Page 31 of Claimed By the Mothman (Greymarket Towers #1)

T he mark between her thighs wouldn’t shut up.

It beat like a second heart. Older. Relentless. Tuned to a frequency she didn’t understand but couldn’t ignore.

She tried to silence it. She buried herself in tasks—memos, stacks, endless manuscripts. But her hands wouldn’t stop shaking. Her breath caught on nothing. Her spine tingled every time someone brushed behind her in the stacks.

She found herself wandering to the Cryptobiology wing. Staring at a chart on insect mating rituals with her pulse roaring in her ears. Her fingers hovered over a line about clasping appendages that locked their mates in place.

She slammed the book shut so hard the shelf wheezed.

Back in her apartment, the spiral continued. One in the morning. Eyes bloodshot. Skin too warm. Breath shallow. She was scrolling through her phone without thinking.

Pheromone response cycles in nocturnal hybrids.

Nonhuman rut behaviors and environmental triggers.

Cryptid bondmarks and reproductive resonance thresholds.

The mark throbbed harder with every word.

She flung the phone across the room, and it clattered against the wall.

Silence followed, but the hum persisted still.

—

The opal ring was pulsing continuously. She didn’t know what it was responding to anymore. Since the flight, it had only gotten worse.

Sometimes it reacted when Sig was near. Sometimes when he wasn’t. Sometimes when she was alone in the library and the air shifted without warning.

Today, it sent a pulse sharp enough to buckle her knees.

Her boss asked if she needed a grounding crystal. Or a week off. Or maybe a spiritual colonic.

She’d laughed. Said she was fine.

But she was lying.

—

She woke in the dark to an ache that wasn’t hers. A buzzing beneath her skin, vibrating in her ribs like breath trapped in blown glass.

Nell stood in the kitchen without knowing how she’d gotten there. The refrigerator was open. Its light spilled across the tile in stark white, casting her body in chiaroscuro: pale thighs, bare feet, sleep-wild hair.

The air touched her like a lover would—tentative. Searching. Full of questions.

She shivered and a sound slipped from her lips—a gasp that wasn’t quite pain, wasn’t quite pleasure. The mark flared between her thighs, echoing along the line of her spine and in every place he’d touched her.

She hissed and braced herself against the counter, bending forward and dragging air into her lungs through clenched teeth.

“I can’t—” she gasped. “I can’t take this anymore.”

She reached between her thighs before the thought had even formed, and as soon as her fingers touched the mark, the world exploded into sensation, white hot and blinding, and her body arched with it.

A jagged cry ripped from Nell’s throat. She clawed at her clothes, tearing the fabric with shaking hands and ripping them off her.

Her nipples peaked the instant they were exposed to the cool air and she gasped.

Grabbing her breast hard, she pinched her nipple as if the pain could shut it up.

But it only made the desire pooling inside her that much more urgent.

The bond ached like a bruise she wanted to press harder. Her core ached as she remembered his mouth devouring hers. His claws anchoring her hips. His teeth sinking into her skin. The pain of it had made her weep, but the pleasure had unmade her.

She sank to the floor as she remembered how his cock had emerged from him, thick and slick and wrong in all the right ways. How he’d moved inside her like he was possessed, and she had clung to him, voice breaking, pleading for more as he impaled her again and again.

Her hand drifted to her clit and circled, hard and fast, chasing that rhythm, that weight, that pressure that had left her gasping into his mouth and begging without words. She gave an obscene moan as wetness slicked down her thighs.

It wasn’t enough. Her cunt howled with emptiness, the need to be filled so raw it tasted like blood on her tongue. She thrust her fingers inside herself—one, two, three—but it wasn’t him. She was full, yes, but not stretched the way he had filled her, brutally and perfectly

The mark keened with every desperate circle of her clit, every thrust of her fingers, every sob that left her lips, coiling deeper and winding around her nerves.

A chord struck deep in her pelvis, vibrating through muscle, marrow, and mind—as if her body had been tuned to a new frequency, his frequency—and she wailed, back arching, toes curling, stomach clenching as the sensation tore through her like it had talons.

Her pleasure crested and detonated through her like a shock wave. Her lungs emptied. Her cunt clamped down around her fingers, hard and fluttering, milking something that wasn’t there, aching for the stretch of him, slick and barbed and right.

Wings—the low thunder of them, their impossible hush. The way he’d carried her. His hands, clawed and impossibly gentle, touching her face reverently. His eyes, watching her speak like he was memorizing her. She chased it. Wanted it. Wanted him.

Her hips lifted from the floor with a cracked cry. Her hands were desperate now, circling, thrusting furiously, trying to fill the space where he should be. Her body bucked against the phantom weight of him, trying to meet each invisible thrust, each wave of resonance that pulsed through her.

“Sig,” she gasped.

Another orgasm hit and she sobbed as she crested again, her thighs jerking, her core clenching, her whole body slick with sweat and wet and ruin .

Her skin shimmered. Her vision blurred. The kitchen dissolved around her. There was no air, no time, but only the bond.

She collapsed, boneless and gasping, limbs slack against the cool tile. Her chest heaved in shallow, broken breaths. Every inch of her body shook.

The mark between her thighs pulsed again, slower, but still unsatisfied. Like she had been given just a drop of water while she was dying slowly of thirst.

Nell let out a ragged breath and curled a hand against her sternum like she could press something back in. It didn’t help. Nothing helped. The ache was still there. Worse, now that the edge had dulled. More real now that her defenses were down.

“I want you.” The truth fell from her in a broken whisper.

Not because of the resonance or because of some mothman-shaped magic stitched between their bodies. She wanted him because he made feel seen in a way that she’d not experienced before, and opened something inside her.

“I want you,” she whispered again, into the bond, into the walls and the tile of Greymarket, hoping—and fearing—the response.