Chapter 9: Dawn's First Claim
The first pale blade of dawn cut through the curtains when the weight settled over him. Draven’s cock, thick and insistent, pressed against his sore entrance before pushing in, a slow, devastating invasion that tore a groan from Andre’s sleep-thick throat. "All day means all fucking day, sweetheart," Draven growled into his neck, his fingers digging into the fresh bruises on Andre’s hips as he buried himself to the hilt.
He set a deep, relentless rhythm, each thrust a calculated slide that rubbed against every raw nerve. "You don't cum until I say," Draven whispered, his breath hot, "or I'll chain you to this bed and keep you dripping for a week." Andre clenched the black silk sheets, his body arching back against its will, stuffed full and aching. Draven’s pace was a brutal, possessive grinding, his balls slapping against Andre’s skin with every plunge.
"You like this, don't you?" Draven’s hand snaked around to grip Andre’s leaking cock, squeezing the base hard. "Your hole is sucking me back in." Andre choked on a yes, the word lost as Draven shifted, angling deeper. "I can smell your deceit," Draven snarled, his thrusts turning punishing, "like burnt ozone under your skin." He fucked him harder, the bedposts knocking against the stone wall. "You will tell me what you’re hiding." A particularly vicious thrust stole Andre’s breath. "And you’ll tell me today."
Andre bit back a scream, his nails tearing the silk as Draven’s rhythm became a brutal, piston-like drive. “I hate being so vulnerable,” Andre gasped, the admission ripped from him as Draven’s cockhead hammered a spot that shattered his thoughts. “I can’t be strong if you’re making me moan and scream like a bitch.” Draven’s hand tightened in his curls, yanking his head back.
A low growl vibrated against Andre’s spine. “But you can’t help it,” Draven snarled, his hips never faltering in their deep, claiming rhythm. He released Andre’s hair, his palm slapping down hard on his ass with a sharp crack. “The greatest feeling is knowing you’re pleasing your mate.”
Draven’s voice dropped to a rough whisper at his ear. “Those sounds you make can’t be faked.” He punctuated each word with a deep, grinding thrust that stole Andre’s breath. “It means you’re enjoying yourself.” Andre’s traitorous body clenched around him, a slick, hot convulsion. “It means we fit together perfectly in all ways.”
His pace turned frantic, a ruthless cadence that shoved Andre up the bed. “And it means,” Draven panted, his breath hot and ragged, “it’s time for your first orgasm of the day.” He wrapped a firm hand around Andre’s leaking cock, his thumb smearing pre-come over the head. “Cum on my cock, Andre.” His final command was a guttural roar against Andre’s skin. “Scream for me.”
The command shattered him.
Andre’s back arched, a raw, broken sound tearing from his throat as his release pulsed over Draven’s fist. His vision whited out, the pleasure a sharp, searing brand that burned away all pretense. Draven fucked him through it, never slowing, his cock driving into the clenching, oversensitive heat.
“Yes,” Draven grunted, his own rhythm faltering into something harder, more desperate. He pressed his forehead between Andre’s shoulder blades, his breath coming in ragged bursts. “That’s it.”
The orgasm crested again, a second, unexpected wave that ripped through Andre’s gut and pulled a full-throated scream from his lungs. It was a sound of pure surrender, of boundaries erased. In the shattered, breathless silence that followed, a single, raw truth clawed its way out, voiced in a spent, broken whisper he hadn’t meant to speak.
“I came here to kill you.”
Complete stillness filled the room. Then Draven pulled out with a slick, wet sound. He flipped Andre onto his back, his emerald eyes luminous and feral in the dim light. He loomed over him, a silent, terrifying monolith.
“What did you say?” The voice was lethally calm. Andre stared up, the aftershocks of pleasure replaced by a freezing, clarifying dread. His hand flew to his mouth. “What the fuck.”
His voice was a fractured whisper against his own palm. “I didn’t... I don’t know what that was.” The words hadn’t felt like his own. Panic clawed up his throat, pure and instinctive, as Draven’s gaze bore into him, seeing too much.
Draven’s expression shifted, the fury melting into something sharper: alarm. He saw the genuine confusion in Andre’s eyes, tasted the acrid fear in the air. This wasn’t a confession; it was a seizure of thought, an external impulse violently expressed. He felt Andre’s internal panic, a chaotic storm.
He knew Andre wasn’t lying. A colder, more clinical understanding clicked into place. His fingers pressed against Andre’s temple, the touch gentle now. "Someone," Draven breathed, his voice low and urgent, "has threaded a compulsion into you, Andre." He could feel it now—a foul, foreign knot in the subtle currents of Andre’s latent magic.
"They tried to pervert your own power," he continued, his thumb stroking the skin below Andre’s eye. "A dormant command, tied to a release of endorphins, maybe... an orgasm." The horror of the violation settled between them, far colder than any threat. "You couldn’t control it because it wasn't yours to control."
Andre’s entire body began to tremble, a violent shivering that shook the ruined silk beneath him. "No," he gasped, staring at his own hands as if they were foreign things. "Get it out. Get it out of me right now." His breathing hitched into sharp, panicked gulps.
Draven tried to tell Andre to calm down but he was hysterical. "Andre, look at me," Draven commanded, his voice firm but laced with a new, strained urgency as he grasped Andre's jaw. "Just breathe. I need to see it."
The panic in Andre's brown eyes spiraled into pure, animal terror. Then the compulsion activated. A sickly, jaundiced gold light flooded Andre's irises, swallowing the warm brown completely. His eyes lost all recognition, all sense, becoming flat, illuminated coins. The guttural voice that tore from his throat was layered, distorted, and utterly cold. "Find the Cinder-Heart. Carve it from his chest before the moon's apex." Andre’s body arched, tendons straining in his neck, a puppet jerked by a malignant will. "Or the dream-fire consumes what remains of your kin."
The light died as suddenly as it came, plunging the room back into gloom. Andre collapsed back onto the mattress, his own strangled sob following the command’s echo. He scrambled back, pushing himself against the headboard, staring at Draven with horror, wiping at his mouth. “What did I just say?” he whispered, his voice raw. “What did it make me say?”
Draven was already moving. He vaulted from the bed, his own nakedness forgotten, and crossed to the heavy oak door. He slammed the iron bolt home with a definitive thud that shook the frame. He turned, his emerald eyes scanning the room’s shadows, his body coiled with a predatory readiness Andre had never seen. “It gave you a mission,” Draven said, his voice low and devoid of all prior heat. “And a timeline.” He looked back at Andre, his gaze analytical, assessing a now-critical threat vector. “Moon’s apex is tonight.”
He didn’t touch Andre. Instead, he closed his eyes. Deep in his mind, cold silver threads unwound, shooting past the castle walls. He mind-linked his Beta, Kael, with a single pulsed image: Secure the perimeter. Magical threat. A second, more delicate thread spun towards his sister Bernadine, carrying the layered, guttural command he’d just heard.
“Find the Cinder-Heart. Carve it from his chest.” Her psychic presence, sharp and ancient as owl-light, recoiled. Blood-magic compulsion, she sent back, the thought laced with alarm. Old. Keyed to release. Draven, his bloodline is the tether. He felt her rifling through memory-scrolls of inherited prophecy. If you die, the spell activates fully… it would scorch his soul from the inside out.
He’s the last of his line, Draven sent back, the truth a stone in his gut. There’s nothing left to consume but him. Bernadine’s realization was a spike of cold fear. The “dream-fire.” It needs his life to manifest. This compulsion… it’s using your mate as a suicide vessel. Her thoughts sharpened. The “Cinder-Heart” isn’t a metaphor. It’s your physical heart, brother. They want him to cut it out.
Draven’s eyes snapped open, the emerald glow brutal in the dark room. Andre was curled against the headboard, shaking, watching him. “What’s happening?” Andre whispered, his voice shattered. Draven crossed the room in two strides, his earlier restraint gone. “I’m finding what’s in you,” he growled, his hands framing Andre’s face.
He saw the oily gold flicker start deep in Andre’s brown eyes again, the foreign will reasserting itself. “No you don’t,” Draven snarled. He yanked Andre down the bed by his hips, flipped him onto his stomach, and mounted him in one brutal motion. His cock, still wet from their earlier fuck, plunged into Andre’s unresisting, slick channel with a single, tearing thrust.
Andre cried out, a sound of shock and violation. Draven set a vicious, punishing rhythm, each slam of his hips meant to dominate, to overwhelm, to shatter the intrusive presence coiling in Andre’s mind. “You are mine,” Draven grunted, his fingers biting into Andre’s shoulders. “My mate. Not their weapon.” He fucked him with a raw, focused intensity, a physical war against a metaphysical curse.
“You will not take him,” Draven roared, not at Andre, but at the thing inside him. His rhythm was relentless, a deep, piston-like drive that stole the breath from Andre’s lungs and fragmented his thoughts. Draven’s hand fisted in his curls, yanking his head back. “You feel this?” he demanded, slamming home, his balls slapping against skin. “This is real. This is mine.”
Andre’s body, traitorously, began to respond, the sheer physical overload short-circuiting the rising panic. A broken, sobbing moan was fucked out of him. “I’m… I’m sorry,” he choked, the words lost in the pillow. Draven leaned over him, his sweat dripping onto Andre’s back. “You have nothing to be sorry for,” he breathed, his thrusts becoming shorter, harder, more possessive. “I will fuck this spell out of you if I have to.”
He felt the tension in Andre’s body coiling towards another peak, this one born of pure, brutal stimulus. Draven reached around, his hand rough on Andre’s cock, stroking in time with his thrusts. “Come for me, Andre,” he commanded, his voice a guttural scrape. “Own your body. Now.” The orgasm that tore through Andre was a convulsive, blinding seizure, his passage clamping down on Draven’s cock in violent, rhythmic pulses.
Draven followed, his own release a hot, claiming flood deep inside, a primal marking. He collapsed over him, breathing hard, waiting. The room held only the sound of their ragged breaths. No guttural voice. No jaundiced light. Andre trembled beneath him, spent. “It’s… quiet,” he whispered, disbelief in his raw voice. Draven withdrew, his come leaking onto the sheets. “It’s a reprieve,” he said, wiping a hand across his mouth. “Not a cure.” He stood, pulling Andre up with him. “We need to move. Now.”
“Ok,” Andre said, his voice hoarse and thin. Draven noticed the usual, subtle blue glow of his own mate-mark on Andre’s skin was gone. He didn’t speak it aloud.
Bernadine worked on scrying the prophecy’s source while Kael coordinated with the pack witches, layering the stronghold with disruptive wards. “I’m going to use the restroom before we go,” Andre said, while Draven was opening the door for Kael. Draven stepped into the hall to talk privately for a moment before a sudden, rending crash of splintering wood and stone alerted them both.
Draven and Kael, ran to the bathroom where a jagged hole was torn out of the wall, open to the twilight sky. Andre was gone. “What the fuck.” Draven’s roar shook the corridor. He mind-linked the entire fortress, his command absolute and cold. Full alert. Find Andre. Approach with extreme caution. He is an extreme threat. His final order was a snarl in every pack mind. No lethal force.
The command to Bernadine laced with jagged self-reproach: The link to you. Now.
Her image fractured into his mind, eyes wide over a silver-chased scroll. "Draven, listen." He was already moving down the corridor, Kael a silent shadow. "I told you the bond felt warped," his wolf snarled inside his skull, a relentless, tearing sound. "He is soul-bound. To you. The prophecy says the bond's thread can't be cut, only frayed or perverted."
"The compulsion?" Draven barked into the psychic channel.
"Is fraying it," she sent back, the words quick, cold. "Pain, terror, violation—it's stripping the bond back to raw nerve to implant the command. But the anchor point remains." He was already moving, moving toward his royal chambers. His inner wolf began doing calculations. He comes here.
"The perverted bond..." Bernadine continued, but Draven severed the link. He understood. The bond was a live wire, and through it, his enemies were tracing a path straight to him.
"They didn't just send him to kill me." He growled as the Alpha energy crackled down his spine, causing hairs to rise, and claws threaten. His breathing picked up. And something else came; his erection grew, intense. They had mingled his darkest desire with their poison, weaponizing his own claiming, turning his mate’s ecstasy into a trigger.
"We need a strategy," Draven murmured coldy to Kael as he studied the path of violence left in Andre’s room.
Kael’s hand held up the scent, if you will—it spoke of fading lupine sweat, and salty fear. A seach in ethereal timelines told them of Drew and where he’d actually ended up. It ended directly in Draven’s main bedroom.
A whisper shimemered into place behind them as they approached the velvet-draped sanctuary of torn obsidian silk. The guard outside was already dead and staring blank at the north end facing the courtyard.
When Draven eased open the door, an anticipatory pain had weighed him; when his left sole touched upon the ground invisible cord stretched the exact position of Andre…no, Andre but gone. His imprint ran high over the table crown jewelled wooden shield. Unchecked air swept in with the calm undertone he braced for it.
Unchecked air swept in with the calm undertone he braced for it. The scene inside was an eerie, sterile tableau. “He’s in the prophecy fold,” Kael murmured, “we can’t touch him.” And there Andre stood in the middle of the room, eyes wide and blank, golden light pulsing softly at his temples; his bare feet were crusted with dirt and crushed petals.
A vivid line of tiny, perfect daisies traced a path from the shattered window across the floor to where he stood. The scent of them clashed brutally with the room's usual cedar and leather. Draven took a slow step forward, his voice low. “Andre.”
The guttural command voice answered, layered and flat. “He lied.” Andre's hand lifted, palm open, fingers caked in soft earth. His brown eyes were a bottomless well of hurt confusion, seeing a scene Draven could not. “About everything.”
Andre ended up in a field full of flowers. A daisy field, they smelled beautiful. He remembered sex with Draven and then something happened, but he couldn’t remember. The beautiful hues of dusk were starting to settle around him as he overlooked the beautiful cliff. But then he heard that melodic voice again singing to him a hymn that he couldn’t quite hear. He pushed himself from the flowery field and followed the hymn until the music was blaring in his ear right into a cave. As he walked deeper the cave glowed with beautiful blues, and purples. He stopped when he got deep into the ether like cave and the music seemed to be resonating from the cave itself. “Andre it whispered,” “He lies.” “Liar.” “Sneaky.” “Hiding.” He was bombarded with an array of sinister whispers. “Who? Who are you talking about?” Andre cried. “The King.” “King of deceit.” “Throne of lies.” “Draven.” the voices said. Then the cave seizes his mind to show him a vivid reenactment of when he was taken as a baby. He watched as the king’s soldiers slaughtered his pack, they took him and gave him to a neighboring pack. A younger Draven looked upon Andre’s baby form. Draven’s father, Raven, made them keep the infant to harness its power to strengthen his son’s lineage. So his father was the reason he didn’t know his heritage, his parents were dead. His father knew he was powerful. So he harvested him to benefit Draven. “Yes,” Andre choked out now, a tear cutting a clean line through the dirt on his cheek. “You knew.”