Page 62 of Claimed By the Mothman
His cock twitched violently, straining against his trousers. His body was reacting in ways it hadn’t since his first heat-cycle, when he was a newly molted youth with trembling hands and no sense of control, mad with the scent of pheromones and fantasy.
His hand drifted low, palm grazing the flat of his stomach. Lower. A shudder tore through him. He stopped himself—barely—with a guttural growl.
The Broodhome rose in his mind. A cold, high chamber. Wind howling across the marble spires. Elders seated in a crescent of bone and silk, watching him with those glowing, ancient eyes.
You are Harbinger,they said.Life calls to the Harbinger because it is the only thing louder than Death. If you answer and take that bond, it will cost. Your thoughts will bend, and your purpose will blur. You will ache in your skin until you cannot remember who you were before.
He had been so young. So sure he would not falter. Thathewould be different. He had listened, but when the moment had come, he had takenher.
Gods help him, if given the chance once more, he would take her again. And again. On the table, crazed with animal lust. In the dark hush of his bed, honoring the beauty of her body one inch at a time. Against the glass of the window, answering her panting breath with his own groans. Kneeling at the altar of her body, pressing his lips and his tongue to her, filling her and worshiping her as she writhed with pleasure.
He would tear down the moon and lay it at her feet if only it would make her smile.
The bond crooned now, raw and needy, and he couldn’t silence it. Swearing between his teeth, he let his hand drift down.
A touch of claw against fabric. The sharpcrackof a seam straining. He tore his waistband open and freed himself with a groan, his cock already flushed and leaking, pulsing in time with the memory of her moans.
He wrapped his hand around his base and shuddered. He stroked once, remembering the way she had looked at him when she leaned in, flushed and glassy-eyed, pressing her forehead to his chest like shebelongedthere.
Twice—rougher—recalling the sound she made when he thrust into her, a wail of pleasure.
Three times now and he was gone—hips canting into his hand, chasing the memory of how her thighs had tightened like a snare. He imagined her under him as she shattered, whisperingplease, again, againwith her lips swollen and her voice breaking. Her hands in his hair. Her tears. Her laugh.
It echoed now as release crashed through him—raw, violent,helpless—his seed spilling over his hand as he bowed over it, wings flared, breath shuddering.
The room spun. The city exhaled. And Sig stood shaking in the wreckage of it—body sated, but the ache somehowworse.
Because she hadn’t chosen him.
But gods, he had already chosen her.
—
Nell’s mouth was dry. Her skin overheated. Her hair—oh gods, her hair wasstuckto one side of her face, matted by sweat or sleep or the shame leaking out of her pores.
Nell groaned. Rolled over. Groaned again. The sheets smelled like leftover perfume and mortification. Her dress from the night before was puddled on the floor like it, too, had given up.
Oh, no.
She pressed a palm to her forehead. Memory skittered across her brain like spilled marbles.
She’d called him atree.She’d kissed her own hand andslapped his face.And worst of all—
"You’re so tall. Like—how did that even work when you fucked me on the table?"
She buried her face in the pillow and her whole body seized like it was trying to self-destruct.
“Oh my gods,” she whispered. She thrashed weakly, limbs tangled in her sheets like she was mid-exorcism.
The blanket wrapped around her legs with the cling of consequence, and hertraitorous, vengefulcore throbbed like it had something to say about everything that had—and hadn’t—happened.
“No,” she said out loud, to the gods, to herself, to the ceiling that definitelywasjudging her. “We are not doing this. We are not having horny regret. We are not fantasizing about the exact angle he used to wreck my cervix.”
She made the mistake of picturing it again and flung the blanket off her like it had personally conspired against her.
She stumbled into the kitchen, her feet slapping softly against the tile, her breath coming in short, uneven bursts. Her oversized T-shirt clung in all the wrong places. Her nipples were stiff peaks beneath the thin fabric, achingly sensitive. She wasn’t sure if she was going to cry, scream, or orgasm from sheer pressure, but by all the gods and monsters, she wasnotgoing to do it now.
Now was tea. Tea wascivilized.Tea didn’t have glowing red eyes, or clawed hands that had held her so perfectly open, or the memory of her own legs trembling, her voice gone hoarse—
