Page 245 of Fractured Loyalties

I meet each thrust with everything I have left. The friction turns fierce. The air tastes like sweat and want and the edge of prayer. He curses under his breath, voice rough, face tight with effort and need. He is beautiful like this. Ruined and relentless. Mine.

My nails score his back. My thighs tremble. He leans over me, lips brushing my ear. “You’re mine.”

“Yes, Mara, and you’re mine.” Then he thrusts. Hard. The bed slams against the wall. My body jolts with each stroke, pleasure sharp enough to feel like pain. He drives into me with ruthless precision, owning me, breaking me open. And I take it. I meet every thrust with my own, chasing the burn, needing more.

“Say it,” he demands, fucking me harder. “Say whose you are.”

My voice cracks, raw and unashamed. “Yours. I’m all yours Elias.”

“Eyes,” he grits.

I drag them up to his. He stares down like he’s memorizing my face from the inside out. His control frays.

His groan rips through the air. He pistons into me faster, sweat slicking our bodies, his mouth crushing mine until I can’t breathe anything but him. The pressure coils inside me again, unbearable, explosive.

He feels it. His hand snakes between us, thumb grinding against my clit, ruthless, perfect. “Come on me,” he growls. “Come while I take you apart.”

I shatter. My cry is strangled against his mouth as my body convulses, clamping tight around him. He snarls, slams deep, and holds there as his own climax tears through him. I feel him pulse inside me, hot and endless, his teeth in my shoulder, marking me.

When it’s done, we collapse together, tangled and wrecked, bodies slick and trembling. His chest heaves against mine. My legs wrap around him like I’ll never let go.

He keeps himself inside me as if leaving would be an insult to the vow he just made with his body. His hand cups my jaw. His mouth finds my ear.

“Mine,” he says, not loud, not soft, a verdict. “Say it back.”

Yours, I think, already gone. “Yours,” I say. “Only.”

His whole body loosens by degrees. He kisses me like a seal set to cooling wax. Then he threads our fingers together above my head and settles in, still joined, still heavy inside me, refusing to break the hold.

Outside the door, Lydia’s steps pass once and fade. In here, the world is a locked room with no clocks. Elias keeps me caged in the safest way I’ve ever known, and suddenly, my mind goes quiet enough to hear my own heartbeat.

I feel claimed. Chosen. Burned into him as deeply as he is burned into me.

Tomorrow can wait. He won’t let it in yet. Neither will I.

The room smells like sweat and skin and soap. The sheets cling to me, damp and twisted around my legs, and Elias is still inside me, heavy and unyielding, chest pressed to mine like he can’t let me breathe without him.

His mouth is at my shoulder, teeth grazing the bruise he left there. He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t have to. His body saysit all—every thrust that still echoes in me, every drop of heat he spilled inside me, every mark on my skin that no one else will ever touch.

I shift beneath him, trembling, trying to catch a rhythm in my lungs again. He notices. His weight shifts enough for me to draw air, but he doesn’t move away. His hand finds my jaw, thumb dragging across my swollen lips like he’s checking his work.

“You’re shaking,” he murmurs.

I swallow. “Because of you.”

He huffs something close to a laugh, though it’s darker than humor. His fingers slide down my throat, feeling the frantic hammer of my pulse. “Good.”

A flush burns through me. I should resent the word, but I don’t. The admission makes my body tighten around him, and I see the flicker in his eyes when he feels it.

“You like it,” he says, voice roughened. “Being wrecked by me. You hate it and you love it.”

I don’t deny it. I can’t. My nails press crescents into his back, desperate anchors against the truth that he’s carving into me. “I don’t hate it.”

His eyes search mine, cold steel softening at the edges. The predator pauses, watching me like I’m not prey anymore, but the only thing left that matters. He leans in, presses his forehead to mine.

“I could kill every man who’s ever hurt you,” he whispers. “But it won’t erase them. I can only overwrite them. With this. With me.”

The words hit like a confession. My chest constricts. He isn’t wrong. Caleb’s shadow has haunted me for years, buttonight—right now—it feels drowned out by something fiercer, darker, Elias’s heat scorching over every scar.