Chapter 38 #3
“I’m right here,” I choke, my forehead resting briefly against hers. “You hear me? I’m right fucking here.”
Too still.
I breathe for her again.“Don’t do this, Noa. Wake up.”
Silence.
“Just breathe,” I whisper against her mouth next. “That’s all I need you to do, sweet one. Just take a breath for me.”
The pleas keep coming, spilling out of me unchecked as I work over her. The next one shreds something vital inside me.
“No, baby, please…stay with me. You have to keep breathing. Please don’t leave me, Noa!”
This string of words tastes of bile because I’ve said it before.
The truth crashes into me with nauseating clarity as I keep pressing, keep forcing air into her, refusing to stop.
The phantom sensation of the terrifying threads Noa can wield slither across my sweating skin.
With them comes the memory of what they’d forced me to see—to live through.
My greatest fear made corporal. This moment.
Me trying and failing to save her. Her dying in my arms.
Only this time, it isn’t an illusion.
It’s real.
And I fear I really am failing.
Tears I have no control over spill from my eyes and splash down onto her lifeless, colorless face as I fight for her life.
“Don’t do this, sweet girl. Don’t you fucking dare do this.”
I can’t be sure how long I keep going. Time has stopped meaning anything. When I finally pull back, panting, my hands tremble as I reach for her neck, fingers searching for a pulse that isn’t there.
Still nothing.
A thought claws its way up through the wreckage—a last, desperate gamble.
I don’t allow myself time to question it.
Brushing the tangle of dark hair aside, I bow over her, and press my lips to the place on her throat I’ve already claimed as mine. The place where her pulse should be.
“You don’t get to leave me,” I whisper against her skin.
“Not after I spent years believing I was whole, only to learn I’d been missing my heart the entire time.
” I kiss her once more, lingering there and breathing her in, before giving her the words she deserved to hear long before it came to this. “I love you, sweet Noa.”
And then I bite her.
My canines burn as they lengthen into my wolf’s. I sink them in deep enough to scar. Deep enough to bind. Deep enough to leave my mark on her soul. Deep enough to hopefully keep her here.
Her blood coats my tongue and my body rebels. Not because of the taste, but because of the truth it carries. This isn’t a claiming to be savored. It’s a reckoning. Either my life continues from this moment forward, or it ends here. With her.
I don’t have any time to process this fully before the air in the closet starts to hum, charged and alive, the hair on my neck lifting.
It’s the only warning I get before the magic explodes.
It tears through my chest in a violent, blinding rush, igniting from the place that single defiant thread has clung to life all these weeks.
The remaining tether of our mate bond, the sliver that leads me to Noa, flares bright inside my chest. And then the light wanes; it’s not as bright, but it isn’t snuffed out. That’s all I need to keep going.
I go back to compressions, back to breathing for her, back to begging. I promise her everything. I promise her I won’t live in a world without her. I swear I will follow her if she leaves, that I won’t exist where she doesn’t.
Then the thread surges again, thrumming hard behind my sternum.
My mouth is on hers when it happens, my breath filling her lungs, and suddenly she inhales sharply against me.
I flinch back, terrified of what I might not find but more terrified to hope, then I reach for her anyway.
One hand cradles her cheek, my thumb brushing over skin that’s still too cool, while my other presses to the unmarked side of her neck.
I hold my breath, the silence stretching until I’m suspended in agony.
There.
A heartbeat. Then another.
Weak and staggering at first, but very real and already growing stronger. Her chest lifts with a shallow breath, then another, and relief crashes through me so hard my vision whites out.
“Thank you,” I whisper hoarsely, over and over, to the Goddess, to the universe, to Noa for fighting. Anyone who can fucking hear me. “Thank you. Thank you…”
I pour everything I have into the thread between us, giving myself over blindly to an instinct I don’t fully understand, feeding it until it hums deep and sure in my chest. It’s stronger than it’s ever been, no longer the fragile wisp I’d grown used to harboring, the one my wolf shielded so carefully from me.
But now, as I force energy and love and whatever the hell else I have down the connection, the thread thickens.
Solidifies. It becomes something that no longer needs protection.
As she comes back, so does it.
As she lives, it does too.
And that’s the only thing that matters to me.
I fold forward, the strength and fight I used to keep going draining out of me all at once, and I rest my forehead against hers.
A broken sound catches in my throat. I don’t bother trying to choke it back and I don’t dare move—one hand staying on her cheek and my other hand on her throat, fingers resting over her pulse.
I’m terrified letting go will undo this miracle.
My eyes squeeze shut but the emotions escape anyway, bleeding a trail down my face.
I know they’re probably landing on her cheeks, her mouth, on her skin I feared I’d never feel warm again.
I stay like this, using my hearing to track the way her heartbeat grows stronger and her breathing eases. I don’t move until she starts to shift in my hold, movements that are nothing more than small flinches. Only then do I lift my head from hers enough to see her face.
The sight waiting there freezes me in place.
Noa’s eyes are open. But it’s not her staring back at me. It’s her wolf.
A gleaming mix of liquid gold and stark, arctic blue locks on to me with an intensity I’ve never felt in my mate before. Sharp. Aware. Her gaze tracks me with a focus reserved for us predators. I’ve never had the pleasure of being hunted by Noa’s wolf, but I don’t believe I’ll mind it.
I’m still caught on the simple truth that she’s breathing and awake, and I don’t react in time when she moves.
Her hands shoot out, reaching for me with supernatural speed.
Her fingers fist the back of my neck and with strength that doesn’t belong to her human body, she yanks me down toward her—brutal in her force.
The growl that rips from her chest, low and unmistakably wolf, is not something I only hear, but feel against the sensitive skin of my throat.
And that’s where she bites me.
Her teeth sink into my neck, high and a little forward, under my jaw where my beard meets skin.
The pain is immediate and unforgiving—her blunt human teeth tearing instead of piercing cleanly the way they would have if her canines had shifted.
Blood spills warm past her lips and down the side of my throat.
I don’t care about any of it. The pain. The mess.
All I can feel is pleasure, hot and consuming, because my mate is claiming me back. Marking me in a spot no shirt collar will ever be able to hide. A place everyone will see. One look will be enough for anyone to know what I am.
Hers.
Which is all I’ve ever wanted to be.
Noa—or her wolf—doesn’t retract. Her straight, white teeth remain buried in my flesh when another wave of magic starts to make the air quiver again.
It’s stronger this time, diving deep enough to make my nerves hum and bones itch.
The half-formed bond beneath my sternum surges in response. It flares bright and reaches for her.
There’s a sharp, sudden snap—a rubber band pulled taut then released.
And then…completeness.
The euphoria that follows is unlike anything I’ve ever known.
It isn’t just pleasure, it’s wholeness. It’s as though my soul is finally settling into the shape it was always meant to take—it’s been incomplete all these years but its final piece is now sliding into place.
The bond burns hot and sure behind my ribs, no longer weak or fractured, but fully formed into something so indestructible, nothing apart from death can ever break it again.
And through it, I can feel Noa. Her lifeforce.
Her emotions. Her undeniable presence grounding me.
If I turn inward and focus hard enough, I can feel the echo of her heart beating right alongside mine in my chest.
Through my haze of wonder, I’m only dimly aware of Noa gasping, of her teeth finally releasing my neck as the bond finishes knitting itself whole inside her. I don’t move, just hold her through every tremor while I bask in the simple, overwhelming truth.
She’s mine.
I’m hers.
But I barely have time to savor it before something in my head cracks.
Accompanied with something that sounds like shattering glass, pain detonates behind my eyes with such a violent force, the air in my lungs abandons me completely.
Gasping, my vision wavers and stars burst across it.
I have to battle against the instinct screaming to curl into myself, to fold against the pain, that I may find relief there.
Somewhere through it, I hear the sound that comes from her. Distressed and wrong. She jerks in my hands, her body turning into stone where I’m still clutching her cheek and the unmarked side of her throat.
In a desperate bid to clear my vision, I see them appear.
Threads.
They emerge from our skin. Blue and gold, they shimmer as they weave around us, sliding over our bare skin like living things. Serpentine-like magic, knotting and twisting with deliberate intent, I innately recognize its crafter.
Thalassa.
My pain-riddled, fracturing mind barely shapes her name when the threads begin to constrict. They squeeze, cranking tighter with every second that passes, until breathing at all begins to feel impossible.
Through our new bond, I feel Noa’s panic as if it’s my own spike in answer.
They’re slowly suffocating her too.
Right on the cusp of unconsciousness, fingers and lips buzzing from the lack of oxygen, and my vision tunneling toward black, the strands of magic snap loose. One second they’re crushing us, tightening without mercy. The next, they’re gone, leaving my body reeling from their abrupt absence.
I drag in air, harsh and ragged, lungs burning as they fight to refill.
My lips shape Noa’s name, the instinct to call out to her, the desperate need to hear her voice, rooted too deep to ignore.
Sound never comes. It catches in my throat and stays there because the pain in my head reaches a fever pitch and confuses everything in its path.
Thought collapses. Awareness thins. I can’t hold on.
The last thing I’m aware of before darkness swallows me is Noa through the bond. Terrified, but still alive.
And then there’s nothing.