Focusing on keeping his breaths slow and even, he knelt back up on the bed and let his hand slide up one of her legs. She stiffened at his touch, but didn’t resist when he grabbed her by the back of her knee and spread her open.

“Blackened stars!” He was only half aware of the snarled outburst, hands clamping onto the Breeder’s thighs in response to her small squeak at the threatening sound.

How? How did she smell like this? His entire being was alight with the scent of her.

Dazed, he slid off the bed and pulled her to the end of it in the same motion, snarling a warning when she tried to resist his hands spreading her thighs wider. She thought to deny him? Sought to cut him off from the source of everything there was? No.

Without preamble, Kesh buried his face in her pussy and inhaled.

Heady musk so intense he could barely take it rolled over his tongue and down his throat. Eyes clenched against the onslaught to his senses, he slipped his hands from her thighs to her soft labia and spread her open, pressed his nose against her warm flesh and breathed her in again. And again. Every mouthful of her scent shot lightning through his veins, almost painful in its blissful addictiveness.

He opened his mouth on instinct, driven by the hard need for more, and pushed his tongue between her soft folds.

Heady, tangy flavor filled his mouth and pulled a groan from deep in his chest. If he’d thought her scent was addictive, the taste of her nearly short-circuited his already flagging brain.

He sought the source of it on instinct alone and teased his tongue around her tight and reluctant entrance. She gave him a few hesitant drops of her essence, but it was far from enough. He wanted to bathe in her—drink her up until she had no more left to give.

Her flesh parted more willingly as he moved up her pussy, seeking the center of her pleasure.

“Shit!” The Breeder’s gasped cry came the second his lips brushed her clit. She jumped and tensed her thighs, but he easily kept her spread open with the bulk of his arms.

What was that?

Frowning, Kesh flicked his tongue over her clit, ignoring Georgia’s mewl of protest. No. Surely it couldn’t be?

He jerked his head back and swallowed a curse. Between her parted folds, a band of gleaming metal encircled her small nub.

“Someone… Someone ringed you?” Anger throbbed through his heated blood, forcing enough of his focus from his desperate need that he managed to pull his gaze from her pussy to her face. Her unmarred face.

A Breeder’s ring, meant to help her future mate secure her willingness until she settled into her new life by his side, was always given to a woman at the same time as her blinding mark. Always. The implication that Georgia had hers while still retaining her ability to see their true forms... Someone had had her in their grasp, had known what she was… and they had inflicted terror upon her. Purposely.

The fog of lust waned, replace by his fury. He pulled further back, darkened gaze sweeping over the Breeder’s prone form. She might be tall for a human woman, but compared to his massive bulk, she was only slight. Delicate.

It would be so very easy to simply… break her.

He’d had human women in his bed before, but they’d been thrumming with lust for him, blind to his true form and eager for pleasure.

Georgia stared at him with nothing but fear in her round eyes.

“I can’t do this.” He moved his hands from the softness between her legs and pushed off the bed, rising to his feet.

“W-what do you mean?” she croaked, scrambling to push up on her elbows.

For a moment, his vision blurred at the edges. Fuck, he needed to feed. He hadn’t been this drained in years.

Kesh flicked a couple of fingers in the direction of her naked body before he turned, intent on the exit. “Deal’s off. Go to sleep. The building is secure, and I will be back soon.”

“Wait.” Her voice rang through the room, surprising him with its strength.

He looked at her over his shoulder, eye-ridges raising with impatience. “What?”

“Don’t go. Please. Please, don’t.” She knelt up on the bed, chin wobbling once before she steeled her jaw.

“I have to eat.” It came out as a snarl. “Now.”

“Take what you need from me,” she begged. “I don’t understand what happened. Please, you promised. Don’t hurt anyone. Feed from me.”

He bared his teeth, fury pounding in his temples. Fury that he wasn’t ignoring her, fury that he wasn’t already out the door in search of a meal. Fucking Breeders and their sorcery.

“I would be hurting you,” he snarled.

“No. No, you wouldn’t.” She forced her lips to quirk up—not quite into a smile, but not a grimace either. “You promised you wouldn’t, and I… I believe you. Please. Take it from me. Not… Not someone innocent.”

He scoffed at the ridiculousness in her statement. “Someone innocent? You think that worthless piece of scum you saved is innocent? As compared to who, you? Tell me, Breeder, who have you hurt to get your next high? Who have you stolen from, beaten up, killed for your own gain?”

She blinked, the idea that every human didn’t possess a base level of goodness clearly new to her. New, and unacceptable. “I… It doesn’t matter, okay? I am… willing. And I will survive. They won’t. Right?”

He didn’t answer, but he didn’t need to. She took his silence as the confirmation it was.

Swallowing, she held out a trembling hand. “Come back. Please.”

She might as well have jerked on a chain wrapped tight around his throat. He wasn’t fully aware of having crossed the bedroom floor to her, until her soft hand wrapped around his forearm, forcing crackles of sensations along his skin despite the fabric covering it.

“You won’t hurt me,” she said again, more conviction in her voice this time. A blush crept up her throat and heated her cheeks, and she lowered her eyelashes. “And… it felt… nice. What you were doing. It won’t be like when… I was… was ringed. It’s okay. Please. Let me feed you, like you did for me.”

Some faraway part of him knew he should deny her—that he should find the will to resist her spell spoken in pleading tones—but he didn’t have the strength. Perhaps if he’d been at full power, if his vision wasn’t dancing from the need to refuel, and her sweet scent didn’t linger on his tongue, he would have stood a chance.

Hazy images of butter glistening on her lips and her throat bobbing around morsels of food flickered for his mind’s eye. He reached for her without thought, wrapping one hand around her jaw and cheek in blind search of the feel of her.

Her breath stuttered in her throat, but she didn’t flinch away. Simply looked up at him with blue eyes more full of wariness than outright fear now. He didn’t have the brainpower left to ponder the change, not this time. He needed her energy. Now.

Her body yielded for his, allowing him to guide her to her back. There was no resistance in her thighs when he pushed them apart this time, only a tremble in her muscles as he slid to the floor at the end of the bed and used his thumbs to expose her ringed clit once more.

Her scent enveloped him as fully as before, sweeping away whatever lingering hesitance might have remained in his swiftly fogging mind.

Fuck, she smelled like… Woman, and sex, and life.

He groaned and leaned in, sucking her clit between his lips on instinct alone.

Georgia hissed at the contact, her thighs clamping around his head in instinctive protest.

Too sensitive. He eased off, kissing the soft skin around the center of her nerves instead, until her thighs slowly relaxed again. The hood of her clit had been pushed back with the fastening of the ring, leaving her pearl permanently exposed. He’d never given much thought to how a Breeding ring affected a woman when it wasn’t activated, but the sound of Georgia’s shallow breaths and the tremble in her muscles at his proximity to her unprotected nub made a thread of regret worm through his chest. Even without twisting the wicked device and inflicting its dark magic on her, her pleasure would always be forced to some degree.