by Nora Ash
“Grim,” I murmured. “Grim.”
His lips skimmed the shell of my ear—not quite a kiss, but the gentleness of his caress sent shivers down my spine. He groaned again, gliding his hands from my hips to my waist, bringing me with him when he sat back up.
The change in position brought me into his lap, straddling his cock still hard and unyielding inside me. With one hand, he released my waist, dragging his palm along my torso, over a breast, and up to my throat. His grasp was like iron, his hold on me unbreakable. I leaned my head back, resting it against his shoulder, reaching back to dig my fingers into his thighs.
Grim’s first thrust was ecstasy made flesh. His cool, girthy cock filled me in a rough push, and I mewled at the brutal pleasure. He didn’t pause when he met the bottom of my passage this time, instead giving me another harsh thrust. And another. And another.
I arched and spread my thighs as much as I could while he took me with rough, urgent groans, his previously light touches exchanged for bruising strength and dominance. It was exactly what I needed—what my body needed to ease the fires of my heat.
I cried out for him again and again, his name spilling from my lips to the tune of my pussy’s syrupy smacks each time he drove home. He clutched me closer in response, held me so tight I struggled to breathe, but I didn’t care. I just needed more of him, more of his cock, more—!
“Oh, fuck!” Without warning, every muscle in my body clamped down tight, my back tightening like a bowstring. My climax struck like a lightning bolt, pleasure seizing me as my pussy erupted in a series of flutters around his thickness.
Grim let out a strangled sound, his entire body freezing as his shaft thickened in my entrance.
I forced out a noise of protest through his grip on my throat, but Grim didn’t draw out my torment. With a grunt of effort, he pressed his swelling knot home, the brutal bump hooking deep in my pelvis.
I wailed and clawed at my alpha’s leather-clad thighs in retaliation, light exploding behind my eyes as equal parts pain and pleasure lanced up my abdomen and down my thighs. But his knot was immediately followed by cool, soothing liquid. It filled my pussy and bathed my cervix, alleviating the pain with each powerful spurt, and making my lover shudder and gasp against my ear.
“Grim,” I rasped brokenly, his name the only word filling my mind. Grim, Grim, Grim. This was home. This was completion.
A deep growl rumbled through his chest and into my back in response.
And then he buried his sharp teeth in the back of my neck—and my soul.
Twelve
Grim
Annabel still shuddered periodically in my arms.
I’d stopped rubbing her clit some time ago, but small tremors of aftershock had her pussy tightening on me in uneven intervals. I buried my face in her sweat-soaked neck and clenched my eyes shut, reeling against the pleasure.
It was too much.
I’d never known anything could feel… this much. Everything was raw—my nerves, my soul… my heart, where something new and alien, yet achingly familiar hooked deep into the muscle. It bathed me in warmth and light too intense for my endorphin-addled brain to process, but I could do nothing to protect myself and there was no escaping it. I lay in dazed stupor as everything that was Annabel flooded me, filling up every dark recess, softening my icy flesh and forcing my organs to expand to the point of pain.
Mate.
The word throbbed in my brain in tune with her heartbeat drumming steadily under my palm where I was still clutching her against me. Mate. Mate. Mate.
I’d known claiming her would end me. But even as I’d accepted that, I hadn’t been prepared for this. For how it felt.
“Grim,” she mewled, thick and sweet. She’d been calling my name throughout, her voice drawing me in like a siren’s song. Even now I shivered at the sound of it, another pulse of semen leaving my cock to bathe her womb.
“Mate.” The word rumbled out of my chest before I could stop it, earning me a happy little chirp from the girl in my arms.
“Mate,” she whispered, one hand coming up to prod at the fresh wound I’d given her. My mark was right in the center of her nape, gray in the dim light of Hel, but still visible, marking her as mine for the world to see.
“This feels… different than the other times,” she mused, voice still soft and dreamy.
The others. I felt them in her—those dark, aching wounds near where our bond hooked on her end. Her other mates.
Cool rage stirred at the base of my skull, threatening to end my hazy bliss as I let the knowledge that my mate belonged to four other males wash over me. They had no right, she was mine, she was—
“Grim?” This time concern tinged Annabel’s drowsy voice. “What—What’s wrong?”
She felt me. Like her warmth and light filled me, my ice and darkness filled her in return.
I shook my head and pressed my forehead to the back of her skull, tempering the rage until it was a low, simmering ache in the pit of my gut. I’d known this would happen. There was nothing to be done about it, except accept it.
This—how I felt with Annabel in my arms—was biology, and Fate’s slimy fingers pulling at the web in attempted manipulation.
At least the rush of anger at the memory of my mate writhing underneath four other males had managed to ease my knot.
I pulled my hips back, sliding out of Annabel despite her grunt of protest. The loss of her tight, wet heat was a gruesome mix of agony and relief, my cock already attempting to rise again to return to her hallowed depths, even as the severing of the pleasure gave my frayed nerves a much-needed respite.
Annabel rolled over to face me on the skin. Her eyes trailed up my body to my lips, lingering there for a moment as if she were contemplating kissing me.
“The ring,” I reminded her. I raised my hand to hold it out to her, but without my approval, 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.
&n
bsp; “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 her.
She gasped into my mouth and clung to my shoulders, but this time I didn’t pull back.
Happiness met me—wrapped around me like the most intimate embrace. She was… so pleased. So happy I was opening up to her, so relieved. Images met me—of every time she’d felt my presence or dreamed of me as she was growing up. Of our first meeting in the flesh back in Iceland, and that instant jerk of recognition. Of my face screwed up in rage as I shattered the boat that would have taken her back to Asgard and her mates, followed by relief that I would now help her, rather than stop her.
Gently I pulled back my magic, easing out of her consciousness before I could see any more of her excitement to be reunited with the four men who’d claimed her before me.
She gave me an unhappy moan as I lifted off her body a few inches, separating our lips as well, but withdrew her own, golden light from me.
“There is nothing to be jealous of,” she said softly, moving one hand from my shoulder to cup my cheek. “They’ll love you too.”
“I don’t need love,” I said, moving to get off her completely, but she wrapped her legs around my waist, refusing to allow a full separation.
“It doesn’t matter if you need it—you’ll have it. The six of us—we belong together.”
She genuinely believed that. She had accepted the Norns’ schemes as her destiny so completely, she felt nothing but contentment at the violation of being so intimately tied to us. It hadn’t always been like that. I remembered how wildly she’d fought against Saga and Magni when they’d first forced their claims on her, and briefly wondered if the bonds had lulled her into submission—or if this too was Verdandi’s doing.
I didn’t respond.
She gave me a lopsided smile and reached up to place a hand on my stomach. “So gloomy still.”
I chuffed through my nose, not quite a laugh, but not quite derisive either.
“I’m still in heat,” she reminded me, the curve of her lip turning slightly more feral. “And you promised seconds. You can brood later.”
My gaze dropped to her breasts, and she hummed a happy little purr, clearly pleased at my instincts’ easy surrender.
“Take off your clothes,” she commanded.
I looked back up at her, eyebrow arched.
“I’m so hot—I want to feel your skin on mine,” she said. “And your leathers chafe.”
I hadn’t given much thought to my clothes—the need to be inside her had overshadowed everything else. But I knew my cool temperature repulsed most hotblooded beings, especially in intimate situations.
My stepmother had demanded I keep my clothes on, that I touch her as little as possible—with one exception, of course.
“Please,” Annabel added, her voice softer, as if she sensed where my thoughts had drifted. “Let me feel you.”
I exhaled before I reached for the straps keeping my armor in place. Annabel watched me intently as I bared my body for her one piece at a time. When I was finally naked, she sat up and reached for me, hooking her arms around the back of my neck so she could haul herself onto the tops of my thighs.
I wrapped my arms around her back on instinct, pulling her close to secure her weigh, and she sighed with relief.
“Oh, that feels so good,” she moaned, pressing her forehead against the side of my neck.
Her skin burned everywhere it touched mine, the heat of her making my blood hum and my cock rise between her thighs. I’d never been particularly bothered by temperature, but Annabel felt like embracing the dawn after a long winter’s night.
I rubbed my cheek against her messy braid, shifting my hands to her plump ass as I rocked up against her. Her slick heat parted for my eager cock, and I rubbed through her wet cleft and up against her protruding clit.
Annabel mewled and rolled her hips down for more. “Yes,” she whimpered. “Like that. Oh, Grim, yes, like that.”
I let her grind on me for a few more breaths before I tightened my grip and lifted her up mid-rocking motion, just in time for the momentum to spear her opening on my dick and drive her halfway down it.
“Oh! Fuck!” Annabel arched in my arms, body stiffening and face screwing into a tight grimace as she took me in.
Heat enveloped me, radiating down my thighs and up my spine. I groaned unintelligibly, freezing for a long second as my nerves screamed with the intensity of our union.
Then instinct took over.
My mate cried out as I forced her all the way down on my cock, her channel fluttering around me, sucking me deeper still until there was nowhere left to go. I forced my eyes open then, as hungry to see her take me as I was to feel it. The look of near-pained ecstasy on her pretty features, of her teeth buried in her bottom lip and her breasts thrust out toward me, nearly summoned my orgasm.
I choked out a groan and bent forward, burying my mouth in her breasts as I pulled her against me by her ass, ensuring my cock stayed sealed deep inside of her.
One hard nipple popped into my mouth, and I latched onto it with a desperation I hadn’t known I possessed.
“Grim,” she crooned. Her slim fingers tightened in my hair, pulling me harder against her chest as she peppered my scalp with kisses. “Suck me. Please, suck me.”
Even if I’d wanted to, I would have been incapable of resisting such a sultry, needy command.
Moaning, I tightened my lips around the little bud and sucked.
Home.
This was home.
The pleasure burned bright, blinding me to anything but the sensation of her, throbbing and pulsing and so, so hot. But through the mind-numbing ecstasy of every physical impression, there was something else fluttering at the edges of my consciousness.
Safe. I felt safe in a way so wholly unfamiliar it would have scared me, had I the capacity to feel fear.
I flicked my tongue o
ver her nipple, gasping as Annabel’s responding shiver echoed through my own body, and tightened my seal on her breast.
She moaned again and clutched tighter at my hair, her pussy spasming on my cock still buried to the hilt inside of her.
“Oh, Grim.”
The yearning her soft coo sparked making me press my face into her breasts and rub at the softness enveloping me, my mouth popping off her now-glistening nipple.
Gods, she was… everything. A safe haven I hadn’t known I craved. Hadn’t known even existed.
An impatient roll of her hips had me kiss her soft mounds still cradling my face, one hand slipping from her ass to her front. When I flicked my finger over her taut clit, Annabel groaned. The sound went through me like a lightning bolt, my focus turning carnal once more. When I turned my head to suck on her still unattended nipple, it was with intent.
“Grim,” she cried, her pussy gripping me so tight it almost hurt. “Fuck, don’t stop, baby. Don’t stop!”
I pressed my thumb in harder on her clit and rubbed her, her hands in my hair ensuring I stayed latched on her breast for the duration. Only when her sheath erupted in spasms around me did I release her nipple in time to see her expression contort, her body stiffening against mine as her climax struck.
I rolled my hips up, giving her a deep thrust that had her crying out. And another. She still clung to my hair, yanking savagely at the roots, but the small hurt only fueled my need to take. With a snarl, I put her on her back, pressing my hips down hard between her thighs before she could reorient herself.
“Shit!”
I ignored her outburst at taking the full force of my cock and rolled my hips again, making her pelvis take my weight with every savage thrust. She came again, and I fucked her faster and harder through her pussy’s desperate flutters, snarling every time I bottomed out against her cervix. Darkness mixed with brilliant, golden light behind my eyes, crackling through my every cell. There was nothing but her—nothing but her warm, sucking cunt and the certainty that if I ever stopped fucking her, I’d cease to exist.