Lukas's growls filled her ears as his tongue filled her mouth. There was no longer any holding back on his part, and she didn't even try to stop her body from reacting. It knew exactly what to do, and it followed his perfectly.
That left Luna adrift in a sea of heat, flashes of the occasional red light thrown slantways across her face, the only sensation she was aware of.
Every other sense was drowning in him.
His scent.
His sounds.
His touch.
His taste.
It overwhelmed her, and she doubted that she could have tried to resist even if she had wanted to. Her mind was hazy, her heart pounding with the power of a wolf inside her. Her blood ran hot, almost as hot as his, and the bare gasps of air that she was able to get between the aggressive, fiery collisions of lips on lips and tongue against tongue were able to sustain her, but only just.
Yet still it was unnatural. She should be drowning in him now, should be begging him for breath and clawing, shoving at him, hoping to make him release her so that she could take in the necessary air.
But she wasn't, and she didn't. She survived on the hot breaths that he unloaded into her mouth and the infrequent, rapid inhales she managed to get when he paused briefly.
His air was sweeter to her than any oxygen, more pure than that of the deepest tangled jungle.
They were entangled, together.
One again.
Lukas was hers, she knew that now. He had never given himself to another woman, and as her faithfulness lasted he intended not to. He hadn't said it, but she had seen it in him. The boundaries between their bodies and souls were frayed, and she could see into him as easily as she could see the dark gold and silver orbs above her. He had removed his mask at some point.
Of course he did. You would've felt it if he was wearing it while kissing you, idiot, Luna thought, annoyed with herself.
But, then again, there was a possibility that she wouldn't have felt it. She could have been too lost in his presence to recognize it.
Luna forced the thoughts out of her mind and relaxed into him again, putting effort into following his will. She curved her body when he touched her, arched her back when he slid a hand down her torso.
She moaned when his tongue entered his mouth, and when his hands brushed her breasts. She groaned when he ground the heat between his legs against the heat between hers. She whimpered when he pulled back, and whined when he shifted his body away.
And then the contact was gone.
Luna was left naked, spread out on the bed, panting softly, and alive. Lukas's touch electrified her, as though contact with him infused energy into her. She felt like she could run as far as she wanted, leap from building to building, dodge arrows in the night.
She felt like a Northern raider wolf.
Each Lycan's characteristics were similar to a certain animal, and it didn't necessarily run in the family, though some families passed down their souls, and thereby their beasts, when they died. Luna obviously didn't know the process for that, because every family that did it kept it a closely guarded secret, but she knew of it.
She had never heard what Lukas's beast was, or seen him shift.
But she knew what it was.
The Northern raider wolves were the fiercest variety of wolf to be found on the whole continent, capable of performing feats that no other could, which meant that they were one of the greatest threats to the sentiment species. Reports of Northern raider wolves escaping past the border in the North weren't exactly uncommon, and most people had at least one horror story about Northern raider wolves. They were said to be able to cross a town without ever touching the ground, leaping easily across gaps ten, twenty, even fifty yards across, and those were only the recorded ones.
It was one of those creatures that was so terrifying that it was used off and on as a bogeyman. So many of the things that went bump in the night were lies, rumors, myths, or stories told by drunken guardsmen from the gate shift, but not the Northern raider wolf.
It was too good of an opportunity for mothers to miss, to remind their children that those who went out at night could be gobbled up by the raider wolves, but it was also too true and too genuinely dangerous to be used that way, so it fluctuated.
And because of their generic breeding, they were able to reproduce with other varieties of wolves to create roaming packs called Southern, Western, Eastern, or Central raider wolves, but none were so terrifying as the purebloods from the North.