Page 55 of Wrath

I settled between Kwan’s legs, kissing her face and caressing her body while waiting for her to come back to reality. At last, she looked at me, her brown eyes—almost black from desire—locking with mine.

“Bond with me, my mate,” I whispered against her lips.

As sole response, Kwan spread her legs wider for me. Her arms wrapped around my back, and she pressed her chest against mine while her consciousness prodded at my psychic mind. I welcomed her in at the same time that I pushed myself inside of her. The burning heat of her closing all around me made me hiss with pleasure. Like every time we made love, it took all my willpower to control my possession of her, so that she would adjust to my girth. But fuck she felt good! I never imagined pleasure so intense was possible.

As soon as I could safely move without hurting her, my hips settled into a steady rhythm, until my mate started lifting her pelvis in counterpoint to my movements. I crushed her mouth in a possessive kiss, my thrust becoming increasingly deeper, faster, stronger. Beneath the fire raging inside of me, something more primitive and feral that I had been keeping at bay ever since the first time I’d lain with Kwan, reared its head again. This time, I didn’t fight my dragon.

A deep growl rose from my throat, and the exquisite pain of the partial shift swept through me. My shoulders broadened, my muscles swelled, and my spine felt on the verge of splitting in half as the bone spikes lining it and the curve of my shoulders began protruding further and growing thicker. My throat burned with my mating glands kicking into action. They set my loins on fire as my seed became fertile and made my fangs ache as they descended to complete the bond.

Kwan’s hands tightened their grip on me, fear and excited anticipation settling on her features as I bared my teeth at her. Despite her trepidation, my mate turned her head sideways, stretching her neck to make it easier for me.

I didn’t resist.

Moving at lightning speed, I lowered my head and sank my fangs into Kwan’s neck. As the taste of iron exploded on my tongue, my woman shouted in pain. The sound quickly shifted into moans of bliss as my bonding fluids flowed through my fangs, flooding her system. Something broke within me, and I unleashed my passion in an unbridled fury. Kwan writhed beneath me as I pounded into her. Her shouts of ecstasy mixed with my almost animalistic growls of pleasure over the slapping sound of our flesh meeting.

All sense of time and place vanished as I lost myself in my woman. I was burning from the inside out as I wrested one climax after the other from my mate, joining my voice to hers from time to time while my scorching seed shot out into her. But I didn’t go soft, thrusting in reckless abandon as another orgasm built up until I filled up Kwan once more with a blissful flow.

By the time I collapsed on top of her, I was utterly wrecked. Rolling onto my back, I gathered my woman into my arms, her slender body slick with sweat. Kwan was trembling with the spasms of pleasure, and burning feverishly with both passion and my essence flooding her system, already at work binding her to me.

“I love you, Kwan,” I whispered in a rumbling voice, rendered rougher from shouting so much.

“I love you, too, Wrath,”Kwan mind-spoke to me, her voice likely even more shot than mine.

My consciousness prodded her psychic mind. She welcomed me in. As I flowed towards the magnificent silver sphere that sheltered her soul in the center of her psychic void, Kwan dropped her shield. The silver sphere faded, revealing the mesmerizing rainbow of the dancing lights of her soul, beckoning me. Unlike previous nights, where I’d merely wrapped my consciousness around her sphere, this time I intertwined my soul with my mate’s.

We fell asleep, bonded for life, body and soul.

Epilogue

Kwan

In the two weeks of our return trip back to Khepri, I felt happier than I ever believed possible, especially in the second half of the journey after Wrath and I bonded. Sure, I had been looking forward to being back home, feeling the ground beneath my feet, the caress of a soft breeze on my face, and the warmth of the sun rays on my skin. But Wrath had quite literally swept me off my feet. The beauty of long space trips was plenty of idle time. My man didn’t allow a single second to be boring. Although we socialized a lot with the others—who I loved dearly—Wrath made every minute of our private time special.

To my pleasant surprise, we didn’t end up spending a whole lot of time on the holodeck as I expected. Wrath loved doing real world things with me, simple things that gave us time to talk about everything and anything, or to simply cuddle. I loved board games and was delighted to discover that he had a huge library of them in his private quarters. Better yet, he owned a whole bunch I’d never played before, which he took his sweet time teaching me.

Wrath loved touching me and caring for me, especially brushing my hair. That meant I got treated to massages and full spa treatments—including pedicures. Naturally, those usually ended up with us playing naughty. Then there were the countless movie nights where we just cuddled on the couch, not to mention the snuggling in a bubble bath while he read me a book, or me listening to him while he sang me a song… or ten. My mate was an accomplished guitar player, and his rumbling voice as he sang made my toes curl.

When we were in a silly mood, we would go into full karaoke mode. Since we were suckers for punishment, we picked songs from foreign planets and languages that we mostly couldn’t pronounce. It was so atrocious I’d be all but rolling on the floor, choking with laughter.

Laughter… How I had missed it.

Wrath had reminded me how to live, love, and be happy again, then taken it to the next level. I still thought about Kevin from time to time, but less and less with sadness, and more and more with fondness. Wherever he was, I knew in my heart that he was happy that I’d stopped wasting the precious gift he’d bestowed upon me through his sacrifice. Like Varnog, I would make the most of every single minute of every day.

That said, the benefits of my bonding with Wrath came with its fair share of aggravation. I’d heard about the itchiness the women experienced for the first couple of weeks after bonding with their mate as their mantle grew. I’d never imagined it would be this bad. I quite literally wanted to claw my skin off. Wrath had to wrap my hands to keep me from maiming myself. Nathalie did her best to whip up some appeasing cream for me, but she didn’t have all the right reagents to make the one the other women normally used.

Then the scar on my belly also joined the party. At first, it reddened and burned a little before becoming itchy as well. For a moment, I feared it had become infected somehow. However, as the itchiness grew, the scar itself faded. By the time we reached Khepri, it was halfway gone. I immediately stocked up on soothing cream, which made the following week bearable. By the end, my scar had completely faded, and Victoria—the Vanguard’s Chief Medical Officer—confirmed that I would have zero problem conceiving going forward. Although I’d known it deep down, I still made a spectacle of myself, weeping with joy. Damn, I’d become a real emotional wreck since joining the Vanguard.

Aside from that good news, I also celebrated the stunning mantle of golden scales that now adorned my neck and shoulder lines. However, while it looked gorgeous on me, I couldn’t help envying the brown-skinned women like Sabra and Ayana on whom the golden scales stood out even more, making them look regal.

Although I only got to see Sabra for a short time before she set off on a mission with her mate Chaos, we still had time to go into an open war—friendly though it was. During our mission to Narjin, Varnog and I had grown very close. I’d officially claimed him as my big brother. But apparently, Sabra had already laid such a claim when he’d helped save her life during her first crazy initiation to the Vanguard. Naturally, Varnog had puffed out his chest, loving to have so many ladies fighting over him. While I didn’t mind sharing the insufferable Scelk leader, I wasn’t feeling as generous about the other battle.

As Wrath had sensed with an almost supernatural accuracy, Linette had conceived sometime at the beginning of our trip to Narjin. Varnog was beside himself with joy. It was my second time seeing the sarcastic male this emotional… more even. Obviously, I called dibs on being the future baby’s Godmother, but Ms. Sabra had different ideas. The fact that she’d chosen Varnog as Godfather to her own firstborn son Ghost didn’t help my case.

Being a shameless brat, Linette flat out stated that she was open to bribes over the next few months of her pregnancy to help her decide.

We had returned to Khepri shortly after Doom. The sight of the Horned Creckels simply blew my mind. It would be sometime before they were trained enough to join one of the Vanguard teams, but Wrath was already using his irresistible charm to start wooing some of them in the hope one of those highly intelligent creatures would pick us.

On a less happy note, more reports of the rebels’ interference kept flooding in. After further interrogation, the Lenusian female Osanu indirectly helped narrow down the identities of some of the Division Leaders that had participated in turning rogue countless former Coalition troops. A part of me felt sorry for Osanu. She had made some very bad choices, and associated with even worse people, but her heart had been in the right place.

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