Bonded
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"I can't believe this," Lero said to me as our feet pounded the forest floor flat and our breathing tried to catch up to our pace.
"Don't," I said. I was drained enough; I didn't even want to think about what this meant for my future, having held a knife to Jed's throat. I just wanted to lie down and sleep, but I couldn't do that. I couldn't even afford to stop running.
"How many of them are there?" Lero asked me. He stuck close to me, whipping around trees as needed. "What other strongholds are we going to have to avoid?"
"Avoid?" I sputtered. "What, so you don't go inside and kill everybody?"
"I didn't—"
"You were inches!" I yelled, batting a branch away from my face. "Inches from changing and slaughtering everyone in there! Don't tell me that you weren't!"
"And?" Lero demanded. The forest was quiet; the sun was still shy, and all the noise was ours. Our breathing, our feet, and our words. "You'd rather I let us both be turned in to the Baron than kill a few thieves? They betrayed you, Myra!"
"They're just following orders. Looking out for themselves! I would have done the same thing. It's the life of a thief. Your own skin...it's the most important!"
"Some thief you are, then," Lero said. "You saved me. Maybe you're not as much like them as you think."
I was exhausted, and so was Lero. We had to stop. We came to a rest somewhere deep in the forest, a place I actually recognized; looking around, I saw that it was along the path I would have taken if I had been able to escape Baron Eaves' estate last night. If I had been able to make it to the woods.
That was only last night? It almost felt like a lifetime ago.
I leaned against a tree, catching my breath. "I don't appreciate how willing you are to just...unleash yourself like that. You need to trust me."
Lero looked away, up at the sky. The moon, perhaps, though we could barely see it. "If you're so upset with me...if you don't like the way I do things...then why did you bother to save me at all? You could have left me and disappeared."
"I don't know, okay!?" I snapped, glaring at him for a moment before turning away. My chest was heavy and hot. My throat burned. My eyes stung. And it wasn't because of the running. "I don't understand this, what's...what's happening to me? Lero, I..."
Now he looked at me, and his expression was softer.
"I feel like I've known you all my life," I managed. "I don't understand it. But I couldn't leave you. I...it's like...I can't do this without you. I can't." Ashamed, I slumped to the ground and put my head in my arms. I was crying; inexplicably, but I couldn't stop it. It was coming out whether I wanted it to or not, just like the words that I was saying.
"There's something connecting us," I said, picking my head up so that I could speak, but unable to look at Lero. "Isn't there? Can't you feel it? Or am I just going crazy?" I wasn't putting it into words as well as I wanted to, but it was true—like invisible strings held me to Lero, but in some way beyond physical holding. Something...emotional. A bond. If there was such a thing as destiny, this must be what it felt like to be in its grasp.
Powerless to fight it...but fulfilled by following it.
I had never felt so scared and alone in my entire life as I did this night.
Lero knelt down next to me. He rested his left hand flat against the trunk of the tree I was sitting against, and was silent for a couple of moments. Then, "I feel it, Myra. You're not alone."
"I know." I whispered. And then I reached up from where I was sitting, putting my right hand up and over my shoulder...
...and Lero was there, and he took hold of it, and his grasp was warm on this cold, early morning, with the two of us all alone in the woods. I closed my eyes and held his hand, not wanting to say anything else. I just needed to know that he was there.
"I'm sorry," Lero said. "You've done so much for me, Myra. I have no right to...to be mad at you, or to think that I know better than you. I don't. I've just been alone for a long time. I haven't had to rely on anyone else in...I don't know how long. It's hard to remember how to do that again."
I nodded. Lero and I may have led different lives up until now, but we had both been through much of the same, it seemed. We were dealing with exactly the same struggle: solitude and its normalcy. How hard it was to leave it behind. And how the only way to achieve that was to do it together.
I stood up, slowly. Turned toward Lero and looked at him. Even tired down to his bones, on the tail-end of a long imprisonment and possibly the most stressful, exhausting night to ever happen, his eyes were full of energy. And they were looking right at me.
I took his other hand in mine, holding them both. "I don't know what to do," I said to him, ashamed to admit it. "I don't have a plan. I'm scared for us both, and for my friends in The Hole and what Baron Eaves is going to do to them."
"I don't, either," Lero said, and he gripped my hands a little harder, pulling me closer to him. "But you were right...it has to be us. It's going to be us. We have to take care of the Baron."
Lero spoke with utter confidence. I heard his conviction. I felt it in my hands, held in his, and in his eyes; the bright, driven eyes of a man with a beast inside him, I saw his intent. That same infallible destiny that pulled me to him, pulled him to me, and pulled us both toward what should happen next.
And it pulled my lips to his.
I stood on tiptoe and kissed Lero, closing my eyes and forgetting about the woods around us and the danger hanging in the air. His rough beard scratched against me, and he was so warm. He slipped his hands around my back and brought me up against him, and my whole body flared with heat and desire, enough to send prickles up and down my skin.
Lero kissed like a man ravenous for the touch of a woman. The touch of me. His energy sparked when we moved together, and there was no hesitation in his actions. No wondering if I wasn't sure, or thinking it over.
I loved it.
I treated him in kind, sliding my hands up under his shirt, feeling the hard muscle of his form beneath his sparse clothing. With his recent transformation, some of the changes must have lingered. He was bulkier than he had first seemed in the cell, when I first saw him. He was strong and broad, and my fingers slid across firm muscle and scarred skin. Lero had been through so much. I wanted to know it all. I wanted to touch it all.
Lero wanted the same. As my hands found my way up his shirt, so did his go up mine, and his rough fingers and palms were on me, touching me, spreading his warmth and making gooseflesh ripple across me.
Our lips parted only so that we could take our clothes off of each other. I slipped his shirt over his head and tossed it to the side, and he deftly undid mine from the front and slid it off me, spilling it onto the forest floor.
Lero looked at my bare chest and I looked at his. His skin was dark, cast in shadow. I put my hand on his chest and felt his heartbeat, excited and firm in his chest. I moved my fingers down the scarred flesh of his muscled front, to his abdominals, also with their marks, but not as severe. Just looking at his torso told me so much about him. His life. His struggles. How strong he was, and how he had to use that strength every day to get what he needed.
I didn't have that kind of strength displayed on me, but Lero seemed enraptured all the same. His hands caressed one of my breasts, a fleeting touch that made me shiver with desire before he pulled me back into a kiss, breathing heavy and holding me tight. He squeezed my breast in his hand, rubbing against my hard nipple in the open forest air, and I gasped into his mouth.
I brought my hand further down, past his abs and down to the loose waist of his pants, which I quickly slipped off of him and let drop to the ground. I wrapped my hand around his cock and found it was already stiff and swollen between his legs. He grunted as I grabbed it.
"You're as eager as I am," he said, taking his fingers to my nipple and pinching it, then doing the same to the other. He untied the waist of my pants and made me as naked as he was, both of us pressing our flesh together in the slowly lightening morning of the woods.
"Come on," I whispered, still holding tight onto him, feeling his heartbeat pulse in his thick rod. He was blazing hot down there, all the force inside concentrated into this part of himself. "I want you, Lero. I need you."
This man, this beast-man with untold power under his skin, he put his hands on my shoulders, held me strong.
And he said, "I know."
His strong hands brought me to the ground, where he loomed over me, naked and powerful. I saw the shadow of the beast in him, and it spoke to me primally. I ran my hands up his arms, feeling the power and muscle there, the same power that was currently pressing me into the dirt. I reached up until I was touching his shoulders and moving my hands down his back. He was radiating with heat and desire, the same as I was.
While I touched Lero's skin and explored the curves and rigid hardness of his muscles, he forced my legs apart with his own. The werewolf wasn't interested in anything short of the need to mate, the entangling and enrapturing desire to plunge himself into me and drive in deep. This was a matter of animal instinct.
I wrapped my arms around him, breathing in that same smell of musk that I had noticed when I first met him in the dungeon. Lero's eyes were blazing green, and he locked them onto mine and pressed against me. I could feel the stiff, unyielding heat of his cock just between my legs. I shuddered, the feeling of his flesh on mine overwhelming my senses and coursing through me.
"Take me, Lero," I begged, digging my fingers into his back. "Mate me. Fuck me."
Lero growled, and I saw with some surprise that he was starting to change, just a little, as though it was sneaking in on him without his knowledge. I watched as his features edged toward being decidedly more wolfish, his beard filling out, and I felt his hands on me grow bigger, stronger, and a little claw-like. Not a full transformation, far from it, but a sign that he was in the grip of something more powerful than his conscious mind could overcome.
With no hesitation, Lero plunged himself into me, burying his cock all the way inside of me with one powerful thrust and gripping me with impossibly strong arms at the same time. I cried out, the sudden entry of his thick rod making me clench, but that cry quickly turned to a moan of fulfillment and pleasure.
"Yes," I gasped, clutching at Lero and his beastly, savage body. His head was low, hung by mine, and I could feel his breath on my face and hear the low growl that was inside his throat.
"Myra," he uttered, just speaking my name, but saying it with intent. Conviction. Lust. He panted while he was buried inside of me, pressing his chest up against mine. "You're so...you feel so...good!"
Now his growl turned into a roar, and Lero started to pound himself into me, slamming his cock into my tunnel with all the force he could muster. It felt good, and it hurt, and I loved it. His raw power and roughness, fucking me like the beast inside was taking over. He drove deep into me and lowered his head to my neck, biting at my skin, surely leaving a mark.
I didn't care. I wanted his teeth buried in me just as much as his cock. I relished the sensation of his saliva dripping down my neck and his panting breath rolling across me. I opened my legs wide, letting him in. Closer and deeper, never relenting.
"F-fuck, Lero!" I burst out, hardly able to talk for the force and speed of his thrusts. I had never had anything remotely like this before. This kind of energy and power, slamming into me over and over, becoming one with me. I wanted all of it—all of him.
Lero planted one hand, spread-fingered, in the dirt next to my head. He got himself some leverage and somehow fucked me even harder, biting at my neck and pulling up to look at me before diving into my flesh again. He fucked me like prey, and he looked at me like a companion. Such a strange and powerful juxtaposition, and it was buried in me to the hilt.
I closed my eyes and let my body take over as Lero fucked me, hard and deep, and I felt his tongue lick up my neck and along my jaw before he reached his peak and released himself inside of me.
"Lero!" I screamed, clenching at the pulsing thickness of his cock within me, holding him close, amazed at the unrelenting power that was on top of me, pinning me down. Lero growled hoarsely, panting, and emptied himself into me. His hot seed filled me until it dripped out onto the bare dirt below us, while I writhed in pleasure below him and wished that he could stay in me for all eternity. That we could mate, just like this, forever.
That wasn't possible, of course, but it was a nice thought. And this passionate coupling in the woods, just after a fight for our lives, was enough for me, for tonight.
Lero's breath was hot and fast, and he pulled back from my face as he slipped out of me, leaving me empty in one way but filled in so many others. He sat back on his knees, and I rose up off the ground with him, letting him pull me up so that we could look at each other.
The daylight was weak around us, but growing stronger. I could see him well. He was fully human again; the fleeting changes he had gone through had evaporated. I touched his face and then kissed him.
"I've never had anyone like you," I whispered, my voice rough around the edges from screaming in passion. "Never felt so...connected."
Lero pressed his forehead to mine as both of us caught our breath and let our beating hearts settle into their natural rhythm. "We are connected, Myra. We have been for years, I would think. It's the nature of our kind. Or at least, so I have heard..." He looked at me with fondness. "I was unable to say for certain about the destiny of wolves like us. Until now."
I still didn't know about this whole idea of me being the same kind of creature that Lero was, but I could not fight the idea that Lero and I were destined to be. Destined to meet, to survive, to...to couple. And to go on together to meet our future. It felt more right than anything I had ever done.
We rested there together for a little while longer, staying close, bathing in the afterglow. But after a few minutes, the urgency of our situation tapped on our shoulders, and we knew that it was time to get dressed and move forward.
With my clothes back on, I stood and leaned against the same tree that I had slumped against earlier when I was feeling defeated. Now, I was filled with energy and inspired. I was sure that we were going to be able to take care of the Baron and put all of this behind us. Even if I didn't exactly know how.