Page 88 of Claimed By the Mothman

He clicked once. Smug. “Only to those who harm what is mine.”

Her cheeks flushed in pleasure and she looked down at her ring to distract herself from his words. “You call this a ring of tangled light. What does that mean? And why does it pulse? It’s like it has moods.”

Sig’s wings shifted faintly behind him. “It does. It is not only a ring.”

“That’s not a comforting statement.”

“It is a conduit,” he said carefully. “A vessel.Tangled lightis a crude name, but not wrong. It channels resonance and stores it, or sometimes distorts it.”

“Like a mirror?”

“Of a sort. It remembers how you feel.”

“You mean it has memory?”

“Not like yours. Not of events or time. But of tone and intention.”

She snorted. “So it’s a haunted mood ring?”

“I do not know what that is,” he said, antennae twitching faintly. “But it is not merely decorative. I have seen similar artifacts crafted to harmonize with claiming, but this one does not match any of them.”

Her thumb brushed the opal’s surface. “I found it in a pawn shop. I didn’t intend to buy it. But It just…called to me.” She exhaled. “So—what? Now it’s part of the bond?”

Sig shook his head. “It does not carry our shared resonance, although it echoes with it now. It allowed the bond, but I do not believe it belongs to it.”

She stared at the opal, watching it glow in the soft light. “That’s a very cryptic answer.”

“I am a very cryptid being.”

She groaned into her tea, pulling her hand away from him. “This is too much thinking for me after about a billion orgasms last night.”

He clacked softly, a satisfied sound. The ring on her finger gave a single, answering thrum of agreement.

Nell looked up and glanced at the clock over the stove. 9:05 a.m. She should be at the library right now filing overdue scrolls and fending off whispering encyclopedias. Pretending not to notice when Goldie scribbled notes in the margins of the books in the Cryptid Romance section.

As if summoned by guilt or cosmic mischief, her phone pinged in the bedroom. Once. Twice. Then a flurry of buzzes that could only mean one thing.

Goldie was at work. And Goldieabsolutely knew what was up.Nell bit her lip to keep the grin off her face.

Sig drifted back to the kitchen counter, now utterly focused on a citrus reamer. He rotated it slowly in his claws like it was an archaeological wonder or an unsolvable puzzle box.

“So,” Nell ventured cautiously, tapping her fingers against her tea mug. “My boss texted. She gave me the rest of the week off.”

Sig didn’t look up, just turning the citrus reamer in his hands like it might emerge with the answers of what fueled the universe.

What exactly did one do with a winged cryptid lover after the best sex of their life? Play Scrabble? Go antiquing? Perform a blood rite in the community garden?

Nell cleared her throat. “What…” she asked carefully, “...what would you like to do today?”

Sig turned the reamer once more and set it down gently. He lifted his gaze.

“I would take you back to your bed,” he said, in a steady and unapologetically dark voice, “and coax every echo of pleasure from your body until your voice gave out and your name no longer mattered.”

Her breath caught on the inhale and her thighs squeezed together. “Well,” she managed, a little breathless. “That’s…direct.”

“But I suspect that is not what you meant.”

Nell blinked. “I mean, it’s notnotwhat I meant…”Down, girl.