Chapter 208: Mate!
She knew Nicholas. She had learned him the way you learned something dangerous.....carefully, thoroughly, every detail filed away because your survival depended on it. His silences. His little talks. The precise temperature of his cruelty and the rarer precise temperature of something that wasn’t cruelty at all.
This was not him.
This was something older wearing his face. Something that had been caged for months and had just found the door open.
"Kael."
She scrambled back.
Hit the headboard.
Looked past him. "Sebastian....."
Kael’s hand shot across the bed and wrapped around her ankle.
He dragged her forward and she screamed....real fear, actual fear, not the heat, not overwhelm, fear.....and he flipped her face down in one motion and pinned her between her shoulder blades with one hand and yanked her hips up with the other and drove inside her from behind before she could do anything at all.
The sound that came out of her was nothing like the sounds from the night before.
Sebastian was on his feet before the echo died.
"Kael." His voice came out like a whip. Flat and sharp and nothing soft in it.
"Don’t hurt her you bastard. We just found her and you want to fuck her to death."
Kael didn’t look at him.
He pulled back and slammed forward.
Lilith cried out into the mattress. Her hands scrabbling at the sheets trying to find something to hold. Her body responding anyway.....the heat surging up regardless of what her mind was screaming, her body recognizing something her mind was still refusing.....and she hated it. She hated that she couldn’t make it stop.
Kael turned his head.
Looked at Sebastian.
Gold eyes. Completely animal. Completely certain. Nothing in them that could be reasoned with or appealed to or moved by anything Sebastian said or did.
"Mate," he said.
His voice. But not his voice. Something underneath Nicholas’s voice that had never been there before.
He turned back.
Sebastian’s jaw locked so hard she heard it.
Every muscle in his body pulled tight. He looked across the room at Lucian.
Lucian was already on his feet. Zev bleeding gold into his eyes at the edges. His face was hard and tight and his voice came out low. Barely held together. "Yes we heard you." He looked at Kael’s back. "That’s if you don’t kill her first."
Neither of them sat down.
Neither of them moved toward the bed.
But neither of them stepped back either.
They stood. Sebastian at the side of the bed. Lucian at the foot. Both of them positioned with the particular stillness of men who had already decided what they were going to do and were waiting to see if they needed to do it.
She understood.
If her sounds shifted. If it crossed from overwhelmed to actually hurt. They would pull him off.
Even knowing Nicholas was the strongest of the three of them. Even knowing what fighting him would cost. They would try.
She held onto that.
Kael gripped her hips and the pace he set was nothing like anything from the nights before. This was not Sebastian’s feral momentum or Lucian’s desperation. This was something that had been waiting for weeks and had stopped waiting and was taking what it had been denied with complete and total certainty that it had the right.
Every thrust drove her forward into the mattress. Every thrust pulled the breath out of her. She couldn’t get ahead of it. Couldn’t do anything except grip the sheets and take it and make sounds that bounced off the stone walls and the high ceiling and she was certain they heard them two floors down.
"Sebastian....." she managed. Broken. Between sounds she couldn’t control.
"I’m here." His voice right there. Close and clipped. "Right here Lilith."
It didn’t help.
But she heard it.
Kael yanked her upright.
Her back slammed against his chest. One arm locked around her waist like iron and he drove up into her from below. her head fell back against his shoulder and her tears were running down her face thou she hadn’t decided to cry, hadn’t noticed when she started crying.
"Sebastian....."
"I’m here." Tighter this time. She could hear what it was costing him to stay where he was. "I’m right here Lilith. You are okay, you’re going to be okay"
Lucian’s voice came from the foot of the bed. Low and controlled and barely either.
"Kael. She’s crying."
Kael didn’t stop and he didn’t slow down.
Lucian looked at Sebastian.
Sebastian looked back.
The conversation that passed between them took no words and less than a second. Both of them taking one step closer to the bed. Not intervening. Not yet. But closer. The line moving.
Kael felt it.
His gold eyes cut sideways to Sebastian. Then to Lucian. Taking in both of them. Their positions. The readiness in both of their bodies.
He held their gaze for one long moment.
Then he turned back to Lilith and drove deeper and she cried out so loud Sebastian actually flinched.
He didn’t stop.
He fucked her through it.
Face down first...her hands white-knuckled on the sheets, her sounds muffled against the mattress, his pace relentless and consuming and giving her no space to think or breathe or be anything except exactly what he’d decided she was.
Then on her knees.....him behind her, his hands on her hips dragging her back to meet every thrust, her back arching despite herself, despite the fear still running underneath everything, her body responding to him in ways that had nothing to do with her decisions.
Then standing.....he stood her up at the side of the bed and bent her forward and took her from behind standing up and she grabbed the bedpost and held on.
Sebastian was right there two feet away, she looked at him and he looked back and his dark eyes were completely wrecked with Rhen was right there behind them but Sebastian held the line and didn’t reach for her even though every part of him wanted to.
"You’re okay," he said. His voice rough. Barely steady. "You’re okay Lilith."
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