11. Chapter 11
Chapter eleven
Jen
When he finally comes to find me, the cabin has gone quiet.
He closes the bedroom door behind him. The room is small and the lamp is low. He stops at the foot of the bed and looks at me like he’s starving. Like he's afraid if he reaches for me, I'll disappear.
The shift is still riding close to the surface. Dark lines climb his throat. His canines are down, his eyes nearly black. His hands aren't quite steady.
He doesn't come any closer. He won't until I ask.
I get up off the bed. I cross to him. Three steps, and the patch on my sternum goes hot. My canines drop. Slate creeps over my wrists.
I stop close enough to feel the heat coming off him. He smells like cold air and something that's only Fen. His breath catches, but he doesn't move.
"You can touch me," I say.
The tremor in his hands gets worse, then quits. He lifts one and sets it flat on my sternum, over the patch, through the thermal. His eyes fall shut. The breath goes out of him all at once.
"Jen."
His voice is rough. He hasn't used it much today.
"Yes."
"I need—" The word doesn't come.
"I know."
"Months." A breath. "Nothing." His throat works. The next one barely makes it out. "You."
I cover his hand with mine and hold it there.
"Open your eyes," I tell him.
He does. The black is full, the gold moving in it, and he's looking at me through every month of the cell and a bond that's been hauling on him I claimed him.
"I'm here. I'm not going anywhere. Tonight is yours. How ever you need me."
"Slow."
"As slow as you need."
His hand trembles once on my sternum. He brings the other up to my hip, fingers spread, light, like he doesn't trust the weight of his own hand.
I lift my arms. He understands. He strips the thermal up over my head in one motion and it drops to the floor. I'm bare to the waist and the lamp catches the patch on my sternum — dark.
He looks at it. His mouth pulls, and the years come up behind his eyes. He brings a hand near it, not touching, just close, the way you hold a palm to a fire to feel what it throws.
"There," he says.
"That's the one place no one's marked. It's been waiting for you."
His jaw works. "Both."
"Both. You go first."
He moves his hand to the back of my neck and brings me in slow. Forehead to mine first. He drags my scent in through his teeth, and the shift climbs his arms, and he holds his eyes shut and works it back down before he goes any further.
Then he kisses me.
His mouth is hot and open and there are canines in it, and how careful he is with them takes the floor out from under me. It starts slow and stops being slow, his hand fisting in my hair, my hands flat on the bare heat of his chest. He kisses me and holds me to him. I whimper.
He pulls back, breathing hard. "Jen."
"I'm here."
"Almost—"
"Stay with me."
His pupils contract. His shoulders come down a fraction. He's back.
He doesn't say it. He bends and lifts me, slow, one arm under my butt and one at my back, lays me down, and steps back to look.
Lines stark on his throat, canines out. He's holding himself on a hair trigger and I can see exactly what it's costing him — the whole of him coiled into not moving.
And still he's two feet away, holding still, asking me with his eyes.
I push my pajama pants down and off. Bare in the low light, knees apart, and he's breathing through a clenched jaw.
"Come here," I tell him.
He's between my knees before I finish, and he doesn't take. He drops to the floor and puts his face against my stomach and breathes me in, slow, his nose at my skin, grounding himself in the scent of me, his hands closing on my thighs, claws partway out, so careful they only dent the skin.
He goes still.
"I remember your taste," he says against me, and the word lands at a different pitch than anything else tonight. "The cell."
"I remember too."
"No name." His mouth moves on the words like they cost him. "Knew you."
I get a hand in his hair and hold him there.
"You did."
His hands tighten. Not the grip that means he's going under. The other kind. Want. Need. Then his mouth moves lower. He kisses the soft of my stomach. My hipbone, no teeth, just lips and breath. Lower. He pushes my thighs wide and looks up at me first.
"Yes," I say.
He puts his mouth on me.
The first stroke of his tongue is broad and flat and slow and my hips come off the bed.
He growls into me and the sound rides up through my spine, and he does it again, long, deliberate, sure.
The open line runs hot between us, my body telling his exactly where and how hard, and he takes it and gives it back better.
I'm wet and getting wetter and his tongue is working me in slow circles, then up, and the second I jerk he's there, staying on it. I pull his hair and he growls and presses in harder and flattens his tongue and sucks my clit.
My back bows off the bed. "Fen."
His eyes flick up. Black, the red and gold wild in it.
"Don't stop."
He stays. Every sound I make goes down the line into him and comes back as the next thing his mouth does — what makes me jerk, what makes me clench, what tears his name out of me ragged.
He brings up his hand and I ride two fingers.
The stretch making me clench. There's no technique to brace against, only him reading the truth of my body and answering it.
When I break it's long and rolling, my thighs clamped around his head, my hand fisted in his hair, his name coming apart in my mouth.
He keeps his mouth on me through the aftershocks, soft now, and presses one kiss to the inside of my thigh that's close to reverent.
Then he stops. He rips his clothes off as he gets to his feet. Puts his fingers in his mouth and licks every bit of me off. Growling the entire time.
And the shift comes up all the way.
The dark lines flood down his throat and across his shoulders. His canines look long and sharp. His cock is hard and dark and wet at the tip and his whole body is strung tight with it. He steps back, crosses to the wall, plants both hands flat on the logs and drops his head.
"Jen." Wrecked.
"I'm here. Breathe."
"I'm—"
"I know. Breathe."
His shoulders heave. The shift climbs higher, crests, and then comes down, because he decides it will. He breathes. The lines pull back. The gold comes back into the black by degrees.
He turns around.
"Almost came at you."
"You didn't. Come back."
He comes. Between my knees again, unsteady still, the shift only half down, but him, behind his own eyes, looking at me.
He gets the words out. "In you."
"Yes."
"In the cell—" It breaks off. He can't carry it.
I take it off him. "Bite me at the end."
He nods, ragged with relief that I said it for him. "At the end."
He climbs onto the bed and lays me back into the pillows and settles his hips between my thighs, and for a second he only holds there, forehead to mine, the hardened length of him against me, both of us breathing the bond like it's air.
"Jen."
"Now."
He pushes in.
Slow, because he's making it slow, his jaw locked, his arms shaking on either side of my head, and my body opens around him because the line is wide and I've been ready since he said my name in the doorway.
He's thick, and the stretch pulls a sound out of me, and he takes the sound.
He seats himself all the way and stops. Buried.
Not moving. His face down in my neck, breathing like he ran here.
"Fen, I've got you."
He gathers himself against me, his forehead at my temple, and holds there one beat longer.
Then he moves.
Slow doesn't survive. He builds — out almost to the tip and back deep, again, the drag of him hitting the place that winds me tight. The bed is small and there's nowhere to go and the room fills with the sound of him driving into me, the wet slide, the low broken growl in his chest on every stroke.
"Harder," I tell him.
He gives it to me. His hands lock on my hips and he fucks into me hard enough to put the headboard against the wall, and I'm climbing fast, my heels dug into the backs of his thighs, my nails down his ribs as I clench. My whole body tight and I let loose screaming his name.
That breaks him.
The shift roars all the way up. Lines, claws pressed into my hips without breaking skin, the black flooding his eyes, his lip peeling off his teeth. His hips stutter and lock, because he's right at the edge of coming and right at the edge of going under, and he's caught between them.
"Fen."
His eyes find mine.
"Stay with me. I'm yours. Stay."
He stays.
The shift hangs at full and goes no higher. He's looking at me through the black and my name in his mouth is the leash and he lets it hold him. Then he moves again, no tremor left in it, just power, his hands clamped on my hips and his cock driving deep, and I'm cresting, again.
"I'm going to—"
"Yes."
He bites.
Right where no one else ever has, his canines going through skin and into the one place on me that was still waiting. Blood, sharp and instant. He's biting me and pouring into me in the same beat, his cock pulsing deep, his groan going into my chest through his teeth.
He drags his teeth out slow. Licks me blood. Under it the patch is setting darker and deeper, taking the shape his teeth just left. A mark that won't fade. His.
His side of the line is sealed. Mine is still open, still pulling, and now it's the only thing in the world that pulls.
I get a fistful of his hair and pull his head up off my chest. He comes up loose, wrung out, still riding the aftershocks.
I push at his shoulder. He goes with it — rolls onto his back without a second of resistance, lets me put him under me, because the bond is screaming at both of us that I'm not done.
I brace over him, my mouth finding the center of his chest, the same place his teeth found on me.
His eyes go black again, the shift rising just from my weight on him and the teeth that close — and he does not throw me, does not buck, does not take.
He bares it to me. He drops his hands flat to the bed and gives me his chest and holds himself open for the one thing he was built to never let anything do — put teeth in him.
"Mine," I tell him.
I bite.
My canines drive into his sternum and his blood floods my tongue and his whole body locks under me, a sound tearing out of him that isn't pain.
And the bond snaps.
Not slow. Not a swell. It closes like a circuit, the sixth and last thread slamming home, and all six light at once inside me — Thaw, Crull, Harek, Dean, Daron, Fen — every line I carry going live in the same instant, and it is too much, it is everything, and for one beat there is no edge where I stop.
The horns come up at my hairline, all the way.
The slate floods my arms past the elbow.
My vision whites at the edges and I am in all six of them and they are in me, and I make a sound against his chest I have never made before.
Then it settles back into one body. Mine.
I let go. I lick the blood the way he licked mine, and he shudders all the way down, and the shift drains out of his skin at last as the seal takes him too.
I ease down onto his chest. He wraps his arms all the way around me and holds, still inside me, both of us bleeding and spent and sealed.
He doesn't move for a long time.
His face turns into my hair and his arms lock across my back and he starts to shake, and the shaking turns into something quieter. He's crying. Not loud. Not hard. Breath moving against the side of my head, his chest hitching under my cheek.
I don't say anything. I bring a hand up and cradle his head to me.
He cries for a long time. I hold him through all of it.
He stops, eventually. His breath evens out and I feel him come the rest of the way back. I lift my head up, and he tips his face up out of my hair to find me. His eyes are red-rimmed, there's blood at the corner of his mouth.
He looks up at me. And when he speaks the words come — easier, the seal handing his voice back a piece at a time.
"I chose," he says. "Tonight."
"I chose you too. Always."
His breath steadies. The line between us sits quiet and full.
"Always," he says. "With you. I'm still me."
The words go through me.
I hold his face. I let him see I believe him.
He lifts up under me and kisses me, slow, no canines, no shift, just the man, and he tastes like my blood and his and salt, and there's more of him here than there's been in months.
He brushes a piece of hair off my face.
"Stay," he says.
"I will."
He tightens his arms around me and pulls the blanket up over us both. The lamp is low. The mark on my sternum is the deep, the last one I'll ever take. His sits on his chest to match it.
"Sleep," he says.
"You first."
"I can't yet."
"Then I won't either."
"Jen."
"What?"
"You were the first word I had. After everything. You."
I find his hand and lace my fingers into his.