Claimed by the scarred Alpha

SÉVERINE

I had not planned to kiss him.

That was the thing I kept returning to, even as it was happening — the absence of planning, the absence of calculation, the way my hands had simply found his face and my mouth had simply found his before any part of my mind had been consulted on the matter. I had spent my entire adult life making calculated moves. Hell, it was in my nature. This was not one of them.

His whole body went rigid under my hands.

Surprised. My familiar, who had probably existed for more than centuries, seen everything worth seeing, and remained unmoved by the vast majority of it, was surprised. I felt it in the tension across his jaw, the stillness that was different from his usual controlled stillness, actually caught off guard for once in his long and complicated life.

I started to pull back.

His hand came up and caught the back of my head.

He kissed me back.

There was nothing familiar in it. Nothing that resembled the careful, managed way he did everything else. This was rough and immediate and total, his mouth moving against mine like something had been released rather than initiated. I tasted copper before I understood why, and then I understood — his teeth, or whatever passed for teeth in whatever he actually was underneath the body he wore. I tasted my own blood, and he didn’t stop, and I didn’t want him to.

When we finally broke apart, I was breathing hard.

His eyes had changed.

The blue had always been too deep, too still, the particular blue of something very old and very cold. Now it had taken on a quality I had no word for. It did not pass as bold. It was not even close to human. The pupils had shifted, the irises doing something that light wasn’t supposed to do inside eyes, and the intelligence looking back at me through that face was the same intelligence that had always been there but stripped now of every social performance it usually wore.

He looked at me like that for one long moment.

Then he took my hand and threw me to the bed.

He undressed me with the same focused, unhurried attention he applied to everything. No fumbling. No hesitation. Each item of clothing was removed as if he had all the time in the world and intended to use it, and I stood there and let him, because my body had apparently made a series of executive decisions without me and was not accepting appeals.

When the last of it was gone, with the exception of my panties, he looked at me.

Then he kissed me again, and this time there was nothing tentative anywhere in it.

My lips were swollen by the second or third kiss, the pressure of his mouth continuous and consuming, and I had both hands on his chest trying to learn something about him through my palms. He was different under my hands. I had always known intellectually that the body was functional, constructed, worn the way a coat was worn, but feeling it was something else entirely. The muscles moved correctly. The warmth was approximately right. But underneath it, some quality that was impossible to locate precisely, some specific absence of the thing that made human bodies feel human, made every touch feel like pressing your hands against something that had decided to be solid as a courtesy.

Ethereal was the word, and I hated it for being accurate.

He caught my wrists.

Not roughly. Just stopped them. Held them still against his chest and then released them and leaned down to my ear, and whatever he said was not a word — just breath, warm and deliberate, against the shell of my ear. I shivered from my scalp to my heels, a full-body response I had no control over, and he made a sound against my ear that might have been satisfaction.

His mouth moved to my jaw. My neck. He kissed down the column of my throat in slow increments, not rushing, and I tipped my head back and stared at the ceiling and tried to remember several important things.

He was my familiar.

I was his witch.

This was insane.

He closed his mouth over my breast, and the thought dissolved.

The sound I made was not dignified. My spine lifted off the mattress without my permission, the pleasure sharp and immediate and spreading outward in all directions, and his tongue moved, and I made another sound, worse than the first. The rational part of me, the part that had spent years calculating and positioning and maintaining control over every room I walked into, staged a brief protest somewhere at the back of my skull. This was my familiar. The power dynamic here was an absolute catastrophe by any measure, and I had initiated it.

His fingers, cold and not quite human in their precision, found my other breast.

My back arched completely off the bed.

He lifted his head and looked at me. Those impossible blue eyes, still doing that thing that light shouldn’t do, fixed on my face.

"More?" he said. His voice had shed whatever layer it usually kept on top.

"Yes," I said. The word came out without hesitation, and I didn’t take it back.

He moved lower.

He took his time with every inch between my breasts and my hips, kissing slowly, not performing patience but actually possessing it in a way that made my hands fist in the sheets. By the time he reached the waistband of my underwear, my whole body was wound tight and vibrating. He pulled the fabric away with one hand in a single motion that left no room for modesty or second thoughts, and then his mouth was on the outside of my folds and my thigh muscles stopped working correctly.

His tongue found its way inside, and the sound that came out of me was loud enough that I clapped my hand over my own mouth.

My other hand went straight to the back of his head.

He worked with the same inhuman precision he applied to everything else, which proved an unfair advantage in this context. He found the exact point that made my hips buck, and he stayed there, relentless, his tongue moving in strokes that built on each other without mercy. My thighs closed around him, and he didn’t resist it. My hand pressed his head down, and he let me. The sounds I was making behind my palm were continuous and undignified, and I could not stop them.

The orgasm arrived without much warning. One moment I was climbing and the next I had gone over entirely, my whole body clenching and releasing, and I felt myself flood his mouth and he took it all, his tongue still moving through every wave until I was shaking and oversensitized and pulling at his hair to bring him back up.

He came back up and kissed me.

I kissed him back and tasted myself on his tongue and did not flinch from it. His body was over mine now, and I reached between us and found him — hard, present, and mine to touch if I decided to touch it. I wrapped my hand around him and felt him breathe differently. I stroked slowly, learning the shape of him, watching his face while I did.

He kissed me again, deep and thorough, and I kept my hand working, feeling his control strain slightly at the edges.

I broke the kiss with my mouth at the hinge of his jaw.

"I need you inside me," I said. "Now."

He took my leg and lifted it. He settled it over his shoulder with one smooth movement that rearranged my entire center of gravity, and then he pressed in.

The stretch was extraordinary. I felt every increment of it, slow and complete, and when he was fully seated inside me I exhaled in a rush that sounded more vulnerable than I wanted. He held still for one breath. Two. Then he moved.

The rhythm he set was not gentle. The headboard connected with the wall in a sharp percussion that repeated and repeated, the bed frame making its objections known loudly and continuously, and I held onto him and took every stroke, and the sounds coming out of me were past managing. He kissed me through it, his hand finding my breast and working it in time with his hips. The dual input was relentless. My whole body was heat and pressure and the specific sharp pleasure of being completely filled and moved through and claimed.

"Mine," he said against my jaw. The word didn’t sound possessive so much as inevitable, like a fact being stated.

I felt the orgasm building again, deeper than the first, rooted somewhere more fundamental. My nails found his back, and I felt him drive forward harder and the headboard said something emphatic against the wall.

His mouth dropped to my throat. To the nape of my neck.

His teeth broke through.

The pain and the pleasure collapsed into each other completely, and my whole body seized. The orgasm hit at the same moment his fangs sank in, and I couldn’t separate the two things, couldn’t tell where one ended and the other started, just felt the entirety of it roll through me in waves that seemed to go on past their natural limit.

He groaned against my neck, low and broken, and I felt him pulse inside me.

"Say my name," he said against my skin. His voice was raw. "My real name."

I understood what he was asking. Not the title. Not the designation. The name that was his underneath everything else he was required to be.

"Well, tell me. It is one of your best-kept secrets."

"Grigori," He whispered.

"Grigori," I repeated.

He held me tighter. His mouth pressed to the wound at my throat, his tongue moving over it gently, the tenderness of it surreal against everything that had just preceded it.

I lay there.

My body was warm and thoroughly wrecked, and my mind was starting to come back online in fragments, slow and reluctant. The ceiling of the hotel room was unremarkable. The instrumental music from the lobby had apparently continued through all of it, still too cheerful, still entirely unbothered.

I looked at him.

And something went wrong.

The face above mine was... Grigori’s. I knew it was. The eyes were still that impossible blue, still doing the thing light shouldn’t do, still ancient and inhuman and unmistakably him. I knew all of this with the part of my brain that dealt in facts.

But the name that surfaced through my chest and pressed against the back of my teeth was not his.

It was... Étienne.

I closed my eyes quickly. My hand pressed flat against my own sternum as if I could hold the name in, keep it from becoming anything more than a reflex, a misfiring, a side effect of an evening that had already gone far past any plan I had made for it.