Shepherd felt no humming connection, no mental depth, just aggressive, angry sex… and it was eating at him. Svana was performing well, making her calls and trills, spreading wide to show the beauty of her body. It was not enough. His abject fury did not abate, it only distorted, it left him in ruins, and Shepherd began to feel the unsettling wrongness grow with every thrust.
He did the unthinkable and flipped Svana over, to mount his beloved from behind so he would no longer have to look at her. She gasped, tilted her hips at his strength, and seemed to relish the rough handling. To keep her head forward, Shepherd fisted her hair, immediately noticing the tactile wrongness of it. It was not silky black, but a coarser brown, and his growl led to no surge of wetness that bathed his cock and beautifully scented the air.
The woman he rode was not his mate.
Even with his eyes closed, even thinking of another, all he could see was Svana… altered, seemingly tainted by what she had done, by what he knew and could not forget. Once she came, tugging at her clitoris in little flicks of her fingers, Shepherd could not continue for another moment. Pulling out, he tucked away his already softening dick.
Spinning about, she gaped at him. "Dearest… everything will be as it was. Come, let me soothe you. I know what you need."
Already she was reaching for his zipper again, leaning forward from the bed to take him into her mouth.
Brushing her hand aside, he continued to right his clothing. "No, Svana." Shepherd felt an impure film on his skin, everywhere Svana's hands had crept over him unclean. "It was wrong for me to take you now. Your assessment was correct, we have surpassed physicality and I will not defile our bodies by attempting to mate with you again. Things have changed, we must both accept that."
Her voice cracked. "You cannot possibly prefer another to me." Svana stood before him, demanding he see reason. "Especially a woman who defies you; who prefers the pretty Beta downstairs."
Shepherd lowered his chin to his chest, the deep furrow between his brows sinister. "Claire is unenlightened and misunderstands my purpose. The very fact that she abhors what I've done to her people demonstrates her worth."
"I am the one who loves you," the beauty pleaded. "Do you not see that she hates you? Has run from you… The Omega could never love a marked man from the Undercroft. You disgust her."
The sharp sting of Shepherd's tattered bond concurred. "But she is still mine, carries my heir, and is under my protection." He grew, cracking bones as he postured. "You will not touch her again, Svana. Do you understand me?"
"You will come crying to me when everything you imprudently created falls apart." Svana nodded, staring forward as if she could see into the future. "And I love you so greatly that I will give you the comfort you do not deserve."
Shepherd could not tolerate another moment of such spite. After what he had heard earlier, the lie spilling from her lips, it was painfully obvious Svana had never intended to let him keep his due. She'd expected that he would cast off the Omega. Nothing he had done had satisfied her—and like the monster Claire believed him to be, he'd stood by and let Svana debase his mate… even willingly participated.
Squeezing his eyes shut, he heard Jules's words echo for what felt like the hundredth time: You allowed Svana to manipulate you into dishonoring your pregnant mate.
Shepherd had accepted his beloved's liaisons, even though the revelation had dumbfounded him. He had even adored Svana despite her foulness with Premier Callas. The same respect was not wielded in his direction, her expectations contradictory, immature.
Every word Svana had spoken when they'd faced off over Premier Callas had been carefully chosen to extradite herself of blame, to justify her own actions. Now he understood—she'd never expected him to seek sexual fulfillment with another.
His beloved had taken him for granted, made his devotion common.
There was something so very cutting in the revelation. After all, her actions had led to his response… his needs apparently considered less important than hers.
Svana had never truly been concerned about Shepherd's feelings on the matter, and now she stood before him and openly lied.
Faith shaken, Shepherd nodded sadly. What had once been the adolescent who'd climbed atop him at her first urge and mated, swearing to be his forever, was not the woman he found he could not look at.
Shepherd left in disgusted silence.
Back in his room he showered in water so hot his skin burned, found the discomfort cleansing, but still felt the taint of what he'd done—found the recoil of the bond, the violent sting, a welcome penitence for mating in a way that degraded them all. No stranger to suffering, he relished it as his due, just as he had each time he had purposefully harmed Claire for her own good.