Just the water lapping. Just the distant call of something nocturnal in the canopy above. Just Dimitri’s breathing, still ragged at the edges, and her own heartbeat thudding in her ears.

His hand was still holding hers.

The water’s surface trembled as Felicity’s healed body floated, moonlight catching the slick trails of six loads still painting her thighs like a fucking canvas. Dimitri’s albino fur glowed like bleached bone against the shadows, his eyes two smouldering coals of amber locked onto her. That massive hand released her chin, sliding down her throat, over the swell of her pregnant belly, his cubs swelling beneath her navel and finally gripped her hipbone hard enough to bruise.

"Fresh," he growled, the sound vibrating through the humid air. "Tight. Mine."

He released her hand.

For one terrible, weightless second, she felt unmoored, and then his fingers were under her chin, tilting her face up with a firm, undeniable pressure. Her neck ached. Her eyes were heavy-lidded, barely able to focus, and she knew what she must look like: exhausted, glazed, covered in the evidence of six men’s claiming, her lips swollen and bitten, her cheeks flushed and tear-streaked.

Dimitri looked at her like she was the only thing in the entire ruined world worth looking at.

His other hand plunged between her legs without warning. Thick fingers, rough with calluses, shoved through her soaked folds. Felicity gasped, arching off the water’s surface. Dimitri’s nostrils flared as he felt the slick heat, the swollen lips, the newness her magic had crafted. But deeper, his knuckles scraped against the lingering wetness left behind the sticky, cooling evidence of the others.

"Heal yourself," he commanded. The kind of voice that bypassed thought entirely and went straight to the base of her spine. "I want you whole again, I want you ready. Do it," he purred.

"Cleaned their filth out," he rasped, fingers twisting, spreading her wide. "But my scent’s gonna drown it. Gonna pump you so full, Bug, that cunt’ll weep me for days." His thumb found her clit, a rough, circling pressure that made her jerk. "Feel that? That ache? That’s me waiting. That’s your fucking alpha."

Felicity’s throat worked. She swallowed, her tongue thick and dry, and felt the weight of his command settle over her like a physical thing—not demanding, exactly, but expecting. Expecting her compliance, the way he expected the sun to rise. Expecting her to give him what he wanted because she always did, because something in her body had been rewired to respond to the particular timbre of his voice when it dropped into that register.

"Yes, sir," she whispered.

The words came out hoarse, scraped raw from screaming, but they were there, and they were his.

She closed her eyes. Drew a breath that shuddered through her entire frame. Let her ability unfurl from that place deep in her chest where the magic lives that warm, golden core that hummed and pulsed in time with her heartbeat. She didn’t need to speak the incantation aloud, but she did anyway, because Dimitri had told her to, and because the words felt like an offering.

"Heal."

The magic bloomed outward from her centre like heat radiating from a coal. She felt it race through her veins, warm, bright, insistent, seeking out every ache, every bruise, every torn muscle and oversensitized nerve ending with the precision of something alive and hungry. Her cunt clenched once, hard, as the swelling receded. The ache in her ass eased. The bite marks on her neck and shoulders tingled as the skin knitted closed. The rawness between her thighs smoothed into something clean and new and waiting.

The exhaustion didn’t leave that was bone-deep, magical exhaustion, the kind that sleep and food and time would fix, but the pain did. The trembling stopped. Her muscles unlocked. Her tail lifted from the water’s surface, fur fluffing as it dried in the warm night air. Her fox ears perked, swivelling toward the sound of Dimitri’s breathing. 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

She opened her eyes. Felicity was whole and healed and ready.

Dimitri’s expression hadn’t changed, but his pupils had blown wide, the amber of his irises reduced to thin rings of burnished gold. His fingers were still under her chin, holding her there, and she could feel the slight tremor running through his hand, not weakness. Hunger. The kind of hunger that had been banked and controlled and denied for hours while he watched from the outside, and now it was free, and it was looking at her with nothing between them.

"Good girl," he said, and the words hit her like a physical blow.

Felicity shivered. Not from cold. From the way his voice dropped on the girl, rough and possessive and private, like it was a word that existed only in the space between his mouth and her skin.

His thumb traced her lower lip. Slowly. Deliberately. His gaze tracked the movement with an intensity that made her breath stutter.

"You gave them everything," he said. Not a question. A statement, weighted and careful. "Every scream. Every sob. Every drop of yourself. And you were beautiful. You were perfect."

Dimitri hauled her forward through the water, her legs instinctively wrapping around his waist. The soaked fabric of his pants scraped against her sensitive inner thighs, but beneath it, she felt the monstrous ridge of his cock already fully hard, already throbbing against her mound. Thick and veined. The blunt head nudged insistently against her entrance, slick with her arousal and the river water.

His thumb pressed against her lip, and she opened her mouth on instinct, letting him press inside, tasting salt and skin and the faintest trace of his own release from where he’d gripped himself.

"But now," he continued, his voice dropping to something barely above a growl, "you’re mine. Just mine. For as long as I want you. And I want you for a very, very long time, Bug."

Felicity’s pulse hammered against the inside of her wrist. Her healed body thrummed with a fresh, electric awareness; every nerve ending was singing, every inch of skin was suddenly hypersensitive in a way that had nothing to do with over sensitivity and everything to do with the man crouched at the water’s edge, looking at her like he was going to devour her whole.