Page 47 of Bound to the Marak

Not as a Marak.

Not as a being created for power, not for want.

But now, he was undone.

Every instinct within him screamed to claim her. Not as property. Not as a prize.

As his.

And not even she understood what she had become to him. She believed she had surrendered—he could see it in her eyes, in the helpless tremble of her body suspended in his hold. But the truth was darker, deeper, far more dangerous.

It washewho belonged tohernow.

The realisation struck him like lightning. A terrible, beautiful revelation.

He would never let her go.

Her warmth, her scent, her soul—she had pierced through every cold layer of control he had ever constructed. For the first time in his long, exalted existence, he feltalive.

With a thought, his lower garments dissolved into nothing. He lowered her slowly, reverently, until her bare skin hovered just above his, his tentacles adjusting to cradle her with exquisite care.

He looked into her eyes.

She didn’t flinch.

That alone nearly undid him.

He pressed his brow to hers—Majarin intimacy. A sacred gesture. One no other being had ever received from him. And then, in the space between breath and motion, he moved—finally, completely—into the heart of the fire he’d kindled.

Her soft gasp became a part of him.

The final tether of restraint snapped.

She wrapped around him like she was made for it. He found himself lost in the moment, lost in her.

Each movement fed something ancient and aching within him. She was sosmall, so impossibly delicate beneath the strength of his body, yet she took him—welcomedhim—with a fierceness that shattered his final reservations.

This wasn’t conquest.

It was communion.

And when she moaned his name—his true name, not the title the stars knew—he buried his face in the curve of her neck, utterly consumed.

His human. His surrender.

Hisforever.

Thirty-One

She had no words.

Even if she'd had them, she couldn't have spoken. All that left her lips was breathless sound—soft gasps, broken cries, the kind born from something deeper than sensation, somethingprimordial.

Karian was inside her, around her, everywhere.

She had never felt anything like it—couldn't have imagined it in her wildest dreams, not even in the haze of lust that sometimes overtook her on lonely nights back on Earth. This wasn't lust. It was something far more elemental.

His body moved with devastating control, but it was the delicate caress of the smaller tendrils—curious, gentle, and yet insistent—that undid her completely. They circled her most sensitive places, stroked and teased with an alien grace, as if he knew her better than she knew herself.

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