Chapter 42 #2
He nodded, though she couldn’t see it. His hand kept moving on her back. Slow circles. Up and down the ridge of her spine. He could feel the knots under his fingers, the places where she carried her weight. She was so small tucked against him. It didn’t match up with what he knew about her.
Her breathing started to level out. He found himself counting it again without meaning to—one, two, three, four—each exhale coming a little slower than the last. The muscles along her back started to soften under his hand.
Her fingers uncurled from his shirt. Her knees dropped a fraction on the mattress.
Sleep was pulling her under again.
He wanted to let her. Let her stay right here, human and warm against him, and prove he could keep her nightmares at bay the way he hadn’t been able to keep anything else at bay in his life.
Prove he could be what she needed, even for just one night.
The memory of the woods flickered behind his eyes—her, trembling, trusting him with her first kiss under the canopy of leaves, her asking him to stay then falling sleep just like this.
But he knew better.
“Elora.” He gave her shoulder a gentle shake. “Hey.”
She made a noise, low and confused in the back of her throat, the sound of someone surfacing from deep water.
“You still want to shift?”
She didn’t answer right away. He watched her eyelids flutter. Then she pushed herself up off his chest.
The warmth left him all at once. A cold spot bloomed where her head had been, and he felt the loss of it like someone had pulled a blanket off him in winter.
She sat up, sheets pooling at her waist, and scrubbed at her eyes with the heels of her palms. Her hair fell in a tangled curtain around her face.
She swung her legs off the bed. The mattress shifted as her weight left it. She stood in the middle of the room, shoulders hunched, and for a second, she just stood there with her arms wrapped around herself, like she was deciding.
The shift took maybe three seconds. Maybe four. It always felt longer than it was.
The beast that landed on his bed made the whole frame groan, springs protesting. She was enormous like this—a black mass of fur and feathers, wings folded tight against her flanks. She had to weigh what, three? Four hundred pounds? He’d never asked. It didn’t matter.
He braced for her to do what she always did. Curl into a ball at the foot of the bed, pulling herself into a tight coil with her back to him, the way she had every other night.
She didn’t.
She turned instead, padding the short distance back up the mattress on those massive paws, the claws retracted so they didn’t shred his sheets. The bed dipped hard under her weight, and he felt himself tilt toward her before he caught himself on the headboard. She lowered herself down beside him.
Not at his feet. Beside him.
She settled her body along the length of his, her flank pressing warm and solid against his hip, and he could feel the rumble start before he heard it—that deep, seismic purr vibrating up through the mattress and into his ribs.
Her head came down on the pillow next to his.
He caught his breath, waiting for the weight of it to land on his shoulder, bracing for the kind of impact that would leave bruises, but it didn’t.
She kept her head on her own pillow, thank the gods, because if that massive skull had dropped on his chest he was pretty sure he’d be coughing up blood for a week.
Instead, she nuzzled her muzzle into the hollow of his neck.
It was—gods, it was gentle. For something that could take a man’s face off, she was careful about it.
Her fur was soft against his jaw, warmer than he expected, and she pressed in just enough that he could feel the vibration of her purr against his throat.
The sound was low and steady, the kind of frequency that made his own pulse slow to match it whether he wanted it to or not.
Then her wing came down.
It unfurled across him like a dark curtain, heavy and warm, the feathers settling over his ribs and stomach with a weight that pinned him to the mattress. Not painfully. Just—there. Present. Like an arm thrown across him in sleep, if the arm belonged to something that could tear down a wall.
She was holding him.
Not in the way she’d held him human, with her head on his chest and his arm around her back.
This was different. This was her, in the form that kept the nightmares away, choosing to stay close anyway.
Choosing him anyway. The wing across his chest was deliberate.
He knew it was deliberate the same way he knew she’d meant to lay her head on him earlier, the same way he knew she’d meant to kiss him in the woods. Elora didn’t do things by accident.
For the first time since he found her covered in blood next to Gerard’s mangled body, something in his chest unclenched.
His fingers sank into the fur at the base of her skull, finding the spot behind her ear where the fur was softest. He scratched there and felt the rumble in her chest intensify.
This was different from holding her human. That had been fragile—her body small and trembling against his, all sharp angles and careful breathing. This was solid. Real. The beast didn’t flinch. Didn’t pull away. The beast trusted him in a way the woman was still learning to.
“Goodnight, Elora.”