Still no kiss.

  He wanted me to be present, to recognize that the only pain I felt was the aching fever of heat.

  That prehensile cock knew exactly where to go—a sensitive slit that had grown slippery without my notice. Before it dug in, it ran itself between my seam, coating his accordion-like ridges in the slippery stuff my body leaked in invitation.

  Breath hitching, my pelvis tilted, an involuntary response to such stimulation. Which angled my opening right in line for the pointed head to test.

  He dipped in.

  Watching his terrifying cockhead ever so slowly luxuriate in my cream, flare once within me, then draw out, I whimpered.

  It was not a noise of pain.

  It was one of need. My hips already chasing after that spear-like tip so it might delve deeper and ease the fire within.

  Watching me, studying me, Cyderial pressed his invasion back to my opening, as if licking at me with his tip, before delving just a bit deeper than before.

  I squeaked to feel a stretch at that first fat accordion-like segment forcing me open, to know he flared within to lock his monster inside.

  Yet he changed the shape of himself again, retreating from my weeping slit, leaving me panting and starved.

  This dance of his, never once did it hurt. It felt like a rebirth, like that first taste of fog-laced air upon waking. Sizzling fire and soothing ice.

  An intoxicant beyond anything a glass of wine might offer.

  Two segments pushed through on his next penetration. Three. Four. Until I made a noise.

  So full, then so empty, his retreat slithering out of me while I panted for air, my little sounds of fear twisting into low, breathy moans.

  “You are doing so well.”

  His spearhead popped through the little sucking, starved mouth between my legs again, only this time my body did not allow his retreat. Something inside me closed hard around him, pulled at his cock in waving, undulating tugs, while I watched him stretch and strain my tiny opening so the bulk of his beastly thing could be swallowed whole.

  Girth firmly rooted, Cyderial did not withdraw again. Instead, those segments went to work within me, pushing against my tightened rings of muscle, teasing and stretching me as my insides began to match his dance and ripple around him.

  It felt good.

  The sensation was much different than what his fingers and tongue provided hours ago. Aching fullness countered the sweet zings, wetness squishing out where I gripped him to coat his cock in shining slick.

  Pulling out had me hissing until I realized it was only so he might thrust back in and give me more. My core would do all it might to refuse his retreat, Cyderial playing his game only to fight his way back in past so many spasming muscles. Yet my weeping slit was more than happy to coat his cock with abundant slick to aid his cause.

  Even so, my legs trembled where they were parted by his hips, my pleasure twisted up by nerves.

  “There is nothing that will ever compare to the feel of you. Every bit is perfection.” He groaned, hips shunting forward so once again he would be fully sheathed.

  My internal clench magnified, massaged into submission by a jerking, hungry cock.

  Within me, the segments began to thicken until I ached, then elongated so I might stretch. All the while, the tip of his cock searching out places to tease so my toes might curl, so my breathy pants might tell him just how good it all felt.

  My hips began to rock as reason abandoned me. Yet he kept feeding me more pleasure than I could possibly handle.

  It hurt beautifully, the growing torment almost as wonderful as the climax I had found on his tongue.

  When my hands came to grip his shoulders, when talons pricked deep to anchor me to my mate, Cyderial began to fuck me in earnest. Long strokes of a member that thickened and stretched, that wriggled and dug deep.

  Our breath united in cadence, my chest meekly echoing his deeper pulsating thumps.

  It was so very different taking him without being drunk on male tricks. I was there. It was my hands scratching down his back so I might grip his ass and pull him deeper. My legs spreading inexorably wide so he might plunder where he willed.

  Heat left my skin slippery with sweat, my insides on fire around his frenzied organ. When his lips finally came to mine, that wicked tongue daring to test if I’d bite, something far stronger than a flutter clenched up my insides.

  Which set him wild.

  Where he had been careful and measured in each thrust, he broke upon me with what a male could truly do to a female.

  This frenzy, I had not known on the floor of his office.

  This mania would end me in all ways.

  Trilling, I arched my back and received my demise. Within my body, he began to grow—not his knot, for I had yet to climax. That thing of his curled around itself and pulverized muscles to find what my body kept secret and tease out my screams.

  Pleasure caught flame within, burning the fever brighter when he left my open mouth to drag his tongue over my insanely sensitive nipples, stoking the fiery hurricane into a constricting mass of perfect hedonism that was about to go nuclear.

  I burst into a wracking, heaving orgasm and sunk my teeth into the meat of his shoulder to hold back the cries.

  The knot, the only thing that might improve an already perfect storm, bulged huge in my passage, releasing boiling waves of cum into my belly and fed my fully-formed addiction.

  Every cell in my body wanted more, draining his cock with sucking ripples against that writhing shaft. Poor human women would never know how incredible this might feel, their sad males’ members unexciting.

  “My God, Lorieyn.” Still groaning, he gushed another surge of fluid into my body. “You are perfect.”

  I was nowhere near speaking, actively working him and greedy for every last drop. His liquid gift was necessary to my life, every last cell that made up my body screaming for more.

  The driving need was so different than the climax he’d forced on me while he’d held me to his office floor. That had been mind-bending—this was life itself, dumping into my core.

  Beginning to bulge as he gushed more fluid inside me, my stomach altered shape. And kept growing.

  I wanted more.

  I needed the distortion to expand into burgeoning fullness that might slosh around his gyrating cock.

  “More!” The base part of my brain screamed for him to be generous, to do whatever he might desire so long as he continued to fill me up.

  Kiss him? Yes, I would take his lips and do to him with my tongue just the same as he did to me. Touch him? Greedy hands already stroked and clawed, while I purred encouragement upon the man who stretched my belly like a balloon.

  Only too happy to engage with my addiction-driven antics, Cyderial grew playful, relishing each bite, praising every rippling climax that followed another swell of fluid from his body into mine.

  Intruding discomfort let me know when my guts had reached capacity. What had seemed like a never-ending orgasm and an addict's blissful fix began to fade. I found I was myself again, that such pleasure had not twisted me into a stranger.

  Even if a prehensile thing wiggled inside me.

  Even if my enemy purred to see me pleasured.

  My stomach was bulbous, and my breasts were swollen. Between my legs, I ached perfectly around his pulsating knot.

  Soft kisses came to my brow, playful licks at my ear. “Does my brave mate want more?”

  A slight whine left my lips when his final gush stretched me more than I thought I could bear.

  But even that overburdened sensation? I loved it.

  Grunting, he focused on what he was doing within me, his member flexing strangely. “Hold it in, every drop, my love. Do not spill my gift.”

  As he spoke, something hot moved down the length of his cock, a wad that left the muscles in his neck straining as it stretched his girth through its descent.

  Explaining as he strained, he rocked into me, groaning, “Do not be afraid when I pull out and you stay full. A waxy plug will remain, so your body can drink down all it needs. It might feel a little strange, but you’re safe. Just remember that. Just… remember….”

  It burned where he spewed out the thick mass, yet there was no pain. Only a strange sense of relief that I had exactly what I needed.

  Plugging my insides, bit by bit, his pulsating knot diminished until he withdrew, leaving more of that hot substance in his wake.

  His spent cock popped free of my cunt to fall to the mattress. Not a drop had been spilled on the sheets.

  Inflated with semen, bursting… so full I could hardly bear it, still I tingled inside as if every last drop was sacred.

  Appraising his work, Cyderial’s hand came to gently stroke my large belly. To praise all he found, arrogant in his smirk as he saw me squirm. Every last trace of heat was gone, yet as he tickled his fingers over my distended abdomen, I grew crimson from heightening awkwardness.

  Pressure inside made it difficult to draw a deep breath. Organs felt as if they shifted to make room, some complaining, others relieved the addiction had been satiated.

  General Cyderial’s appreciative gaze never faltered. “Are you tired?”

  It may have been dark, yet I had slept much of the day. Not to mention how fast my hearts were beating from our exertion. Breathless, I answered, “No.”

  “Good.” He grinned, stretching out his extraordinary tongue as he crept down my body. Earning my cry when he began to kiss me passionately where I was already extremely stimulated.

  I came almost immediately, corked full of his fluids and screaming for mercy.

  He gave me none.

  Over and over until sunrise.

  There was no resistance left in me by the time he pulled me close to cuddle. My head on his shoulder, my belly resting at his flank, he stroked where I was swollen… and told me he loved me.

  21

  I awoke to midday sun, a soft breeze floating over my bare skin.

  There was something so strange about the concept of open windows, in allowing atmosphere to enter a room without filters to suck out the fog.

  So high above the city, there was no fog.

  Clean air, cold enough to leave my scales prickling, blew over me… the discomfort of my heat gone, leaving me vulnerable to a chill.

  No more aching burn, no more fever. Had it not been for the radiant warmth of the male with his chest pressed to my back and his legs tangled with mine, I may have even required a blanket.

  Head pillowed on his bicep, I listened to the sound of his soft sleeping breaths, feeling the rhythmic rise and fall of his chest. Where my abdomen poked out, his palm rested, a possessive embrace.

  My swollen belly had shrunk but not completely diminished. It poked out, a very strange physical phenomenon I had no idea my body was capable of. I possessed an entire organ system nature designed to assure I would need the first male to ejaculate inside me as long as I might live, and there it was right under my skin all along.

  A life mate who slept at my back.

  Cyderial claimed that my body would absorb what it needed from that swollen pocket within. He even left me plugged to ensure no drop would be wasted.

  But heat would return.

  And I would have to be fucked again.

  Twice it had happened now.

  Once, fucked senselessly drunk on male tricks on his office floor.

  Then, fucked with my mind clear and addiction riding me, in the very bed we would share from now on.

  Both times had been so different, and both times, the general knew exactly how to play my body against my mind. The things he could do with his fingers. The taste of his lips, how they might pull at my nipples. That beast between his legs.

  He could give me a kind of pleasure that was impossible to discount, the male shameless in wielding his power over me, utterly unapologetic. Cyderial could make my body sing, inspire reactions I would never know how to describe to another female. That journal—not a single one of the diagrams within it came close.

  Sexual congress between hybrid mates was existential. Cyderial was more than eager to show me all the secrets he had memorized over the years. It was hard to grasp these were his first sexual experiences too. But he was so experienced in the theory and practice, where I knew nothing—nothing about my body, about his, about wriggling cocks, ballooning stomachs, waxy plugs, nor orgasms.

  A female’s duty was to submit to these things.

  A male’s duty was to pleasure her in every way.

  It had only been one night wrapped up in his passion, but I could see how it could go horribly wrong. Miranda had been forced for ten years to endure a lustful mate who refused her freedoms so he might enjoy her cunt.

  The idea of being locked in a room and subjected to that kind of pleasure over and over would literally drive any female insane. I had already been tamed to such a point that I was allowing him to hold me.

  The same man who had forced me to sleep just the day before.

  Who had taken me without permission at the academy.

  Who I had given permission to knot me in that very bed, because I saw no other possible outcome, knowing Mirada’s sad history and Cyderial’s obsessive insanity.

  I had to be confident to be allowed outside on his terms.

  Why waste time arguing with reality? That is what the wise would ask.

  Accept every bit of disgust, swallow down your disappointments, and move forward. Cyderial had won. I had been defeated at a game I had unknowingly been playing with him since I was a child.

  He outmaneuvered me even now, the man educated in what I could only imagine were advanced sexual techniques, confident in how and when to apply them. He had bred me and made our children when I still could hardly wrap my mind around the concept that potentially dozens of hybrid babies were waiting in some sort of suspended state… I was not even sure where in my body.

  I didn’t have to like him, but I had to be knotted by him.

  I didn’t have to desire the man, but heat would force me to feel intense pleasure under his body for the rest of my life.

  I may carry our children, but I did have the power to refuse to birth them. Unless… that was also a lie.

  I had to accept that I did not know the world at all and, in accepting that, make a choice. To whine about my lot in life, or to start the new day reborn.

  Lorieyn, bonded mate of General Cyderial.

  Who I didn’t really know at all.

  How much longer before I forgot to feel uncomfortable waking up in the arms of a naked, figurative stranger possessing a weird cock. One I felt fast against my thigh, clinging to me in his sleep.

  A tentacle.

  A shackle.

  Even as he dreamed, I could not escape that thing’s desire to touch me.

  Nor could I pretend I was not beginning to grow aroused looking at it.

  Closing my eyes, I let out a sigh.

  A fresh start awaited, but I needed the bathroom and a few precious moments of solitude to clear my head.

  To poke at my belly, to see what the plug inside me felt like.

  To wash the smell of sweat and sex right down the drain before I might demand modest clothing that any good mate should provide.

  Yet before I might make my move to seek freedom, an audible pop made me jolt. The subsequent rushing flood that poured out of me left me scrambling to my elbows to gape. From my glittering slit poured a river of pearlescent fluid that drenched the bed, my stomach deflating while I stared in frozen horror.

  Jaw hanging loose, I gawked at all the creamy whiteness pooling on the sheets. And just about died to both feel and watch the white plug slither free. Through the gush, moving past the lips of my slit, a waxy-looking blob joined the mess.

  A sleepy male hand dove right into the warm puddle, rubbing it right back into me as he fingered my sex. “Mmm, good morning.”

  Every move, every wiggle I made, and a little bit more dribbled out, uninvited fingers rolling it against my seam and tickling where I leaked. Even that organ of his was perking up to slather around in it.

  “Oh my God, stop!”

  He did, but Cyderial did not remove the single hooked finger penetrating the source of the flood.

  My chest was heaving, my cheeks bright red, unsure if I should get out of bed and risk a greater mess, or simply die right there. But mortification would not let my mouth work.

  Easing gracefully from where he lay, all sleek muscle and dangerous strength, a very naked General Cyderial took me in his arms. “My darling, your body, in all its miraculous workings, is nothing but beautiful to me. I gave you more than you might absorb before the plug would melt. Releasing what is not needed is natural. Cleansing.”

  He began to kiss my neck, murmuring, “Besides, males find a large rupture very arousing. A swollen womb is a sign of our virility and devotion. I am proud to see your stomach protrude, and if you would let me, I would pump you full again this very moment.” Lips came to my throat. “Give you a belly to carry around all day.”

  My squeal when he set his teeth to the skin where shoulder met neck sent another gush to coat where his fingers were once again busy in my slit.

  Taking his wrist in my grip, I forced his touch out of my body, shrugging out from under his shadow until I was free of his grasping cock.

  Standing, more warm drips running down my thigh, I took a deep breath, a shaky exhale following. “You’re telling me this is going to happen every time?”

  “There is nothing to be embarrassed about.”

  “Did this happen after the first time?” I had a protruding stomach then too but did not remember anything about what took place between passing out and waking up here.

  “You were delirious through the release of my knot, and I cleaned you afterward. I knotted you again while your body recovered in slumber, and yes, I gave you what you needed so you could fully rest while adapting to our bond,” he admitted with no shame. “When your body had all it needed, it released, and I tended to you, dressed you, and knew you would wake soon for more.”