Chapter 144 – The Omega’s Reward
Ronan
His hips are working, desperately trying to find friction against the mattress, seeking any edge, any mercy. I lift off him and stop him cold a breath from breaking. “Don’t you dare,” I say, voice shaking with want. “Not yet.”
He sobs. It’s beautiful. It’s monstrous. It’s mine.
I force myself back. The bed creaks. My chest heaves. He’s sprawled and shaking, slick smeared across his back, thighs trembling, hole fluttering around nothing. He drags in air like a drowning man.
“Ronan,” he whispers into the pillow, and there’s urgency in it, and fury, and glee, because he’s built to love a fight and I’m the only opponent he wants. “You’re going to kill me with your cruelty.”
“Yes,” I say. I don’t give him comfort yet, we’re nowhere near done. “And you love it and lap it up like a puppy with a bowl of milk.”
He gasps out a laugh that holds no argument. I go to the basin, splash my face and breathe until my knuckles stop rattling. When I turn back, he’s in the exact place I left him. Obedient, destroyed, waiting.
I climb onto the bed and haul him onto his side. He fights me for a second out of pure principle and then melts, little by little, until his head is on my bicep and our legs tangle. I fish the blanket up over his hips, scrub the sweat damp from his chest with the corner, and kiss the brackish-salt track at the corner of his eye.
“You want me to make it stop,” I murmur against his temple. “Say the word and it stops.”
He takes too long to answer. Not because he doubts me. Because he likes the hunger. Because the ache is a tether that ties us tighter. “No,” he says finally, tantrum and prayer all at once. “I want you to be the one who breaks.”
I huff helplessly. “You make me insane.”
“Good,” he says, smug and wrecked. Then, softer, raw under the edges: “Don’t ever leave me.”
“I’m not going anywhere.” I tip his jaw and make him look at me. “You declared unequivocally to a hall full of wolves that you’re mine.” My thumb strokes his cheekbone. “Now I’m going to win you.”
He blinks, dazed. “That sounds like fucking.”
“It is,” I say, and smile.
Before the worlds can fully register, I have him under me, face down, sinking my teeth into the meat of his shoulder, hard enough to make his body convulse with desire as I drive into him to the hilt.
Eli sobs against the mattress, fingers clawing for purchase. “Thank you, Alpha.”
“Quiet,” I growl into his skin, mouth still full of his flesh. “Take what’s yours.”
He clenches around me and the slick heat of him drags me deeper. One hand bands his throat, the other circles his wrists, keeping him from reaching for me. I set a pace meant to erase weeks of denial. Punishing, relentless, the kind of rhythm that makes furniture complain.
He writhes with frantic little movements, his body trying to climb the knife-edge I’ve kept him on for so long. “Please. Please.”
“You’ll come when I tell you,” I snarl, hips snapping forward, my heavy testicles slapping against his ass cheeks until he whimpers breathlessly. “Not one heartbeat sooner.”
He shakes, the sound he makes halfway between laugh and cry, so turned on he’s delirious. I free his wrist long enough to hook my arm under his knee and fold him open obscenely, driving the angle I want. His back arches. I feel the second my cock finds that spot and his whole spine bows.
“There,” I say, cruel with affection. “I’ve got you, pretty thing. My pretty one, my salvation. Right there.”
His curse burns hot and helpless against the sheet. I grind, short and ruthless thrusts, milking his reactions. His cock drags over the linen, slick and leaking. He’s so primed a harsh word could knock him over.
“Count,” I order.
“Wh-what?”
“Every time I hit it and you inch closer to your orgasm.” I slam into him again and his mouth falls open. “One.”
“Fuck! One,” he gasps.
Again. “Two.”
By five he’s gone glassy with need. By eight his voice is a wrecked thread. I let him lose count and take over from him.
When he’s on the verge of losing control, hurtling into oblivion without my permission. I ease off to a single slow thrust that makes him wail.
“Ronan you fucking bastard! Please-please-please-please-please.”
“You begged in front of me for weeks,” I rasp, “Tonight you earned it, but that doesn’t mean we have to rush to the finish line.”
I take his wrists, cross them in the small of his back, and bind them there with my forearm. I ride him hard for twenty breaths, then drag it cruelly slow for ten, then back to ruthless. Grind, stroke, kiss his shoulder in an apology he’ll never accept, and keep going. He’s shaking so violently the bed creaks.
“Listen to me,” I say, bending until my mouth is at his ear. “You’re mine. Say it.”
“I’m yours,” he chokes. “I’m yours- I’m- Ronan, I-”
“Not yet.” I angle deeper, feel him tear apart under me, feel the bond flare like a struck match and then become wildfire. “You take me and you hold it. Show me.”
He does. He holds with that stubborn little clench that makes my vision strobe black at the edges. His feet brace, his hips come back to meet me. I slide a hand down his belly, not to touch his cock, that’s still mine to deny, but to press just above the root, pinning him to the feeling, to me.
“Good boy,” I breathe, wrecked with pride. “Perfect for me. Made to be mine.”
He makes a noise like he’s breaking. I feel the first shudder of his orgasm trying to take him and clamp down on his hip, hold him on the precipice like I have for days. He actually sobs.
I bite the other shoulder to prove a point and he keens, clamping around me so hard I see stars. I’m close, too close, but I won’t finish him on denial. Not tonight. Not now. Not after the way he stood in front of that prince and put a blade to temptation’s throat for all to see.
“Look at me,” I order.
He turns his head, cheek crushed into the sheet, eyes blown and wet. I take his jaw in my palm and kiss him messy, open-mouthed, owning every gasp. Then I flip him and drag him up into my lap without leaving his body, folding him into me. Knees wide over my thighs, spine arched, throat bared. He clutches my shoulders.
“Ride me,” I tell him, voice a ruined thing. “Now.”
He does. Uncoordinated at first, too wrecked to find a rhythm, then he catches and it’s beautiful filth. The slap of him coming down on me, the high sound he can’t swallow, the lick of his tongue at the corner of his mouth like he can taste the praise I haven’t said yet. I give him all of it.
“Look at you.” I palm his chest, rub my thumb over a peaked nipple until he jolts. “Look at the mess you are for me, it’s so beautiful. My jewel. My prize. My perfect boy.”
The praise detonates inside him. I feel it. He claws at my hair, rides harder, frantic now. I catch his mouth again, swallow his broken sound, slide my palm down, down...
“Please,” he begs, wild-eyed. “Please, Ronan, let me-”
“Yes,” I growl into his mouth, finally, blessedly. “Come for me, pretty one.”
I fist him and he shatters. It’s violent. Head thrown back, the first ribbon hitting his chest, the second striping my knuckles, the third milked out as I hold him through it, fucking him steady so the pleasure has nowhere to go but deeper. He cries out and clamps around me, and that’s it, my control snaps.
I surge to my knees, haul him tight, and drive up into him with the kind of speed that lives between worship and ruin. “Mine,” I snarl against his throat. “Mine mine mine-”
He’s still coming, aftershocks devastating his body. I pound through them, chasing the edge I’ve refused for weeks, and when it hits, it knocks the world sideways. I bury myself and spill, pulse after brutal pulse, held inside him by the lock of his body and the vicious way his arms strangle my neck like he can fuse us.
I don’t stop. I can’t. I rut through the oversensitivity, gentler now, coaxing more out of him. He yelps, trembles, and dissolves again, quieter this time, a broken whimper as his cock spills weak and lovely over both our bellies.
“That’s it,” I murmur, voice destroyed. “Give me all of it. I’ll take it. I’ll hold it. I’ll keep you.”
He’s incoherent, whispering yes against my cheek like a mantra.
I lay him back and slide down his body until my mouth can close over his spent cock. He jolts, tries to wriggle away from the too-much. I pin his hips and nurse him through the aftershocks, tongue slow, reverent, ruthless in its devotion.
When he sobs again I let him go and climb back up, kissing his open palm, then the soft inside of his wrist, then the fading bite marks blooming on his shoulder.
“More,” he whimpers, shocking himself with the want. “Please, Rona. More.”
“Greedy little monster,” I say, adoring it. I push two slick fingers back inside him, crooked to find that spot, while my mouth seals around a nipple and sucks. He screams, honest as a storm. The bond roars. I ride it, working him, praising him between each thrust.
“My redemption. My work of art. Look how you give me everything.”
He spasms in my hand and spills a thin, helpless pulse onto his own belly. I keep him there, just edging into too far, then stop, then give him a mercy kiss that has no mercy at all.
“Can’t,” he begs, the word shaking.
“One more,” I coax, and rub his chest slowly until the panic smooths. “For me.”
He breaks on command, the soft, sobbing kind of climax that leaves him boneless underneath me. I pull my fingers free, gather the mess on his skin with my palm, and smear it possessively across his hip bones in two pale handprints.
“Marked,” I say, voice low. “Inside and out. Mine.”
He blinks up at me, dazed and glowing. There’s no space in him for brattiness now, only the open, ruined devotion that undoes me more efficiently than any plea.
I lift his hand and kiss each knuckle. “You did well,” I tell him, because he lives on praise as much as I live on control. “Perfect. You’re perfect.”
His lashes flutter. “Say it again.”
“Perfect,” I repeat, softer. “My perfect boy.”
The wildfire in the bond settles into banked heat. The part of me that’s all wolf finally falls on his side to rest and stops pacing.
I fetch a warm cloth, clean him with the same hands that wrecked him, careful around the bites. He mutters threats about making me pay for this later. I smile into his shoulder and pull the blankets up. When I move to roll away, he clutches and drags me back with surprising strength.
“Stay,” he mumbles, already half under.
“Always,” I assure him again. It’s the easiest vow I’ve ever made. I slot our bodies together the way they were designed to fit. One arm over his waist, my mouth tucked to the crown of his head, my breath synced to his.
Eli exhales a long, satisfied sigh and goes heavy in my arms. Boneless, sated, thoroughly marked. Utterly mine.
And I’m steady again for the first time since Kieran of Silvercrest’s unannounced arrival.