Chapter 23 #2
"If I go in tonight with the thread not sealed," he says.
Flat. "And something happens to you — you get hurt, you get taken, you get pulled across a building from me — I have a thread to you and that is all.
I want to feel you. I want the line closed before we go.
I want to know where you are tonight. I want you with me. " Patting his chest. “Here.”
I stare into his ice blue eyes.
It is the most real thing he has ever said to me. The dry banter is gone. He is telling me he wants to be sealed to me before I walk into a building where something could happen to me.
"You want to be bonded to me before the raid."
"I want you to seal it when you want to. I want you to know I am asking. I do not want to walk into a building with you tonight and for you to not be able to call me."
I cross the barn.
I stop a foot from him. He does not move. The forming thread is so taut I can see him feeling it — the small tic at the corner of his jaw, the way his pupils have blown wide in the cold barn light.
"Take your hands out of your pockets," I say.
I take his wrist. His pulse is loud in it. I press my thumb against the inside, over the place a brand would go, and I push warmth down the thread and the thread takes it.
Daron's breath goes out of him in one long shudder.
His other hand comes up — slow — and the back of his fingers brush along the side of my jaw.
His ice-blue eyes are wet at the rims and he does not look away.
He has been a man with his hands on a rifle for two years and his hands are doing something else now, and I can see in his face how badly he wants to be allowed it.
He tilts his head.
Slow. Deliberate. The wolf in him offering his throat to me.
I understand what he is asking.
"Yes," I say.
I rise up on my toes. His hand moves to the back of my neck — supporting me, not directing me — and his breath catches when I put my mouth against the side of his throat where the pulse beats hardest under the skin.
He smells like forest and something underneath that is just him. The pulse hammers against my lips. I open my mouth.
I bite.
Clean, sharp, my teeth breaking the skin, marking him. His pulse jumps once against my tongue. Iron and salt and the heat of him.
He groans.
Low. From his chest. The sound of a man whose body has been holding something for months and is finally being allowed to let it go.
His hand at the back of my neck tightens.
The hand that was at my jaw drops to my hip and pulls me into him, and I feel every inch of his body against mine for the first time — the lean weight, the heat, the wolf running close to the surface under his skin.
My body is burning for his.
I have wanted him since the corridor, when his eyes met mine and my body said mine. The cabin porch when I watched him shift — the lean man becoming a wolf, ice-blue eyes still ice-blue. I have been telling myself it could wait until we were safe and there were no Syndicate hunting us.
I want him now.
A deep low pull in my core. The hard line of him against me, my body rocking into him before I have decided. His arms tighten around me. My pulse spikes. The patch on my chest goes hot.
I want him here. I want him in this barn on the concrete with the smell of motor oil and old cedar around us. I want him before we get in the trucks and before we drive south and before we walk into a Syndicate building with rifles up.
I cannot have him here. Not tonight.
I lift my mouth from his throat.
"Daron. Promise me. Soon."
His ice-blue eyes are still wet. He does not look away.
"Soon," he says. "I promise you. As soon as I can have you."
The bond seals.
I feel it the same beat the answer lands — the thread closing all the way, the wolf in him rising and meeting me, the pack-recognition coming up in him as he accepts the mark.
My bite, in the curve of his throat.
Daron's breath catches.
Not from the bite. From what he is reading now through the bond.
"I feel you," he says. Low. "I feel where you are. I feel your pulse."
"Yes."
"If you get hurt in there tonight."
"You will know."
"I will come."
"I know you will."
He brushes his thumb across my lower lip where his blood is.
He does it carefully. Reverently. Then he steps back enough to look at me — fully look at me, with the bond closed between us — and what is in his face is the kind of vulnerable readiness a man gets only once in his life when the thing he has been wanting finally happened.
"Mine," he says again. Quiet.
"Yours."
His hand at my hip tightens once. Then releases.
Behind us, the barn door is open. Dean is in it.
I do not know how long he has been there. The almost-smile is on his mouth. His steel-gray eyes are on Daron's throat — at the bite-mark, at the blood, at his brother's face. He is reading the bond on his brother. He is reading what we just did.
Then he shifts to me.
The almost-smile goes away.
"Jen."
"Yes."
"Me too."
The forming thread to him pulls tight.
He has not moved from the doorway.
He has not moved because he is not Daron. He is not going to come at me. He is going to wait until I cross the barn to him, because that is who he is, and the waiting is the thing he wants me to see.
I see it.
"You do not have to follow him," I say.
"Yeah. I do. I want you too – no, I need you."
His voice is steady. Level. Like he is reading a tactical brief. But his pupils have blown wide in the cold barn light, and his hands at his sides are clenched.
I look at Daron. The thread between us is humming, sealed, mine. I squeeze his hand once. He releases mine.
I cross the barn.
Dean does not move.
I stop a foot from him. The forming thread is so taut I can feel his pulse in my own wrist.
"Dean."
"Yes."
"Touch me."
His hand comes up.
Slow. Controlled. He is in no hurry now that I have said it. He puts his palm flat against the side of my jaw — the same place Daron's hand was a minute ago, and the bond carries the doubling of it — and his thumb traces the line of my lower lip where Daron's blood is.
He does not wipe it away. He just touches it. Once. The pad of his thumb against the smear of his brother's blood on my mouth.
"Okay?" he says. Quiet.
"Yes."
I take his other wrist. I press my thumb against the inside of his wrist. I push warmth down the line.
Dean's breath catches once. Quiet. Controlled. But I feel it in the bond — the way his body is responding to me, the way he has been holding himself in check for weeks.
I want to bite him. The thought lands in my body. I want to put my teeth in his throat the way I put them in Daron's. I want both wolf twins marked. I want him.
Dean reads it through the forming thread. He tilts his head.
Slow. The wolf in him offering his throat, the choice fully made.
"Yes," he says. Before I have asked.
I rise up on my toes. His hand at my jaw guides me — gentle, sure — and I put my mouth against the side of his throat where his pulse is. The vein at his throat is a long clean line under the skin.
I bite.
His pulse jumps once against my tongue. His hand at my jaw tightens once and stays. Just the stillness of a man who has waited and is now allowed.
The bond seals.
I lift my mouth. My teeth marking the side of his throat. The matching mate-mark. The wolves are both marked now. Both of them mine.
Dean does not say my name, but I feel his pride with my mark.
The bond carries everything — what he feels, what he wants, what he is choosing not to take in this barn with the door open and a raid forty minutes out.
He breathes in. Slow. Through his teeth, the way a man breathes when he is forcing his own body to come down from something. His hand at my jaw has not moved, he brushes my cheek. Then his hand drops.
He kisses my forehead. I feel the weight of what he is not saying. I feel his pulse spiking now. He is not as controlled as his face says he is. His body has just told me the truth.
He stays there, breathing deeply, scenting me. Then he speaks. Low. Against my ear. Quiet.
"I have wanted you since the escape. I have watched you, guarded you, and hoped you could be mine."
He steps back. The control is back on his face. But his hand finds my hand for one beat — quick, sure — and then drops.
"Trucks," he says. To Daron. To himself.
He turns and walks out of the barn.
Daron is at my side again before Dean is through the door. His shoulder against mine. His hand at the small of my back. The two wolves' bonds humming together in my chest like the same note played twice.
"He's been holding that for a while," Daron says. Quiet. To me. To no one.
"Yes."
I walk back across the gravel to the cabin with my new bonds reorganizing in my chest with the addition of two more lines that did not exist as solid an hour ago. The five sealed threads. The not-yet-thread to Fen. The patch under my chest registering each new bond and mapping them.
The pack is going into a Syndicate building tonight as a full pack. That was the math the Syndicate wanted to keep us from. They did not get to.
Fen has not moved from the floor. His head is leaned against my leg. His eyes are on Thaw.
We hauled Reyes up to the kitchen again.
"Doctor," I say.
"Yes."
"You are going to tell us everything about Site Theresa. Every door. Every camera. Every shift rotation. Every face on staff."
"I will."
"And then you are going to tell us how to find the next one. And the next one. We are not stopping at Theresa."
His eyes are very wide.
"I will," he says.
"Good."
Dean writes everything in his notebook. Tonight we are going to put a hole in their system.
I do not say it out loud. I do not need to.