The mist didn't clear so much as it was violently shoved aside.
Solid ground materialized beneath Lexianna's bare back. Not the jagged rocks of the pit, but a sprawling, absurdly large mattress layered in thick, dark wool, swallowed her whole.
Lord Arkin's chambers.
She'd heard it was beautiful. Being inside it right now confirmed that, but the luxury of actually looking around wasn't available to her at present. Her chest was still leaking. The poison was still active. And the ache between her legs had graduated from desperate to genuinely insulting.
The air was suffocatingly warm, smelling of cedar and the sharp, territorial musk of an Alpha wolf.
Before her brain could fully process the change in real estate, he dropped her.
She hit the mattress and immediately twisted, hands shoving against his chest on pure reflex. She didn't like being handled. She didn't like being positioned like a luggage.
Arkin didn't entertain the rebellion.
He caught both of her wrists in one hand, pinned them above her head, and sank just enough of his weight over her to make the point without crushing her.
"If you move too much," he said, his voice a low gravelly warning that vibrated against her collarbone, "you should forget about getting whatever it is you want."
Lexianna glared up at him. She despised being given orders. She was the one who drafted the ultimatums. She had made grown men sweat through expensive suits with a single well-placed silence.
But her chest was in agony. And fighting him was bad business.
She let the tension bleed out of her shoulders.
Fine. Strategic retreat. I will let you have this one just for today.
Arkin released her wrists. He stepped back from the bed, his eyes locked on hers as he reached for the clasps of his robes.
He stripped.
Lexianna's eyes glazed over as her brain filed a brief objection and then went completely offline.
He was, there was no other word for it, magnificent.
Magnifique!
Absolument Magnifique!
Broad shoulders, a sharp V-line tapering to narrow hips, skin crisscrossed with pale brutal scars that suggested his survival record was as impressive as his everything else.
Her ex-husband had been a soft, tailored-suit of a man who looked at charity galas. Arkin looked like something that had been forged, not born.
Which is fair for a sexy demon like him, honestly.
Perfect vessel to give me what I need.
And the sheer, heavy size of what was freed from his silk trousers made her breath physically stutter.
Oh mama, that's bigger than my arm. How do you walk with that?
The black curtains fell shut around the bed, sealing them into a cocoon of heat.
He dropped over her. His knee parted her thighs with effortless, unbothered dominance just as she gulped with her eyes trained on his.
His mouth found hers, hungry, bruising, no preamble while his hand moved down to the slick, aching entrance that had long since run out of patience.
Lexianna arched. A desperate sound tore from her throat. She opened wider, chasing the contact---
Only for him to stop again.
Again!!!
Arggggh!! Are you trying to torture me to death.
He lifted his head. Pulled his hand back just as she reached for the friction.
"What now?" She asked, her voice raw with disbelief and fury.
A warning growl rippled through his chest. "Quiet."
Before her lips parted to curse him out, he grabbed her hips and flipped her over. She hit the mattress face-down, a sharp gasp punching out of her. She was immediately grateful for the thick wool, anything harder and her chest would have lodged a formal complaint with her entire nervous system.
She hated this position. It was blind. Vulnerable. A complete surrender of the visual field, which was the only field she had any remaining control over.
She braced her palms against the wool and started to crawl forward.
His hand closed around the base of her silver tail. Lexianna stopped dead in her tracks.
The world stopped with her.
It was like grabbing a live wire with her spine attached. A bolt of pure electricity exploded from the base of her tail and shot upward, exploding behind her eyes. Her back arched on its own. Her hips lifted without her own permission, angling toward him like her body had already surrendered and simply forgotten to inform.
She whimpered.
Pathetic. Needy. Completely humiliating.
Fuck, Lexianna... what the fuck are you doing right now! This is not you!
But the words that came next slapped her across the face.
"Lord Arkin," she gasped, the words falling out as he curled her fingers right at the sensitive area on her tail, "please... be gentle."
He leaned over. His chest pressed against her back, his weight settling like something permanent. He didn't release her tail while the others curled around him. His fingers stroked the thick silver at its base, slow and deliberate, massaging in a rhythm that turned her joints to liquid.
The other tails stood erect.
It was her clit and her spine and every nerve ending she'd ever owned, amplified and focused into a single unbearable point of pleasure.
Her nails found the wool and held on.
Why the fuck is touching a tail feeling so good, damnit!
"We have already come this far," he murmured, his breath hot against her pointed ear.
A pause.
"My darling wife."
Who the fuck is your wife?!
The scream happened entirely inside her head because her body had staged a full coup and wasn't accepting communications from management. Her hips were rocking backward against him in a desperate, humiliating rhythm that she was observing from a distance.
"Please, Lord Arkin," she whimpered again, her voice muffled by the wool. She wanted to be embarrassed about it.
She was too far gone to be embarassed about it.
He positioned himself at her waiting entrance.
"Hold on," he said quietly, kissing into her hair.
He pushed. Slowly. With the same infuriating measured patience he had applied to everything since the moment he'd landed in that pit.
Yet inside him, he couldn't stop groaning with so many sensations that were bombarding him.
She was so warm.
She was so tight.
She smelled so good.
So mine for me.
Lexianna cried out, her fingers twisting violently into the sheets. He stretched her open, filling something that had never been filled, and they both felt the exact moment the realization landed.
For all her sharp edges and memories. For all the luscious, dangerous curves of her body built like it had been designed for exactly this. The fox Demoness had never been claimed.
Not once.
A groan of pride tore through Arkin's throat. Something in it wasn't entirely controlled. The wolf, for the first time, sounding genuinely undone.
Lexianna's mind went sideways.
Too much... Was her first coherent thought. Entirely too much.
The poison in her blood collided violently with the demonic heat radiating off him, and the clash was... it was... she was trying to hold onto some fragment of herself, but that woman was dissolving rapidly into the mattress.
The pleasure was winning. It wasn't even close.
"Yes..." she whined, her voice muffled, wrecked and completely without shame. The demand came from somewhere primal, somewhere that had never sat in a boardroom in its life. "Rearrange my insides with your big, fat cock, Lord Arkin."
Arkin froze.
The only sound in the room was their ragged breathing.
And then the wolf prince threw his head back and laughed.
It was low and deep and genuinely dangerous, the kind of sound that vibrated in the walls. Nothing like the cold predator who had cornered her in a pit. This was real. Unguarded. She felt it in her spine.
"I have never," he rasped, dragging a hand through his hair, his eyes burning red with something that hadn't been there before, "met a female like you."
He gripped her hips, pinned her to the mattress and began to move.
***
Right outside the heavy oak doors of the Prince's chambers, the corridor was its usual tomb of silence.
Or it was supposed to be.
The two elite wolf guards posted at the door had been stationed there specifically because Prince Arkin was banished. Their orders were clear, prevent unauthorized entry, and sound the alarm immediately if he returned.
They were doing neither of those things.
They were standing rigidly at attention, faces burning a pepper-red that had been deepening steadily for the past several minutes, because the doors were thick, but not thick enough.
The thud of the bedframe carried. The low animalistic growls of their prince carried. And the absolutely unhinged melodious, shameless sounds of a female enthusiastically demanding things that no one in this corridor needed to be hearing, those carried most of all.
They had been so thoroughly paralyzed by the audacity of it that neither of them had noticed the junior servant who'd slipped away three minutes ago.
The heavy march of boots echoed down the courtyard before they could recover.
The guards straightened. Then immediately wished they hadn't, because rounding the corner was a crowd and at the front of it, was the Demon Luna of the wolf tribe. Beside her, Jaw tight, fury barely leashed, strode the Demon Alpha himself.
They all halted ten paces from the door.
From inside the chambers, Lexianna let out a piercing silver cry that rang off every stone surface in the corridor like a bell. It was followed immediately by Arkin's deep voice, low and warm, and entirely too tender for a man with his reputation, murmuring something that sounded distressingly like praise.
"Aren't you a good little fox..."
The silence that followed was heavier than a death sentence. The Demon Alpha turned his head toward his Luna. A muscle jumped in his jaw. His eyes were doing something complicated.
She was staring straight ahead at the door. Her face had gone the color of a fresh wound.
"Is that," the Alpha started, with the careful enunciation of a man choosing each word like it was a blade setting down gently, "not your son in there?"