The intrusion into my body was fast and hard, but not unanticipated, making me moan with pleasure as he pierced parts that had been too long without him. I leaned forward to kiss him, his hands hard on my hips, urging me to a faster rhythm.

“I want all of you, Gabriel.”

His eyes opened to flash with quicksilver brightness, his gaze hot enough to scorch. But his dragon fire came from his mouth as he pulled me down, taking my breast in his mouth, bathing it with fire that danced down my skin until it covered us both. I gasped as he pistoned upward even harder, deeper than he had been before, the sensation of his mouth on my other breast almost pushing me over the edge of sanity. I gripped him hard with my knees, watching with amazement as the taut, brown flesh between my thighs turned iridescent, forming into white scales that rippled upward into a beautiful silver that was almost as bright as Gabriel’s eyes. The body beneath me and inside me thickened, lengthening and changing in ways that were both wholly foreign and yet somehow familiar. The hands that gripped my breasts changed as well, the long, brown fingers changing to silver, tipped with curved claws the color of blood.

Part of my brain shrieked to me that it was wrong, that the man I was riding was no man—he was a beast—but my heart knew the truth. The tension inside me built until I flung back my head, arching my back as I was locked in an orgasm, the muscles embracing Gabriel tightening with an ecstasy that was almost painful. Gabriel thrust upward at the same time he roared his pleasure, a primal, terrifying sound that echoed in the room and in my soul. There was a word in that roar, one word: my name. The fire leaped between us, back and forth until there was no ending and no beginning. It just was—and so were we. I knew with every atom of my being, every infinitesimal part that combined to make me, that Gabriel and I were one. Nothing could ever change that—no demon lord with delusions of grandeur, no authority in this world or any other, existed that could take me from him. Gabriel had somehow become an integral part of me, and that thought shook me to my core.

“Mayling!”

I slid off him, collapsing onto my stomach, the blanket beneath me cool on my fevered flesh.

“Little bird, did I hurt you?”

The hand that grasped my shoulder was human again, the fingers long and sensitive. I laid my cheek on the bed, clutching the blanket as my body shook with the aftereffects of both Gabriel’s attentions and my own realization.

I was me, May, created wholly formed, and independent of all, even those to whom I was bound. Even when I had accepted my role as Gabriel’s mate, when I had agreed that we were fated to be together, it never occurred to me that he would become necessary to the very act of living.