The Sickened Luna's Last Chance novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Last Night

She tells Torin she will reject him and takes him one last time; something pulls out of her chest.

Torin was home before me, which was unusual.

He stood in the dark at the long window of our bedroom with a glass of whiskey he wasn't drinking.

Dunne dropped me at the end of the drive.

I walked the last quarter mile with my braid coming loose and my mind made up.

I closed the bedroom door behind me.

"You embarrassed me," Torin said without turning.

"You embarrassed yourself. I just stood there."

"The council wanted to know whether I can control my own wife."

"And what did you tell them?"

"That you were ill."

"I am ill."

He finally turned around.

He had taken off his tie, and his shirt was open at the throat, and the scar through his eyebrow caught the light.

I had looked at that face for two years.

I was never allowed to touch it unless the contract called for it.

Our nights followed the calendar.

The first and third Saturday, in the dark, with the practiced courtesy of two strangers sharing a bus seat.

I'll say this for Torin Stannard.

He was thorough, and he was quiet, and he never once looked me in the eye.

"I'm going to reject you," I said.

The glass stopped halfway to his mouth.

"At the Winter Moon?"

"Tomorrow. At the stone, before the whole valley."

"You can't."

"I can. It's in the old law. Any Luna who stands at the Moon Court and says the words."

"The contract runs to the Solstice."

"The contract isn't a law of the moon."

He set the glass down hard enough to slop it over his fingers.

"Linnea. Think about what you'd be doing. The pack would see a Luna spit in her Alpha's face."

He stopped.

"I'd be weakened."

"There's the word."

"That isn't what I meant."

"It's exactly what you meant. Everything with you is about whether you look strong."

I took a step toward him.

"Do you know what I wanted, in the hall? One sentence. 'Hester, what do we do?'"

"Linnea."

"That's all I wanted. You couldn't give me a sentence."

His jaw worked.

"I couldn't afford to," he said. And his voice broke on it, just slightly, and he heard it too.

We stared at each other.

I don't know which of us moved first.

I know my hands were in his open shirt.

His mouth was on mine, hard enough to taste blood.

We both made a sound.

He walked me back until my spine hit the bedpost.

"This isn't the first Saturday," I said against his mouth.

"No."

"It isn't the third."

"No."

"Good."

I pulled his shirt off his shoulders and shoved him toward the bed.

He went, with a rough, startled laugh, and I climbed over him and pinned his wrists to the mattress.

The lamp was on.

I wanted it on.

His amber eyes looked up at me, wide open, and for once there was nobody in them but him.

"Linnea," he said.

"Don't talk."

I kissed his throat and the hard line of his collarbone and the long scar over his ribs that he'd never explained.

I dragged my teeth across his chest and felt him jerk under me.

His hips came up to meet mine through my dress, and I reached down and found him already hard and hot in my hand.

"God," he said, through his teeth. "Take that off."

"You take it off."

He tore the zipper open down my back.

I shrugged out of the grey dress and the rest of it.

He looked at me, really looked, with his chest heaving.

It was as if he'd never seen a woman's body with the lights on.

"You're beautiful," he said, like it was a rule he'd forgotten.

"Too late for that."

"Linnea."

"Shut up, Torin."

I took his cock in my hand and sank down onto him slowly.

I went an inch at a time, my wet heat stretching around him until he was all the way inside my pussy.

His head dropped back against the pillow.

He swore.

I rode him hard.

I braced my hands on his chest and fucked him in long, rough strokes.

Every time I came down he drove up into me.

The groan he made shook through both of us.

His hands found my hips and gripped.

Then he sat up and wrapped an arm round my back.

He kissed my breast, my collarbone, the pulse in my neck.

"Look at me," he said hoarsely.

I looked.

"You're mine," he said, "you've always been mine, and you never once let me."

"You never once asked."

He rolled us over.

He drove into me from above with my legs locked around his waist.

He was deep and fast, one hand tangled in my hair.

The other hand tilted my hip, so every thrust hit the place that made me cry out.

I raked my nails down his back.

I said his name.

Then I said things I wouldn't have said to a priest.

He answered with a low, ragged growl against my ear.

When I came, it tore through me so hard I bit his shoulder.

He followed a moment later, his face buried in my neck as he came deep inside me.

And at the exact second his cum spilled inside me, something yanked.

It was like a hook set deep in my chest, and someone on the other end pulling.

My vision went white.

My lungs wouldn't fill.

I felt a warmth leave me, a long hot rush of it, straight out through my ribs and into him.

He shuddered and groaned and said, in a voice I'd never heard from him, "God, that's good."

And I lay under him with my heart stuttering and the room going dark at the edges.

He was glowing.

His skin was flushed and bright, and his eyes were clear, and his breath came slow and strong.

I had never felt so empty in my life.

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