“Little star, I have you,” he ground out, lining himself up to my quaking entrance. “I will take care of you.”

I was already wet. Or maybe still wet. How long had it been since the last time? It could have been minutes or days and I would have had no idea.

Skalla penetrated me with his largest cock, stretching and filling me, and then stopped when his knot brushed tantalizingly against my skin. I bucked wildly against him, desperate for him, as if drugged with the need to feel his knot swell into place inside me. My movements made my clit bump against the underside of his smaller cock, and my entire body spasmed violently. Skalla splayed a huge hand against my burning abdomen to steady me, made another deep, soothing sound. Then, with a single, potent thrust, he was in me.

This was it. This was what I’d needed. This was every good thing I could have possibly imagined experiencing. This was hunger and satiation, hurting and healing. It was completion. Like I’d never been truly whole until this moment.

I’d never believed in souls in a literal sense, but I did now. Because with Skalla swelling into place deeper in my body than I would have thought possible and his eye speaking plainly to me without uttering a single word, I knew that we were meeting on a plane beyond the physical. Our spirits; our souls; the raw, core kernels of our beings collided.

I knew him. He knew me.

His heart was like my own.

His wings smashed outward as ecstasy gripped him, but he never closed his eye, never turned it from me. It was then, staring at me and so deeply knowing me, that Skalla came, his knot expanding and then his cocks releasing. It was almost laughable that he’d just cleaned me off. Because here I was covered once again in the ardent viscosity pumping from the narrower cock that now jerked against my pubis.

Feeling Skalla erupt on me, in me, was pure fucking magic. I came with shattering intensity, my body coiling so tightly around his knot that he went rigid and gave a broken groan.

“My mate,” he gritted out, fangs flashing, wings flexing. “Mine, Suvi. You are mine.”

“I’m yours,” I mewled, and it felt like an echo, like something I had said before.

Or maybe it just felt so familiar because I knew it was the truth.

THUS BEGAN THE PERIOD I began to affectionately refer to as The Week of Fucking.

For days, it felt like all Skalla and I did was have sex and sleep in short bursts. We ate, too, but only because Skalla often stopped to make me. He was especially concerned about me drinking enough water. One newfangled feature of my starburn-transformed biology was that I got gushingly wet in preparation for taking Skalla’s knot, and my mate’s brow was often furrowed with worries about dehydration.

Sometimes, the sex was deliciously slow, almost languid. It was love-making. Skalla would stroke into me with the first half of his large shaft, the thrusts deep and controlled while he pressed the underside of his upper cock against my clit with delirious results. And only after making me come what felt like a dozen times that way would he finally knot me.

Other times, it was rutting, feral and frenzied, the carnal actions of animals in heat. Which, to be fair, we kind of were.

But perhaps even more miraculous than the sheer amount of time two creatures could spend grinding at each other without keeling over dead was that the more we did it, the more of Skalla’s memory returned.

It still wasn’t much, but it was coming back. Murky flashes that I saw him furiously trying to piece together when he thought I was asleep. After one particularly intense round of sex, as Skalla pulled his spent cock with its deflated knot from my core, he suddenly stiffened. His eye went cloudy, fixed somewhere very far away.

Then he said a word that, even with my translation abilities, I didn’t understand.

“Wylfrael.”

“Skalla?” I frowned, gently patting his chest. “What’s Wylfrael?”

“That was his name. The white-haired male.” He sat heavily down on the mattress beside me. “I think... I think I loved him.” He brushed his claws along the place where his snout met scarring. “I think he took my eye.”

He turned his remaining eye solemnly on me.

“And I think I might have killed him.”

I took one of his hands in both of mine, running my gaze over the scales, the claws, the strength of it. It was a hand that I’d grown to know almost as well as my own. A hand that fed me, caressed me, protected me, loved me.

And it was a hand that had killed. Over and over again.

I held that hand and I squeezed it hard, accepting the good and the bad in silence. Because, at least for the moment, there was nothing else to say.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

Suvi

By the end of The Week of Fucking the effects of the starburn had begun to wear off. I no longer felt like I had a limb-weakening fever, and Skalla was able to go longer and longer periods with his cocks flaccid and tucked inside his slit (though the shape of the larger one was permanently altered by the development of his knot).

When the temporary, physical symptoms of the starburn dissipated, they did not go without leaving scars. But they were nice scars, I decided. The kind that turned beautiful and silver and didn’t cause any pain.

Once the intense heat had passed, I was left feeling closer to Skalla than I’d ever been to any other living being – even Elvi. I was intensely aware of him at all times, like he was the gravity anchoring my feet to the world. I had loved him before. But it had been a messy and fearful sort of love. The starburn had gathered up the jagged pieces of it and melded them together in its forge until it was strong and smooth and whole, like metal.

Like the fire lily, I’d survived the blaze. And now, I bloomed.

I still desired Skalla physically. I craved him. Even after the starburn had entirely passed, I welcomed his knot at least once a day. But now, I wanted him simply because he was Skalla and he was mine. I wanted him because I wanted him. Not because heat made me feel like my body would combust without his knot inside it.

We fell into a comfortable rhythm. We began to accompany Jolakaia to the temple again during the day, and I revelled in putting my hands and skills to work in the gardens and lab. In the evenings, we’d eat with Zev and Jolakaia. Skalla stroked trembling orgasms from my body and knotted me as the sun went down, and we’d fall asleep tangled in each other’s limbs.

One week passed. Then another. Our rhythm became something more solid. It was a life that we were building. The things I’d left behind – Earth, my human friends on the ship – felt further from me than ever, but slowly, the pain of that loss grew just a little bit duller. It wasn’t that being with Skalla this way now made everything alright. The grief hadn’t gone away. But, much like my body had changed to accommodate Skalla’s knot, it felt as it my heart had changed too. It had grown so that it could hold onto loss and joy in equal measure.

The two feelings didn’t negate each other or compete with each other. Neither one made the other less true. I still missed Elvi, and Torrance, and my living human friends terribly, but I knew that I could move forward into something that felt a whole lot like happiness if I only let myself.

So I did.

And with that choice, I accepted that I’d never get to see my human friends again.

Until one night, about three weeks after we’d finished starburning, when Skalla sat bolt upright in bed and murmured madly into the darkness, “I remember. I remember how to find them.”