Luna lay on her back, breathing hard. She had spent too long in that last kiss. She had known that she would, but she still did.
She just didn't have the lung capacity of a Lycan. There was no getting around it.
Lukas loomed above her, and although she tried to tell him to give her a moment longer, when she opened her mouth all that came out was a desperate groan, and then he was on her again.
His lips, tasting hers. His body, pressing against her. His voice, calling out her inner beast.
Nothing she had ever experienced could have prepared her for this. This intense passion, this total eclipsing of her personality, her entire being.
She couldn't think, just as much as she couldn't breathe through him.
And then something happened.
Something inside her shifted. Deep in her stomach, near her core, a fire began to burn.
It was different from the other one, but it drew fuel from it.
Her arousal burned away inside her stomach, and then she awoke in a way that she never had before. Her lungs burned with the absence of air, and her mind burned with a knowledge that she had never had before.
All throughout their body, heat burned. In their cores, it pushed them to do more. In their muscles, it pushed them to act, to move.
And in their hearts...
Lukas's was overtaken by a lust that didn't come from himself. His inner beast was howling for more, more, more. He suppressed it, but barely.
Luna's beat in sync with his, not the other way around. Her heart bore the blazing brand of his lust, no, his beast's lust, and it ripped through her ribs, showing on her face and in the movements of her body. She wasn't in control of them anymore, and she loved it.
Luna felt every single one of them. Every single one.
She could feel the power thrumming beneath his skin. And she could touch it.
Luna plunged herself into that power, and she took it for her own, refusing to let go as she dragged it up from the depths where it was buried.
It felt almost like one of the slimy patches of water in the lagoons near her castle. Her consciousness slipped into it like a knife sliding into muscle, and it pulled out the way that a stick would from honey, sticking in the viscous liquid-like substance, made of screams that tore at her and pulled her down, before the stuff relinquished its hold on the object she was gripping.
Luna held the object closely, wrapping it in herself.
It was a small, wet wolf cub, naked of fur and absent of any sort of consciousness or movement. As though it was torn from the womb.
But it was... wrong. It shouldn't have been there. It was large enough to have been born. But it wasn't.
It was stuck. Had been stuck, before she freed it.
What was this?
She had never before seen anything like it.
Was this...
Yes, it was.
Magic.
Luna breathed out slowly, then she opened her eyes.
She looked at Lukas.
He was... confused.
Not angry at what she had done. At least, not yet. She didn't even know if he had realized that it had been done.
He was just confused.
She must have stopped moving at some point.
That heat inside him was still there. But it wasn't the same. It was his own, belonging solely to him. That she could feel when she touched him.
"You're an empath?" he asked softly.
Still dazed, Luna shook her head. He frowned.
"Then what did I just feel rooting around in my head?" he pressed, his brows furrowing as he looked at her, as though trying to divine her inner workings.
But she already knew his.
And something that she had just done had changed him, fundamentally, forever.
And neither of them knew what it was yet.
"I don't know," she answered honestly. "But I think it was me."
"You..." he trailed off, looking intently at her. No longer was his gaze heated, not even curious. It was just searching. He knew something else. When she had merged temporarily with him, he had discovered something.
She gasped softly.
She knew exactly what it was. He didn't even have to say a word.
He had seen when-