His mouth found her neck.

Low. Involuntary. The sound of a woman whose body had been through several shifts and was exhausted and sore and should have been incapable of arousal and whose body had just overruled every single one of those conditions because Dexmon Drakenfell’s mouth was on her neck and her body’s response to his mouth was constitutional and immune to circumstances.

His hand slid between her thighs.

She gasped. The contact was direct, purposeful, his fingers finding her with the precision of a man who had studied this territory thoroughly enough to write a dissertation and whose dissertation would have been peer-reviewed as exceptional.

“Dex.”

“Right here, baby.”

He started slow. Circular.

The kind of touch designed to dismantle resistance one layer at a time, and the layers were falling fast because she had zero reserves left and the zero was the point. He wanted her with nothing left to hold back. He wanted the version of Serena that was too tired to overthink and too worn down to control the sounds and too spent to do anything except feel what he was doing and let her body respond without the committee in her head voting on whether the response was appropriate.

Her head fell back against his shoulder. Her lips parted. The steam from the bath was curling around them, water lapping at the edges of the basin with every small movement his hand made, and the small movements were producing results that were the opposite of small.

His mouth found her mark. The bite. The place on her neck where his fangs had claimed her, the scar tissue that carried his venom and his ownership and the specific nerve cluster that connected directly to something deep and primal in her body.

His lips pressed against it.

Her body jolted. Electric. The reaction was involuntary, total, every muscle tensing simultaneously and then releasing in a wave that started at her neck and rolled downward through her chest and her spine and ended where his fingers were working and the ending was a sound that bounced off the stone walls of the bathing chamber.

“That’s it,” he murmured against the mark.

His fingers moved faster. More pressure. The circular motion shifted to a rhythm that matched her breathing, then outpaced it, then left her breathing behind entirely. His other arm wrapped around her midsection, holding her against him, pinning her back to his chest so her body couldn’t arch away from the intensity.

“Let me hear you,” Dex said. “We’re alone. Nobody is on this floor. Let me hear every goddamn sound.”

Her body was building toward something. Fast. Too fast. Seven shifts had left her nerve endings exposed and oversensitive, and the oversensitivity was multiplying every sensation by a factor that made the math terrifying.

“Dex, I can’t, it’s too much.”

“Yes you can. You can take everything I give you.”

He pulled her tighter against him. His hand between her legs shifted, moving from her clit lower, two fingers sliding inside her while his thumb maintained pressure where his fingers had been. The dual sensation ripped a noise from her throat that was closer to a sob than a moan.

“There she is,” he breathed against her ear. “Right there, baby. Give it to me.”

His arousal was flooding the matebond. Dark, possessive, consuming. The wave of his need poured through the channel and crashed into hers and the crash was an accelerant on a fire that was already out of control.

Her hand reached behind her, grabbing a fistful of his hair, pulling his mouth harder against her neck because the contact on her mark was doing something chemical that she couldn’t fight and the fighting was over and the over was a relief.

“Oh gods. Dex.”

“Cum for me.”

She broke.

The orgasm detonated through her body with a force that whited out her vision. The water surged around them, displaced by the convulsive arch of her spine, splashing over the rim of the basin. Her body clenched around his fingers so hard his breath caught, and the catching was the sound of a man receiving something through the matebond that nearly ended him.

He held her through it. Both arms now. Firm. Unrelenting. His mouth on her mark, his chest against her back, his body absorbing the tremors that rolled through her in waves that lasted longer than either of them expected.

When her breathing started to return, when the tremors faded to aftershocks, when her body went limp against his chest with the total, boneless surrender of a woman who had been wrung out by her own pleasure and had zero structural integrity remaining, Dex pulled his hand away. Slowly.

He turned her in the water.

Gently. Carefully. Rotating her body so she was facing him, her legs straddling his hips, her arms draped over his shoulders. Her forehead pressed against his. Their breathing mingled. Close. Shared.

His eyes were gold at the edges. Aegon pressing. Dex holding.

“We’re doing that again,” he told her. The telling was a statement. The statement was a promise. The promise was a threat. All three coexisted in the same sentence with the same ease that Dexmon Drakenfell coexisted with tenderness and violence.

He lifted her from the water. One arm under her knees, one behind her back. She weighed nothing to him. She always weighed nothing to him. The carrying was effortless, a prince carrying his mate from a bath to a bed with the casual strength of a man whose body had been built for exactly this.

Her back hit the mattress. Wet. The sheets were going to be ruined. Neither of them cared.

He was over her before the bedframe stopped moving. His weight settled between her thighs, his forearms braced on either side of her head, his face inches from hers. Water dripped from his hair onto her collarbone. His eyes were fully gold now. Aegon was co-piloting.

He kissed her. Hard. Deep. The kiss of a man whose restraint had expired and whose expiration tasted like her mouth.