Chapter 219: The Dragon Was Not Invited - Part 1

He should leave right now. Instead he stays rooted to the spot, nostrils flaring, breathing in air that still somehow carries her on it even from this distance: the floral soap she uses, the underlying muskiness that’s just her, and beneath all of that, fainter but there, unmistakable, the slick dark scent of her arousal. His whole body goes rigid at the smell of it. His enhanced senses have never felt like more of a curse than right now, picking apart every thread of scent drifting across the road to torment him with the knowledge of exactly what’s happening in that house.

The curtain shifts. He catches the outline of her silhouette settling down on top of someone, on top of Thorne, and the sound she makes afterward goes straight down Ash’s spine like a lit fuse.

"Fuck," he breathes, the word scraping out of him.

He can hear everything. The bear might have decent ears for a shifter of his bloodline, but it’s nothing compared to what runs in Ash’s veins. He hears the rustle of fabric. He hears Dove’s breath catch and release in that quick hitching way she only does when someone’s lips are on her throat. He hears his name. No. Not his name. Thorne’s name, dragged out of her on a low, throaty command that makes something twist viciously in Ash’s chest.

"Right there," she says, muffled through glass and distance but still somehow clear as day to him. "Don’t stop."

He should not be listening to this. He knows that. Some small, rational scrap of him, buried somewhere beneath the howling static filling his skull, knows that this is exactly the kind of thing that will eat him alive if he lets it, and yet he can’t make his feet move. He can’t make himself turn and walk back into the trees and let the forest swallow him the way it should.

Because underneath the rage, underneath the gut-twisting jealousy clawing up through him, there’s something worse. Something he can’t look at straight on. A low, insistent ache that isn’t just in his chest.

She wishes it was me.

He doesn’t know where the thought comes from. He just knows it settles into him with the same weight as truth, slides into the cracks of his anger and makes a home there. Of course she does. She’s always wanted more than Thorne can give her, more edge, more fire, more of that reckless hunger that Ash has never once had to pretend to have. He’s watched her for longer than he’d ever admit to anyone, watched the way her eyes catch on danger, on the things that growl back when provoked. Thorne is steady. Thorne is safe. Thorne probably licks and nibbles at her like he’s terrified of leaving a mark.

Ash wouldn’t be terrified. Ash would leave marks everywhere. He’d bite down just hard enough to make her gasp and then soothe it with his tongue, slow and filthy, exactly the way he knows she likes, the way she used to beg him for, back before everything went to hell, back when she’d fist her hands in his hair and growl at him to go harder, to stop holding back.

He realizes, distantly, that he’s growling right now. A low vibration in his own chest that he can’t seem to stop.

Another sound drifts from the house, her voice again, commanding now, sharp-edged in a way that makes every nerve in Ash’s body light up. Right there. Don’t stop. He can hear the authority in it, the way she’s taking control, straddling Thorne and riding him exactly how she wants, and god, doesn’t that just undo him completely. He remembers what that voice sounds like up close, remembers the exact cadence of it murmured against his ear while she dug her nails into his back and told him to go slower, to go deeper, to not you dare come yet.

She was always like that. Fierce. In charge. Like she owned him.

She did own him. She still does, whether she wants to admit it or not, whether Ash wants to admit it or not. It doesn’t matter how many miles separate them or how many months have passed or how much ash and ember have built up between them like scar tissue. It doesn’t matter that she’s in there right now with another man’s hands all over her. She is still his, in the most fundamental, elemental way that nothing can shift.

He realizes his cock is in his hand.

He doesn’t remember reaching for it. He doesn’t remember unzipping himself, doesn’t remember the shift that’s rippled partway through him without his permission, muscles thickening, skin at his jaw and throat rougher now, more like scale than flesh. His cock has already changed too, longer, thicker, ridged in heavy bands all down the underside, flushed dark and swollen and throbbing in his grip so hard it actually hurts. He squeezes himself without thinking, drags his fist slowly up the length of himself, and has to bite down on a groan.

He knows what these ridges do to her. He’s felt the way her whole body used to shudder and clamp down around him the second he pushed inside her, felt her nails rake down his back as she sobbed out pleas for him to go deeper, harder, don’t stop, don’t you dare stop. No gentle, careful human hands could ever do what he does to her. No soft, apologetic little licks and nibbles could ever wreck her the way he can wreck her.

He wants to be inside her right now so badly it’s a physical pain, radiating up from his groin into his gut, twisting through his ribs. He wants to feel her tight and wet and shaking around him, wants to hear that commanding voice break apart into something desperate and wordless, wants to watch her face when she comes undone completely, knowing it’s him doing that to her, him and no one else.

He wants to fill her up. The thought comes from somewhere feral and ancient in him, somewhere that doesn’t care about pride or history or whatever mess he’s made of things between them. He wants to breed her, wants to pump everything he has into her until she’s full and dripping with it, wants to watch his seed take and know that whatever she carries afterward is his, undeniably his, something even Thorne could never argue away.