Chapter 40: Mating Roar Mid-Battle. Be My Guest, Sterling.

Of all the ways Kael expected to lose a battle, cumming in his pants while holding a comatose woman on the back of a dragon was not on the list.

Her scent went from background noise to a wall. Rich, gold-laced, thick enough to taste at the back of his throat. His pupils blew before he could stop them.

The flame orbiting them responded. It pulsed hotter, brighter, the rotation tightening. Heat concentrated low on her body, glowing between her thighs in a way that made Kael’s thoughts scatter like birds from a bowstring.

His hand trembled. The blade vibrated against her skin.

Her scent was flooding every cubic inch of air between them with something that made his dragon growl and his thoughts go somewhere he could not afford them to go in the middle of a collapsing battle.

"Stop," he said, low, to a woman who could not hear him.

The scent didn’t stop. Nothing about her had ever listened to him, and apparently that included her subconscious.

Instead, she arched into him.

He pulled the blade back half an inch. Because if her throat pressed any harder against that steel while she arched like that, the cut would be his fault and not his choice, and Kael did not make mistakes.

Unfortunately, the blade was not the only thing that was hard.

Two minutes ago, he had a hostage and the upper hand. Now he had an erection, a dragon screaming one word on repeat, and a woman whose unconscious body was dismantling his self-control faster than the three Drakencrest dragons trying to kill him.

She was pressed against him. Flush. Her back to his chest, her hips against his, and the erection between them was obvious enough that if she were conscious, the conversation would have been very different and significantly more violent.

"Sweetheart, your timing is genuinely, profoundly terrible."

He pulled the blade away from her neck and slid it back into his sheath.

His dragon spoke for the first time in years.

Ours.

One word. Final. The kind of word that didn’t come with a negotiation attached.

Kael’s hand moved. He didn’t decide to move it. His dragon did. Down from her waist, fingers sliding over the curve of her hip, settling between her thighs with a pressure that was too deliberate to be accidental and too instinctive to be planned.

The heat that met his hand through the fabric was devastating. Her hips pressed into him. A slow, rolling grind that her body produced without consultation, without awareness, without any of the defiance and fury that would have been there if she were awake.

Take her.

His dragon again. Louder now. More insistent. The voice filled his skull with a hunger that felt like gravity, the kind of pull that didn’t ask and didn’t wait and considered the battlefield outside the orb to be someone else’s concern entirely.

Kael pressed his mouth to the side of her neck.

"Fuck."

One word. The most honest thing he’d said all day.

She rolled with a low sound that was doing more damage than the entire fae mutiny combined.

He felt his own hand press harder, felt his hips grind against her from behind, and the rational part of his brain, the strategist, the commander, the man who always had a plan, went quiet.

"Gods... I can’t stop."

Then he started grinding against her, his hips moving on its own. The hand between her legs rubbed faster, possessive circles on her clit. Every stroke made her unconscious body jerk and press back into him, feeding the fire.

He was so hard it hurt, and dry humping with enough force that the head of his cock was being rubbed raw on his trousers.

A broken groan escaped his throat. He had never felt a primal urge to mate this violently in his entire life. It wasn’t lust. It was need. A bone-deep, dragon-driven compulsion to claim, to breed, to mark what should never have been his.

The last coherent thought he had before his dragon took the wheel completely was that this woman was going to be the death of him—and he was going to let her.

The pressure snapped. A guttural roar tore out of his chest as he came hard in his pants, thick ropes of cum soaking through the fabric while his hips kept moving. He was still hard, still leaking, still desperate to push inside her and lock her to him.

"You’re mine." 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

Maddox felt it through the matebond before he understood it.

Heat. Low, pulsing, rolling through the connection in waves that had nothing to do with fire and everything to do with her body responding to something he couldn’t see. His wingbeats stuttered. His vision narrowed.

She was aroused. Whatever was happening inside that gold orb, her body was reacting, and the matebond was delivering every detail with the subtlety of a battering ram.

His rational mind supplied the explanation he didn’t want: Kael was touching her.

Maddox: Ryker. Get her off that dragon. NOW.

The draconic command cracked across the frequency. Not the voice of a commander. The voice of a man whose mate was in someone else’s hands, and whose body was receiving a live feed of what those hands were doing.

Ryker banked towards him.

Ryker: Maddox, we need to—

The roar that came out of Maddox Drakencrest was not tactical.

It started low, building in his chest cavity before it reached his throat, and when it broke free, it was a sound that hadn’t been heard over a battlefield in generations. A full mating roar. Involuntary. Ancient.

The kind that bypassed the man entirely and came from the dragon underneath, from the part of him that predated language and strategy and rank and operated on a single, uncivilized frequency: mine.

The sky responded.

Every allied dragon in range locked up. Wings stuttered. Formation dissolved. The roar hit them in the chest and triggered the instinctive submission response hardwired into every dragon shifter alive, the one that said dragon king is claiming his mate, do not interfere, do not approach, clear the path.

Ryker dropped thirty feet before he caught himself. His wings locked and his teeth bared in an involuntary snarl that had nothing to do with Ryker and everything to do with his dragon processing a mating roar at close range and trying not to submit to it.

Ryker: MADDOX. Control yourself.

Maddox couldn’t hear him. The matebond was flooding. Her heat, her scent carried through the connection, the unconscious sounds she was making, all of it pouring into him with zero filter. His claws had punctured his own scales.

Guinevere’s body responded. The roar hit her through the matebond from the opposite direction, Maddox’s possession slamming into her like a tide reversing.

She let out a high-pitched sob of frustration, involuntary, carrying on the same frequency Maddox was broadcasting on. Every dragon in the sky heard it. Her answer. Even unconscious, her instincts pointed to Maddox, and she wanted to go to him.

A growl came from Kael’s chest, his dragon surging so hard his vision flickered. His arm tightened around her waist, his hand pressing harder between her thighs, and for three full seconds, the war, the fae, the mutiny, all of it ceased to exist. There was only the woman in his arms, answering another man’s roar with her body while pressed against his.

The jealousy that hit him was unexpected and irrational. She was a hostage. A means to an end. He kept telling himself that as his eyes narrowed at the pulse point on her neck. Then his fangs started to elongate.

Maddox climbed altitude. The mating roar hadn’t stopped. It was sustaining, rolling, each wave building on the last. An apex predator who stopped seeing obstacles and was rapidly closing the distance between himself and her.

Sterling: Ryker. If you don’t slow him down, he’s going to hit that orb at full speed and kill all three of them.

Ryker: You want to tell the man in a mating roar to slow down? Be my guest, Sterling.

Just as Kael was about to sink his fangs into her neck, the gold orb fell like a curtain dropping, and the open sky rushed back in with wind and cold and the sound of a battle that had just become three wars instead of one.

Guinevere jerked out of his arms, bolting for the edge of the dragon beneath them, moving towards Maddox like he was gravity.

Kael’s hand closed around air.

"No."

He lunged, hooking her around the waist with both arms, pulling her against his chest, breathing hard.

The gold from her skin poured into him like it was made for him, and she was pulling towards another man with every unconscious breath.

The sound his dragon made in response was not a growl. It was a declaration of ownership filed in a language older than speech.

Ours. Mate.

Kael did not correct it.