Chapter 26
Chapter twenty-six
Jen
It took six months to believe the quiet.
Six months of nights where nobody came up the drive.
Of the registry on the kitchen table with more names crossed off than not.
Of women in the bunkhouse across the yard — Crull's bunkhouse, the one he never asked anybody about, that went up in nineteen days once the twins stopped arguing about the string line — learning how to sleep with the windows open, and then learning how to laugh again, which took longer.
Six months of the house settling.
Long enough, finally, for the one thing the work never left room for.
Dinner runs late. All six of my men at the long table, the wine, the bread Crull baked that morning, Madison at the far end with Gabi asleep against her shoulder. The bunkhouse fed and gone quiet.
Madison stands first.
She shifts Gabi up and looks at me, and there's something almost a smile in it. "I'm taking her up. We're not coming down." Her hand brushes my shoulder as she passes behind my chair. "You have the house."
The door closes upstairs.
And the pack closes the house around me without anybody being told to.
Daron sets the cameras and they beep once. Dean reads the rotation and shuts the laptop. Thaw walks the perimeter and throws the bolt. Harek checks the cold storage, and Crull banks the stove and pulls the iron door shut on it.
When it's done I stand up, and six sets of eyes come to me.
I don't say anything. I go down the hall to the room at the end — the one we've never used, the wide bed, the window full of trees, the moon coming through silver because I leave the lamps off.
I turn at the door.
They're at the end of the hall. All six. Watching me.
"Well," I say. "Don't all rush at once."
"We talked about it," Daron says. "There's an order."
"There's an order."
"Dean made a list."
"I did not make a list," Dean says.
"He made a list in his head. You can tell. He's got list face."
I step into the room and I leave the door open.
Thaw crosses the room and stops thinking for me.
His hand at my jaw, and he kisses me until my hands have found the front of his shirt without deciding to.
"Are you first on the list?" I say against his mouth.
"Be quiet," he says, kind about it, and takes my shirt up and off.
Then the others move in. Crull's palms settle at my hips and draw my back against the heat of his chest. Harek's mouth finds his own mark at the side of my throat.
Daron's quick at my temple. Dean at the foot of the bed with his eyes dark and his patience showing.
Fen on the corner with his hand closed warm around my ankle.
My bra goes somewhere. My jeans go somewhere else. Six sets of hands and I stop being able to track whose are where, which I'd find alarming in any other life and which here just makes me laugh — low, until Thaw's mouth closes on my nipple and turns the laugh into something else.
Crull lifts me like I weigh nothing and lays me in the middle of the bed, where the blankets are already turned back by a hand I never saw move.
"Who did the blankets?"
"Harek," three of them say at once.
"I like a neat bed," Harek says, unbothered, and puts his mouth back on my throat.
Thaw braces over me first.
He goes down my body and he doesn't hurry, because he never hurries when he's leading.
By the time he settles between my thighs I'm already soaked and he takes his time anyway — his tongue flat and broad through my folds first, then narrow and hard on my clit, and his eyes come up the line of my body to watch my face while he does it.
Two thick fingers push into me and curl.
"Thaw —"
"I've got you." He doesn't lift his mouth. The words go straight into me. The rumble starts low in his chest and I feel it through his tongue, and I break on it — hard, my back off the bed, the mark at my shoulder going bright, my thighs closing on his head.
He pins them open and doesn't let up until I'm shaking and shoving at him.
"Okay — okay —"
"One more."
"Thaw, I will not survive the list —"
"One more."
He does it again with three fingers and his mouth, dragging it out of me until I'm boneless and swearing at the ceiling.
Only then does he come up over me — mouth wet, gold eyes blown — and push into me in one long stroke.
He fucks me deep and unhurried, and I come a third time around him with my nails down his back, and only then does he let himself go, slow and complete, his hand fisted in the pillow beside my head.
Then he kisses me and moves to my side, his hand flat on my stomach like he's leaving it there on purpose.
"Three," Daron says from somewhere. "She's at three and we haven't even —"
"Daron."
"I'm keeping count."
"Do not keep count."
"Too late."
Crull comes up next and I lose whatever Daron says after that.
He rolls me onto my side and fits himself against my back, and when he pushes into me I have to breathe around it — enormous, more than I think I can take and then taking it, working me open one inch at a time until he's seated and I'm full to the back of my throat.
Daron's at my front with his hand between my legs, working my clit in tight circles while Crull moves in me. Harek lays a palm flat on Crull's shoulder and grounds us both, and the bonds answer each other so loud I can't tell whose heat is whose.
I come on Crull with Daron's fingers at the peak of it, clenched so tight around him he chokes, and he groans into my neck and doesn't stop.
And then the others draw back.
They open a space around him the way this pack has always opened a space around the one who needs it — Daron lifts his hand away and goes quiet for once — and Crull turns me in his arms until I’m facing him and brings his mouth down to the wrist where his bond sits and sets his lips on the mark.
It answers him like it's been waiting all night.
I reach and get my hand into his hair and hold him against my throat.
He doesn't brace.
Tonight my hand goes into his hair and he lets go immediately, with five men watching him do it.
"I've got you," I tell him.
"I know," Crull says.
He comes with his face in my neck and my name wrecked in his mouth, and after, he doesn't pull away, doesn't move. Nobody in this room rushes him. Nobody in this room ever will again.
"Okay?" I say, eventually.
"Yeah." Rough. A pause. "That was four for you, by my count."
"You too?"
"Daron's a bad influence."
Daron, from the dark: "Five, actually. I counted the first one twice because it was loud and went on for a loooong time."
"That's not how counting works," Dean says.
"It's how I count."
Daron doesn't wait once Crull eases back.
He rolls me onto my back with the wolf full at the surface and every bit of the evening's patience burned off him, and drives into me in one stroke, hard and fast and hot, his hand fisting in my hair and the bed taking all of it. The mark at the base of my throat flares.
He fucks me like he does everything — like it's the best idea anyone's ever had — grinning into my neck, and I'm laughing and gasping at the same time, which is its own specific thing that only Daron does to me.
Dean comes up beside us with the control finally gone out of his face, and I turn my head and find his mouth.
And it stops being two of them and becomes one motion.
Daron driving into me, Dean's hand at my breast and then sliding down between my legs, the brother-bond pulled humming-taut through the two marks at my throat — and then they trade, fast and seamless and without a word, the way only the twins can, Daron pulling out and Dean sliding hot into me in the same breath while Daron's mouth swallows the sound I make.
Then back. Then I stop being able to tell which one is in me and which one's mouth is on my nipple, and they don't care which name I'm saying.
Then Dean's under me and Daron's at my back with his hand spread on my spine, and I feel Daron's cock slick against me where Dean's already in me, and I go still, and both of them go still with me.
And they take me together — Dean deep and Daron working into me from behind an inch at a time — and it's too much and then it's not, and both of them are in me and the twin-bond goes off between my throat-marks like a live wire, and I come so hard I lose the room.
They ride it out with me between them and finish close together, because they do everything close together, Daron's teeth in my shoulder and Dean's hand splayed over my heart.
"Told you there was an order," Daron says against my mouth.
"I've lost count."
"Six," says Daron.
"Seven," says Dean.
"Seven," Daron says, delighted, like his brother just won him money.
Then it slows, because Harek moves over me and the whole room lets its breath out with him.
"Breathe," he says. "I've got time."
"You don't have to —"
"I want to take a while." Plain, the way he says everything. "Let me."
So I let him.
He pushes in deep and even and it isn't a peak to climb so much as a place to lie down. The green comes up luminous under the skin at his wrists and lights mine where he's holding me.
And the three-note purr starts in his chest — the same three he ran through a wall at me in the dark before I'd ever seen his face — and I feel them everywhere we touch. In my throat. Under my ribs. Where he's moving in me.
He builds it long. More tide than crash.
Talking low against my ear the whole time — there, like that, I have you, stay with me — until it rolls up through both of us at once and I come on a long unraveling breath, and he goes with it, and the mark at the side of my throat goes warm instead of bright.
Warm. Like his hand laid over a wound.
"That one didn't have a number," I tell him.
"No," Harek agrees, pleased. "That one was just yours."
Fen is last.
He's been at the foot the whole time with his hand on my ankle, watching the field climb, holding himself out of it. I've felt him there. Patient. Banked.
Now he comes up over me — the dark lines rising at his throat, the shimmer waking at his wrists, the canines coming partway, all of it up and all of it steered, the way only I ever get to see it come.
He doesn't make a joke.
He looks at me and says, "Jen."
"Yes."
He pushes in all the way and goes still.
The patch at my sternum sears against him.
Then he moves, and his eyes never leave mine, and the claws come out at the tips and stay off my skin even now, even with all of him risen, the way they always have.
I get my hand against the side of his face and he turns into it without slowing.
And I feel the whole field lean toward us. All of them. The pack folding its attention around the last bond like it knows this is the one that closes the circle.
Then he gets his arm under me and turns me over.
I know what he's doing before he does it.
I go up onto my forearms with my hair falling off my neck, and every mark on my body is showing — Thaw's at my shoulder, Crull's at my wrist, Harek's at the side of my throat, Daron's and Dean's at the base of it — and Fen comes down over my back and puts his mouth on the one bare place left on me.
The back of my neck.
Nobody's ever marked it.
"Fen —"
He bites.
And the field comes up, and it isn't six lines anymore.
It's one.
Every bond answering every other until I can't tell where mine ends and theirs begins, the whole of it filling the room and all seven of us at once, and I come with the field cresting straight through me — through Thaw and Crull and Harek and both twins and Fen at the very top of it — more than I can hold, more than anyone bothered to count, and he goes a beat behind me with a sound low and not human in his chest and his teeth still set in the back of my neck.
The crest holds.
Something comes up under his mouth that isn't his.
I feel it arrive and I feel all six of them feel it, and not one of them says a word, because there isn't one yet.
Then it lets me down. Slow.
The peaks fade and the marks settle and the pack breathes and I breathe, and there's the moon through the window and the sound of seven people remembering how to.
"For the record," Daron says into the quiet, wrecked and happy, "I stopped counting at —"
"Daron," the whole bed says.
Silence.
Then Thaw, mild, "Eleven."
Nobody moves.
"THERE WAS A LIST —"
"There was no list."
"You counted!"
"I paid attention," Thaw says.
Daron laughs so hard the bed shakes. So do I. So, eventually, does Crull — which is the rarest sound in this house and the one I'd put above all the rest of it.
I'm in the middle of the bed with all of them folded around me. The field is the quietest it has ever been. It stays that way a long time.
Then Thaw, near my ear: "There you are."
Crull, behind me, his arm tightening once: "Held."
Harek, from the foot: "Stay."
Daron, against my shoulder: "Mine."
Dean, his hand in my hair: "Ours."
Fen says nothing for a moment. Then, into my hair: "Home."
I close my eyes.
Nobody's standing watch. Nobody's listening for engines on the road.
For the first time since the cells, the whole pack sleeps together at once.
So do I.