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There is an exhaustion that exists within him, a slow simmering burn that can never be extinguished, nor diminished. On his eighteenth birthday, as the moon crept into place in the night sky, the tendrils of bone-deep enervation claimed him and he hasn’t been able to shake that eerie sensation. Like he has one foot in the afterlife—like one bad move, one wrong step under the night sky, might bring him into the arms of eternal rest.
Jack has rules that he keeps in place; rules that have kept him alive for twenty-five years and three hundred full moons. Elsa Bloodstone is an exception to every single one of those rules, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. When he’s with her—when she lets her guard down and giggles over a glass of whiskey, when she blushes and sighs under the heat of his gaze, when she’s writhing beneath him, moaning his name—he feels more alive than he’s ever felt before.
Before Elsa, Jack recalled a certain type of emptiness that came after the full moon. His body—battered, aching, and still reeling from breaking and bending to the whims of his curse—begged him to retreat to the quiet comforts of his bed. He would sleep it off, buried under blankets, and trying to weigh down the floating, weightlessness of knowing the out-of-body sensation of the day before, had just been him growing too large for his own skin.
Now the morning after felt like being reborn. He found purpose in the first glimmer of sunrise, because he knew she was waiting for him. Like him, Elsa thrived in the dark—she was a creature of the night like Jack, but for very different reasons. She hated getting up with the sun, but like clockwork she would be waiting for him on the ancient stairs of her family’s palatial estate, with a blanket thrown over her shoulders and her eyes soft with adoration for the beleaguered man who dragged himself to her.
There was nothing better, in his mind, than crawling into her bed and taking advantage of the adrenaline still coursing through his veins. Some mornings it was a slow, leisurely sort of love making—though she shied away from any four letter words. Love or like—they were forbidden. But Jack knew that he wasn’t alone in the ache between his ribs. Because he was complicated and if she didn’t care, she wouldn’t surrender herself to him. He was a risk to everything she was, and she had already proven she didn’t care.
“I dreamed about you,” Elsa whispered against his mouth as she greeted him, winding her arms around his shoulders and shrouding them both in the soft, wooly blanket she’d dragged out of her bed with her.
Jack cupped her jaw, rubbing his thumb over her creamy skin, “And what did you dream of?”
“The beast.”
He inhaled sharply, something itching harshly at the back of his skull as the barely-quieted beast seemed to stir within him. Of course it would rise to the surface with the images that two simple words conjured up.
Elsa’s lips twisted into a smirk, “Do you want to know more, Jack?”
Jack nodded.
She leaned in and kissed him once more before she fed into the swirl of thoughts crowding the already crowded halls of his mind. “I dreamed you came to me.” Elsa threaded her fingers through his hair, nails lightly scraping his scalp in that way she knew he loved. “You chased me through a maze of tall hedges.” Her breath danced over his lips as she spoke and every inch of him—every inch of him—was caught under her spell.
“And what did I do when I caught you?” Jack questioned, his gaze fixed on hers. He already knew what must have come to pass in this dream of hers—she wouldn’t have greeted him with such fervor so soon after his return. Not to mention, he could smell her—ripe and needy, and the fingers she dragged through his hair were still coated in the scent of her, barely dulled by a quick wash in the sink.
Elsa’s tongue swept out to dampen her soft pink lips, and in doing so it traced over his own, “We used that awful sacrificial altar for sacrilege.” She pressed closer to him then, and there was no pretending that she didn’t have his full attention. “Do you like the sound of that, Jack?”
His Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat, “More than you know.”
Her brows shot upwards, “I think I know.” Elsa taunted lightly as she reached between their bodies to cup him through his trousers.
“Perhaps we should, uh, move this inside,” Jack suggested, his voice wavering as she dragged her fingers over the length of him.
The Bloodstone mansion was secluded enough. While the postcode read Boston, it was outside the city limits and situated on an expansive piece of real estate that kept them far from prying eyes. Even still, Jack could feel his self-control waning and if she kept pushing him, or rather stroking him, he was going to take her right there beneath the haint-paint blue ceiling of the ancient portico. Jack had a feeling that was exactly what Elsa was hoping would happen. She wanted him to lose control.
Elsa flashed him a wicked grin as her lithe fingers continued to tease him. “I haven’t finished telling you about my dream.” She bridged the distance between their faces with a desperate kiss, and Jack caved in.
His fingers curled around the back of her head, protecting her as he blindly guided them backwards until he had her pressed up against one of the columns that towered above them. The blanket that shrouded their shoulders fell to the ground, abandoned, as hands sought to divest each other of the clothes that separated them.
Jack trailed kisses from her lips, down her jaw, until he found the juncture where her neck sloped into her collarbone. She still had marks there, dusty bruises from overzealous kisses in the days leading up the full moon, and he intended to leave new marks there. Her pulse thrummed beneath her skin, matching the quickened pace of his heart as it beat against his ribs like a caged animal.
Elsa was undeterred by Jack’s mouth, words tumbling from her lips that painted a picture of exactly what she was dreaming of while he was caught beneath the moon, trapped within a mind that was only half his. But he knew the beast, and he knew that both halves of himself were in agreement where Elsa was concerned. Which was what made her fantasy so dangerous. The beast would happily appease her.
“I haven’t forgotten how it felt,” She murmured, scraping her nails down the back of his neck. “The way you collided into me. Pinned me beneath you. Do you remember it, Jack?”
It’s hazy—all of his memories as the beast are shrouded in a nearly impenetrable fog. But he remembers the scent of her. Jack remembers the sharp, heady tang of her pheromones rolling off of her. She had touched him, a gentle hand to a monstrous face, and he’d fled. He isn’t sure how much is his own memory and how much has been filled in by her in the months since.
“Look at me,” Elsa urged and Jack obeyed without hesitation. Her cheeks were flushed, a crimson blush molting across her skin. “Have you ever fucked under the full moon?” She questioned, watching him carefully—as if she expected that he would lie to her. The only lie that had passed his lips since the hunt, was the one where she forced him to deny his feelings for her.
“Yes.”
“Pity,” She cocked her head to the side with a smug grin. “Were they like you?”
His jaw clenched tight, “She was.”
Elsa narrowed her eyes, and Jack couldn’t tell if it was genuine jealousy. She was too hard to pin down with her emotions about much of anything. “When was the last time you saw her?”
It’s a dangerous line of questioning. Jack had broached the topic of past relationships once, and Elsa had shut him out completely. “I didn’t think you cared about exes.”
“Touché,” She traced her thumb over his lips. “But I want you to indulge me. Just this once”
Jack groaned, “Five years ago. Maybe six. Why does it matter? I told you I was out of practice when this started.”
Her eyes widened subtly, “That long ago?”
He scoffed, “Really, Elsa? That’s what you’re going to focus on?”
“Problem?” Questioned as a sly grin played over her lips.
A bark of laughter escaped Jack and it was infectious enough to make her laugh too, one of the rare, almost girlish giggles that inevitably made him fall a little more in love with Elsa.
But the laughter was cut short by a mischievous hand palming at his cock through his trousers again. “Did you want me to finish telling you about my dream?”
“Do I have a choice?” She scrunched her nose at Jack’s question and he couldn’t resist the urge to steal a kiss. “Continue.”
“Where was I?” Elsa questioned, slowly tracing the length of his cock. “Right. I was asking you about that night.”
Jack gave a short nod, acknowledging that he was listening to her, instead of being solely focused on the hand threatening to end everything far too quickly.
“It was almost like that,” She recalled, scraping her teeth over her bottom lip as she held his gaze. “You caught me and laid me out on the offering slab, ripped my clothes off, and took me.”
“Just like that?” He questioned, cupping her jaw as he leaned in to replace her teeth with his own as he trailed his tongue over her bottom lip. “As pretty you are when I fuck you like that, if it were real, I would’ve turned you over and fucked you from behind.”
Elsa inhaled sharply, arching into him so there was less room between their bodies. “Tell me.”
“I’ve thought about it too,” Jack freely admitted. “It’s not just me that craves you, Elsa. That part of me… it’s aware. I’m aware.” It was so easy to separate the beast from the man, to see them as two sides of him instead of who he was. He was the beast as much as he was the man before her.
“Then why hide from me?”
In one fluid motion, Jack caught her wrist, and then the other, and then penned them both above her head. “You like being in control too much, Elsa. I don’t think you could handle me.”
Elsa curled her leg around the back of his, using it as leverage to draw him closer. “I bet I could. You really don’t think I could, Jack?”
Jack felt dizzy with desire. His cock was throbbing, his heart racing, and all he could smell was the pheromones she was throwing and he felt like he was going to snap. And Elsa wanted words from him? When he could feel the beast crawling at the back of his skull.
“Where’s the stone?”
“What?”
“The Bloodstone.”
“Fuck. Are you serious?”
“If you are.”
Elsa laughed triumphantly, and the three words he had been dying to hear slipped past her lips. “Gods above, I love you, Jack.”
Jack let go of her hands and instead used both of them to cradle her face, “Get the Bloodstone, Elsa. And when this is over, we’re talking.”
The beast at the back of his mind was practically scratching at the door to be let out. It was the lycanthropic side that had truly marked her, that had yielded to his desperate attempts to keep her alive because Elsa Bloodstone was special. It wasn’t self-preservation, or cowering under the reality that she was the head huntress. It was something more than that.
Mate.
Jack hadn’t even gotten his dick wet yet and his brain was already chanting what it wanted from her. Something impossible and something he would never ask from her. That was a sacred thing to his people—not something to throw around aimlessly because of circumstances like the one he’d found himself in with Elsa. Even if she did love him.
***
Elsa Bloodstone had made a lot of really stupid decisions in her life. But Jack had never been one of them. She realized she loved him not long after the hunt—it was in those weeks following it, when he showed up to help her piece her new life back together, that she realized the feeling in her chest was actually what love felt like. Warm, irrational, and utterly addictive.
She kept him at an arm’s length, lied to him about the fact that he wasn’t the only one—knowing that his keen olfactory senses would betray the truth. She smelled like him and only him. She slept in a shirt he left behind for that very reason.
And all of that probably helped the beast within him recognize her when the Bloodstone ripped him back to the surface mere hours after the full moon had vanished into the sunrise.
There was a certain degree of fear in the reality of it all, which her dream had not contained. As the beast pursued her through the maze, Elsa caught herself wondering if the outcome wouldn’t be nearly as pleasant as she wanted it to be. But then, at the altar, she was sacrificed to the beast.
Jack had been partially correct—she preferred being in control. She had kept a tight grip on the trajectory of their relationship as a man, but the beast wasn’t controllable. She was helpless to the whims of the beast, and she hated to admit that she enjoyed that. Elsa relished being out of control, forced to surrender to the rough touch of the beast as it bent her over the altar like a sacrifice to be savored.
Elsa knew that technically every time she slept with Jack, she was sleeping with the enemy—a monster—in the eyes of the Bloodstones that had come before her, but it never truly felt like that to her. Jack was like any other man she had ever slept with, but the beast… The beast was more than she had ever had.
Her fingers sought purchase on the rough stone-hewn altar she was crushed beneath his weight atop. With every thrust of his hips, her shirt rode further up her back, baring new skin to the coarse hair that covered his chest and stomach. She wanted to spend more time marveling at the beast’s body, but he differed in Jack’s approach to foreplay: there was none.
Elsa moaned through clenched teeth as the beast’s cock brushed that sweet spot within her which made her entire body clench in anticipation. She mourned the fact that she hadn’t been able to fully appreciate that cock before he was driving into her. Like this, he was bigger than she was used to—in different ways. His girth made her ache, stretching her and using her.
The beast fucked as savagely as he fought—quick, desperate thrusts, filling every inch of her to the point where she wondered if she would be able to see him drive into her through the thin flesh of her belly.
“Yes!” Elsa shouted, delirious with want as the creature's cock struck that spot within her again. She had been convinced that it was the thing of myths before Jack. She clenched tight around him and he growled viciously in her ear. “Harder.” She begged. “Come on, baby. I can take it.”
He obeyed, picking up his already impossible pace—barely withdrawing before he was filling her to the brink, grinding into her. The feeling of his rough fur dragging over her skin was different. Not bad or good. Just different.
“I’m close,” Elsa panted out, treating the beast behind her like she would any other partner. Communication was vital, especially when he was at a disadvantage. “I’m so close. So—“
She inhaled sharply when she felt him working his hand in between her hip and the altar she was crushed against. Jack had to be there, fully there, because she doubted any monstrous beast would care to find her clit like he always did.
“Oh gods.” Her head lolled forward as his rough fingers unraveled her. His thrusts became mere rolls of his hips as he rubbed at that little bundle of nerves—focused on her pleasure and not his own. Elsa came just like that, with Jack’s cock buried within her, filling her from root to tip.
As she came down the other side of her orgasm, she became more aware of the fact that his cock was still rock-hard within her and he hadn’t found his own release. “What do you need?”
The beast growled close to her ear, his chin resting against her shoulder.
“I know three languages, but unfortunately I don’t speak growls,” Elsa quipped, floating on the bliss of her own release. “Take what you need, Jack. I trust you.”
How far the Bloodstone legacy had fallen, once it fell into the lap of the black sheep of the family. Elsa knew her ancestors were rolling in their graves—and she hoped they would never find eternal rest, not with the knowledge that their precious heir was letting a werewolf fuck her stupid on the grounds of their sacred hunt.
Elsa glanced over her shoulder and her stomach clenched as she met the eyes of the beast that she had surrendered to. She hadn’t forgotten what he was, but it was still a shock to see his beastial maw, with deadly teeth, the altered angle of his nose, and the way she could only see a fleeting ghost of the man locked away by the moon—or in this case the Bloodstone biting into the skin of his shoulder.
“What do you need, big guy?” Elsa questioned lowly, grinding back against his cock. “I trust you.”
On their way inside the house to retrieve the Bloodstone, Jack had rambled about what she would encounter with the beast. She had only half-listened to him, writing off the rush of words as his nerves. But then, when Elsa felt the swell at the base of the beast’s cock trying to sink into her, she suddenly remembered Jack’s warning.
“If you don’t get away when I give you the chance to, you’re going to encounter the knot.” Jack had cautioned her in the foyer. “I need that to find completion, but I can live without it. Are you listening, Elsa?”
She hadn’t been. At least not fully.
“Jack!” Elsa keened, once again scrambling for something to grab at, something to cling to as the beast stretched her in new ways. “That’s it.” She wasn’t going to ruin this—for either of them—because she hadn’t listened to him. She knew she could take him. She trusted him.
His hips drew back, nearly slipping from her, but he didn’t. The beast used that momentum to slam his hips forward, to drive her into the side of the altar as he buried his full length, and then some, into her oversensitive cunt.
“Oh fuck.” She hissed, squirming beneath his weight. She was caught. Bound to him in a way that she could barely wrap her head around.
The beast’s breath was hot against the curve of her neck, and his monstrous hand was stroking her hip—like Jack always did—in an effort to comfort her, to prepare her. He fucked into her as best he could, slowly little thrusts, grinding motions, until he finally found his own release.
Elsa felt a step away from true delirium as he coaxed her to join him in that hazy oblivion of bliss. She couldn’t pinpoint what set her off. If it was the way he toyed with her clit until her legs felt weak, or if it was the reality that she was intimately tied to a monster.
***
Transforming so soon after the full moon had taken a toll on his body, but it was a toll he would be willing to pay again if it meant satisfying the beast. He had never felt keening satisfaction from the creature that lurked in the corners of his mind before. He liked it.
Jack’s eyes opened slowly, blinking into the orange glow of the fire dancing within the hearth a few feet from him. He recognized the ornate carvings in the mantle and quickly realized they were sprawled out on the floor in the library. The last hazy memory he had was from the maze—was of Elsa telling him that she trusted him.
Beyond the scent of burning wood and ash, he could smell what lingered between her thighs. The evidence of both of their pleasure tinged with blood. She had taken him—all of him—and paid the small price of surrender.
“I can hear you thinking,” Elsa groused, shuffling closer to him, her forehead pressed to his sternum.
“You’re hurt,” Jack stroked his hand down her spine beneath the cocoon of blankets they’d drifted to sleep beneath.
“I’ll live.” She kissed his chest.
He frowned, “I hurt you.”
Elsa sighed heavily, tilting her face to look at him, “I. Will. Live.” She said each word like she was sharpening a knife. “You were more of a gentleman than you know.”
“There is nothing gentlemanly about that part of me,” Jack snorted. “But I’m glad I didn’t hurt you worse.”
She rolled her eyes, “If you need to wallow, I’m going to bad.”
“I’m not wallowing,” He protested. “I don’t want to lose you, Elsa. Don’t you get that? I’m afraid you might see a part of me and decide you don’t want to deal with it.”
“Jack,” She pressed her palm to his lips to keep him from interacting. “You’re stuck with me. No part of you scared me.” Elsa lowered her voice. “Even the part that I was literally stuck to for an hour.”
His eyes widened, “An hour?”
Elsa threw her head back and laughed, “You don’t remember hauling me in here?”
Jack pushed at those hazy memories. It felt right—what she was saying. He recalled carrying her, though the specifics were fuzzy. “Sort of.”
She grinned at him, “Do you remember coming back to me?” Elsa traced her thumb over his cheekbone. “I took the Bloodstone off of you and whispered such sweet nothings in my ear.” She brushed her lips over his. “Am I your mate, Jack?”
Time stilled. It was the only way to explain the way his heart stuttered to a stop and his breath caught in his ribs. “Elsa…”
“Am I?”
Jack panicked, “I know you want casual, but that part of me… Casual is hard for me. It’s hard for every part of me, but I know that—“
Her hand covered his mouth again, “I meant what I said before. No part of this has been casual for me. I lied to you.”
He remained silent.
“I love you, Jack.” Elsa said it so simply. “I love you like this and I love you like the beast that absolutely wrecked me.”
Jack kissed her palm, and murmured the words against her skin.
“What did you say?” She grinned impishly, pulling her hand away.
“I love you too.” He cupped her jaw and dragged her towards him so he could kiss her. “My mate.” He breathed out against her lips.
“Yours.”