Page 14 of Claimed By the Mothman (Greymarket Towers #1)

T he first thing that awoke was her breath. Shallow, sharp, dragged through lungs that felt out of practice. As if she’d surfaced from too far down and hadn’t yet remembered how to be a creature of air.

Then, her eyes. One, then the other, each peeling open with the resistance of old paint lifting from wood.

The light was dim, but strange. Soft-edged and greenish, but not like sunlight through leaves. She blinked hard and the light remained, pale and pulsing.

Her body came last.

She was lying on her side, curled in on herself, limbs heavy and unfamiliar. Slowly, carefully, Nell pushed herself upright with one shaking arm, bracing her palm against something that gave slightly beneath her weight. It was soft, like moss, but smoother.

She looked around at where she lay. The walls curved and bent like the inside of a shell or a cocoon. The greenish light spilled from softly glowing orbs suspended in a kind of netting above her. The air was thick with a warm, mineral scent.

A tremor ran down Nell’s spine. Her breath hitched again, catching like fabric on a nail. Her body ached everywhere. Her skin tingled rawly, like she’d been scrubbed with steel wool and rinsed in saltwater.

She shifted uncomfortably, and the sheet dragged against her skin. Her bare skin. A sharp, animal jolt of panic knifed up her spine.

Why am I naked?

Memory hit her like a splash of cold water.

The thing , vast and ancient, looming over her as her mind began unraveling one frayed memory at a time. The overwhelming desire to just let it happen, to let everything be claimed and washed away like characters in the sand.

Sig Samora, appearing like an avenging angel or an eldritch god, his wings glowing like lanterns as he roared at the thing above her like he was declaring war on heaven itself.

“I CLAIM HER!”

She squeezed her legs together instinctively and gasped. Her body pulsed , and for a moment all her senses flared and she felt the air on her skin move sensuously, heard the thrum of her heartbeat like it was a chord being strummed.

She swallowed hard and, tentatively, lifted the sheet to peer beneath. On the inside of her thighs, just below her core, something glowed like a coal banked beneath her skin.

Tentatively, Nell reached out her finger and brushed against the glow and—

—sensation cleaved through her, arcing up her spine, igniting her belly, blooming at the tender apex of her thighs. A moan wrenched from her lips as her nipples tightened into peaks, every nerve alive as shock waves bloomed beneath her skin.

“Do not panic,” a voice said suddenly.

Nell shrieked, her eyes wildly flailing around the room until they landed on the source of the voice. Sig Samora sat in the far corner of the room, half-swathed in shadow, perched on a low, curved stool.

His shoulders were hunched. His wings were pulled tight to his back, the burnished edges tucked in awkwardly as if he were trying to make himself smaller.

Gone was the towering figure from the Lustrum. Gone was the god-voice. His shirt was wrinkled like he’d been twisting it in his fists. The cuffs were pushed to his elbows, exposing the velvet-gray shimmer of his forearms. His antennae drooped slightly as if weighted by exhaustion or worry.

Nell opened her mouth. Her lips parted but words wouldn’t come. Her tongue sat heavy behind her teeth, as if it had been burned off in the Lustrum and hadn’t yet grown back.

“Why am I naked?” she squeaked finally.

Sig flinched. “I did not…” He shook his head, a soft clack rising from his throat. His gaze skated past her face, fixing instead on a point above her shoulder. “That is… I undressed you.”

The words began to spill from his mouth, fast, like if he could get the sentence out it would fix something. “You were burning up. Your skin was resonating. I had to—I had to get you out of the clothes. I swear to you, I did not look, I just covered you. I stayed over here.”

His eyes flicked toward the farthest curve of the room, where a pillow and a rumpled blanket lay. Very obvious signs of someone who had slept elsewhere on purpose, desperate to stay but just as desperate to keep a distance.

Nell stared at him, one hand clenched white-knuckled in the sheet against her chest, the other braced on the mattress like an anchor.

Their eyes met. His, deep crimson, glowing faintly in the dim. Hers, green, wide, shaking, uncertain.

“What happened? ”

Sig’s jaw clenched. She saw the muscle jump beneath the fine gray skin, the elegant line of his throat pulled taut like a bowstring.

“I claimed you.”

“You claimed me.” Her voice trembled. “Okay, so what does that mean?”

Sig’s red eyes flicked to her. And in that look she saw guilt, awe, fear … and hunger.

“You were about to be taken,” he said softly. “You would have been unmade. You were being rewritten before my eyes.”

Nell’s heart lurched, and the ache pulsed again, insistent. “And you stopped it by—what?” she said, voice climbing. “By—by saying hands off?”

One of Sig’s wings twitched. “I overrode the Lustrum’s claim with mine. It could not take you, because I already had.”

Nell’s opal ring pulsed, sharp and angry. She stared at the strange, terrible beauty of this cryptid, folded in on himself. At the hunched breadth of his shoulders, the slumped arc of his spine.

The mark between her thighs throbbed.

He flinched. A single twitch of his shoulders. A slight flick of one antenna, as if it had caught something electric in the air.

Oh.

“You feel that,” she said, her breath hitching shallowly in her chest.

His ruby eyes finally met hers. “Yes.”

Something was building in her, slow and low and molten.

“So…” Her voice quivered, barely holding together. “What does this mean? This—this whole claiming thing. What does it do ?”

Sig shifted on the chair, claws clenching into fists. He looked very much the picture of someone holding himself still through sheer force of will.

“You shouldn’t have done it,” Nell whispered.

She stood, her bare feet on the warm, pulsing floor, holding the sheet tightly to her chest. It itched against her flushed skin, suddenly too rough, too hot.

The mark was pulsing now in time with her heartbeat—no, not her heartbeat. Was it—his? Was that even possible?

“I had to,” Sig murmured in a strained voice.

“You had to ?” she repeated, eyes wide, voice cracking around disbelief. “You had to just—what? Decide I was gonna be yours?”

“I did not—” he began, and then gasped, doubling over with a hand pressed to his sternum.

“You claimed me like a thing, ” she spat, fear clawing its way up her throat. Her brain was short-circuiting, still reeling from the Lustrum, from almost dying, from this.

“It saved your life,” he snapped, eyes flaring.

“I didn’t ask to be saved!” she shrieked.

Sig stiffened, his wings shuddering.

Nell moved towards him. Her hand lashed out and jabbed his chest with two fingers.

“Listen, buster—”

The instant her fingers touched his skin, heat detonated in her core, rolling through her like a seismic wave. Her knees buckled and her vision went white at the edges.

And she launched herself at him.

The sheet around her body dropped like a defeated flag, and she didn’t care, didn’t think, just needed . She straddled him in one breathless motion, thighs spreading wide across his lap, and gods, her skin sang where it touched him. She wrapped her legs around his narrow hips and—

—oh gods—

Her whole body arched, head thrown back as pleasure exploded through her like a live wire. The pulse between her legs surged into a flood as her mark flared at the touch of his skin .

Sig bucked and he surged from the chair, his wings propelling them forward as he pushed her atop a nearby table. Nell cried out and her hands flew downward, frantic.

“Take it off,” she rasped. “Now.”

His pants shredded open in an instant. Two smaller arms unfurled from above his hips and coiled around her thighs like living ropes.

Just below the smaller arms, a ring of glowing red nestled at his abdomen, thrumming against her skin.

Nell groaned, tightening her grip on his waist with her thighs as the marks aligned.

The surge that followed slammed through her and she wailed, head thrown back.

Like a snake, Sig lunged and clamped his mouth down at the curve where her neck met shoulder. His breath came in ragged bursts, hot against her skin, and his teeth sank deeply into the flesh. Her blood spilled in a slow, hot line down her shoulder, and she arched into him

“More,” she gasped, her breath wrecked and unashamed. “ Please—more. ”

She felt it before she saw it—the subtle parting of flesh low on his abdomen, right beneath the ring of glowing red. Heat spilled against inner thighs, and he pulled back just far enough for her to look down.

His cock emerged in a slow, liquid motion, surfacing, sliding free from a narrow slit.

The shaft was ridged in asymmetrical patterns, and each ridge seemed to pulse slightly.

The head was flared slightly and wept clear, shimmering fluid in slow, heavy drips, painting her inner thighs with want before it had even breached her.

She stared, wide-eyed, trembling, and all she could think was yes.

He moved slowly, deliberately, dragging his length along her soaked folds. The ridges caught against her swollen skin, each pass a jolt of obscene pleasure that made her hips jerk forward with need. The thick head caressed her clit once, twice, smearing her slick with his.

He growled once again, bucked his hips, and slammed into her with one perfect, brutal, sudden thrust.

Nell screamed. He was too big , too deep , too much . Her body convulsed, clenching around him, struggling to stretch wide enough, yield enough, to take the sheer mass of him, stretching around those ridges that scraped delicious agony against her inner walls.

It should have hurt. It did hurt. And it felt divine .