So hard it ripped a sound from his throat he didn't know he could make. His body arched, pulsed, emptied - but not just into Natalie. Into the altar. Into the island. He felt it being absorbed, carried, echoed.
The women cried out as they felt it too - every one of them gasping, shaking, their bodies connected in waves of shared release.
When it ended, they collapsed around him, a circle of heat and pulse and love.
No one spoke.
No one needed to.
They were one.
And the island bloomed.
The air shimmered with heat and scent, thick with the afterglow of release and the deeper magic that pulsed beneath it. Jude could barely move. Not because he was weak, but because he was full - so impossibly full of everything. Their breaths. Their bodies. Their desire. The rhythm of the island now lived inside his bones. It beat in time with his heart. It hummed in his blood like a second pulse.