand over his chest. His heart pounded underneath my palm. I tried not to brush the gashes that Peyton’s silver knuckles had left behind.
“Get away from me.”
I ignored him and tried to unbutton his pants. His position was too awkward to get them off like that. “I don’t want you to get hurt when you change. I’m going to help free you.”
“Your smell…” He snarled, baring his teeth. It seemed to take all of his will to speak coherently. “I want you.”
Heat flushed my body. I licked my bottom lip, and his eyes followed the motion. “Cooper, you know that you killed him, right?” I asked softly, brushing my hand over his jaw. “He’s coyote food now.”
Pain flashed over his face. “Good. Still better than he deserves. But if that means you don’t want me now—”
“No.” I couldn’t even let him finish that thought. It was too ridiculous. I leaned into him, lowering my voice so that Mad Dog wouldn’t be able to hear. “I owe you, Cooper, in so many ways that you can never understand.” I hesitated, tracing the lines of his wolf tattoo. “I’m yours. Completely.”
He twisted to look at me. Our faces were only an inch away. His eyes filled my vision, like two giant burning moons that seared deep into my soul. “Mine,” Cooper said. He stretched to the edge of his chains and claimed my lips. His tongue invaded, shoving against mine, exploring the recesses of my mouth. He tasted faintly of blood. Peyton’s blood.
He will never hurt me again.
I clutched at his chains with my free hand, using them to leverage myself against Cooper’s chest. I couldn’t tell if the pulsing in my body was because of my pounding heart or his, or even if we had two separate hearts anymore.
“I need you,” Cooper said against my mouth. “But tonight—I’m dangerous, Ofelia. I’m changing.”
“I don’t care,” I said.
He was mine. Wolf or man, he was mine, just as much as I was his.
I traced the point of the blade down his collarbone, to his hardened nipple, circling the areola and leaving a line of white from the pressure. He panted, abs clenching as I brought the blade past his navel and scraped the trail of hair vanishing into the waistband of his pants. The cutting edge of the blade was sharp enough that his hair shaved off with the slightest brush.
My blade sliced into the hip of his jeans. I carefully carved them away from his thighs and peeled them down.
He was already erect. It was the first time I’d seen him naked and fully hardened, skin stretched, corded with veins. There was a faint purplish tinge to the shaft. It looked like it must have hurt.
Even having felt it grinding against me, and seeing him soft, hadn’t prepared me for the sheer size of it.
I cut away the remainder of his jeans. Tossed them aside. I was literally salivating at the sight of his erection, and I longed to feel it. “Please?” I asked, closing the switchblade and setting it aside.
Cooper gritted his teeth and nodded. His unspoken consent made something relax inside my chest. My fingers curved around its base. It was silky smooth, yet impossibly hard. When I squeezed gently, I could feel the pulse of blood under my fingers.
He groaned and threw his head back.
I lowered myself in front of him, breathing warm air onto his cock, inhaling the musky scent of his sweat.
Keeping my eyes on his, watching for him to change his mind, my tongue darted out. I lapped a long line up the base of his cock, from the soft edge of his testicles to the ridge of his head. The taste was warm and masculine. His responding growl was better than any aphrodisiac.
Encouraged, I swirled my tongue around the head, tasting the smooth skin, closing my lips around the top. I had to open my mouth wide to take his entire girth without scraping my teeth. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to actually go down much farther than the head alone.
“Ofelia,” he grunted, straining against the chains. They jangled. His biceps flexed.
I pulled off with a slight pop. “What?”
I think that Cooper tried to respond, but he couldn’t seem to get any words out now.
He was starting to change.
“When I touch you, is it easier for you to stay human?” I asked.
“When you touch me…” He let out his breath as a growl. “It’s like the wolf calms down.” His eyes glimmered bright gold. “But you still make me feel like a beast. Big. Strong.”
If I touched him, he was calm. He wouldn’t need to be chained.
I didn’t know what made me different for him than other women. I didn’t know why I was drawn to him the way that I was. But I understood now that what we had was special in more ways than one.
I stood in front of him. His eyes were on level with my hips as I popped open the button of my shorts and slid the zipper down, baring the lacy edge of my thong.
His breathing quickened. “Ofelia…”
Hooking my thumbs in the waistband of my shorts, I shimmied them down my hips, turning as I bent over so that he could get a full view of my ass.
The chains rattled as he struggled to reach for me.
“I’m going to break these,” he snarled.
Not if I touch you. I could see what I needed to do now—that I needed to soothe him.
Free him.
That was what The Devil was about, wasn’t it? The chains weren’t tied to anything. The woman and the man were tied up by choice. We could choose to liberate ourselves, if only we could find the strength. And we could choose to liberate each other, too. He had already released me. It was time to return the favor.
I crossed my arms, grabbed the hem of my tank top, lifted it up over my chest. My breasts sprung free, heavy and large. I wasn’t wearing a bra. My nipples were puckered.
Then I slipped down to him again, straddling his thighs, spreading my fingers over his chest. His cock jutted between us. It was intimidatingly large now that I was naked and just inches away.
He was sweating. His skin rippled as if a hand was pushing underneath. “I’m out of time,” he said desperately, helplessly. “I can’t stop myself.”
“I’ll touch you,” I murmured.
I wouldn’t let the change hurt him. This was what I was meant to do.
My lips fell to his. I kissed him slowly, and where my mouth traveled his trembling subsided. I skimmed my lips up his cheek to his ear.
“Trust me, Cooper.”
His shoulders unknotted slowly. He leaned against the chains, pushing as far forward as he could so that our chests molded against each other, lifting his thighs so that they pushed me flush against his erection. The head bumped against my lower lips. The elastic band of my thong was between us, but nothing else.
No more secrets, no more chains.
I pushed up on my knees, arched my spine, lifted my breasts. He gazed up at me with increasingly wolfish eyes as he lapped at the skin between them, nuzzling the soft flesh. He sucked the nipple into his mouth, massaging it with his tongue, pulling hard so that it extended into a long peak.
His teeth grazed my skin, and he kept watching me. Seeing if I would react. If I really trusted him.
I did. He wasn’t going to bite me.
Twining my fingers in his hair, I pulled him harder to my breast, and he sucked harder for a moment. Then his mouth popped free, leaving the skin glistening.
“I’m changing,” he whispered again.
His biceps strained. His abs flexed. I kept stroking the back of his head as his face contorted, twisting into a rictus of pain. But it wasn’t like the violence of the first change that I had seen. The more I petted him, the more his face eased.
When his lips parted, there were fangs jutting from his gums instead of teeth. The hair on his scalp grew as I watched. It came out shaggy, tawny brown, growing like a time lapse of grass. He breathed hard, but the groans coming from his mouth weren’t ones of pain.
I positioned myself over his cock, slipping my hand between us to encircle the base and point it between my legs.
The noise of satisfaction he made was all animal.
Pulling the string of my thong aside, I lowered myself on top of him. Just the head was too much, too wide—I was wetter than I’d ever been in my life, and he still stretched me like it was the first time all over again. I sucked in a breath, struggling to breathe calmly as I hugged his shivering body to mine. We were both trembling. Cooper, because the wolf was taking him; me, because I was letting his wolf take me, too.
Inch by inch, I joined our bodies. I spread over him. It brought me to the brink of pain, hot and prickling. I could feel the ridge of his head sliding through my body.
It seemed to take eons for our hips to become flush, and the sensation of fullness was better than anything else I had experienced in my life.
“You feel incredible,” I groaned into his throat, arms wrapped around his neck. He was so much hairier now, still shifting gradually even as I held him. The fur grew slowly, slipping out of his flesh by the millimeter, making him shaggy around the shoulders.
He breathed heavily into my throat. “It—it doesn’t hurt,” he panted. The words came out clumsy around the fangs. I heard a muffled cracking and realized that his jaw was breaking as it extended slowly into a wolf’s muzzle. Cooper was done talking.
I lifted myself slightly, testing the friction between us, and then began rocking gently on his cock. I held the chains above him for leverage.
Our bodies slipped together, grinding, aching. There was fur growing from Cooper’s chest. His ears were shifting to the top of his head. And still I rode him, taking away his pain, giving every inch of my flesh to him.
He pistoned his hips, digging his heels into the ground so that he could push against me with as much urgency as I did against him, growling deep in his throat.
Skin slapped against skin, becoming wetter and louder as we moved faster, more urgently.
The orgasm surprised me with its suddenness. It erupted deep in my belly, unfolding to the tips of my fingers, making my head drop back on my shoulders. Black stars erupted in my vision. My throat hurt—I was screaming—but all I could hear was the rush of blood through my skull.
Cooper watched me come. His face and straining arms filled my vision. The hunger in his eyes was breathtaking.
His eyes said, Liberate me.
I sagged against his chest, panting. He was still huge inside of me. He hadn’t come.
Cooper needed more.
My trembling hands slipped toward the locks on his chains, but someone seized my wrist. “Don’t,” Mad Dog said. His breath smelled sticky-sweet, like marijuana.
I’d forgotten he was in the room. He was watching us, making sure we weren’t going to do anything stupid or dangerous, and it was comforting to know that there was one sane person nearby. The fact that it was Mad Dog was less comforting.
But I didn’t want him to stop me. “It’s fine,” I said breathlessly, still hot from my climax. “Cooper won’t hurt me.”
“Even if that’s true, you’re not the only person he could kill,” Mad Dog said. “We chain him for a reason. New werewolves are vicious.”
Cooper snarled at Mad Dog, as if to illustrate his point. “I don’t think he likes you grabbing my wrist,” I said, keeping my tone calm and level.
Slowly, Mad Dog released me. “He’s not safe.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” I said.
This time, when I reached for the locks, Mad Dog didn’t stop me. He stepped back with his mouth drawn into a grim line.
I unhooked Cooper from the wall.
He moved with shocking speed, chains rattling as he pushed me to the floor. He wasn’t inside me anymore. I felt empty and cold without him. I was so surprised by the hollow ache that I couldn’t even react.
But Cooper didn’t withhold his touch for long. Metal slithered against the floor. He ripped his shackles away, arms now covered in long hair. He flipped me over, shoving my head to the floor with one large hand while the other held my hips in place. My cheek and breasts pressed against cold concrete.
I could see Mad Dog from the hips down. He took a step toward us.
“Don’t,” I said.
My voice didn’t even tremble. I didn’t feel the faintest hint of fear. Only a thrill of understanding.
Cooper shoved into me in a single, powerful thrust. He was so deep that it felt like it should have emerged from the back of my throat. I braced my arms against the ground, pushing back against him, forcing him deeper inside of me with a throaty groan.
I wanted him. All of him. I never wanted this motion to end, with the ridges of his cock stroking me onward to greater and greater heights, driving every rational thought from my skull.
Mad Dog was watching as we fucked, breathing hard. He rubbed himself through his jeans. His skin was rippling, too, and I knew he was on the brink of changing himself. In a few minutes, I’d be alone in that shed with not one wolf, but two. And I didn’t care.
Cooper pumped in and out of me, setting a hard rhythm. The sound of his grunts had me aroused again within moments. The feeling of him inside me was just as sweet now that I was adjusted to his size, just as blissfully overwhelming.
All rational thought fled from my mind. I could think of nothing but the motion. The pressure.
My mate.
He pushed against me harder, molding his hips to my ass.
And I felt him begin to swell.
A muscular bulge formed at the base of his cock, growing slowly, stretching my entrance to its maximum. It shoved past pleasure and went straight to pain. The sweetest pain I had ever felt. I was going to tear. There was no way I could take the entirety of his knot.
It was something that wolves did, I knew. I had learned about knotting in my biology for non-majors class. I recalled laughing about the idea of the mating knot with my friends in class, talking about how gross it was that the male would lock himself inside of his female, how strange and unreal it seemed.
I had never thought I would be on the receiving end of it. And if I had thought that, I never would have guessed it could feel so good.
The sound that came out of me was barely human, somewhere between a whimper and a mewl. My fingernails clawed at the concrete.
His thumb pressed against my perineum, applying gentle pressure. Human enough to think of my comfort even as his body knotted in mine, locking us together. Inside my pussy, his head pushed against my cervix. I was filled to the utmost. And once the knot had grown fully, I was certain he couldn’t have pulled out of me if he wanted to, though he still thrust gently, each tiny centimeter shooting bolts of pleasure to my fingertips.