Chapter 17 #2
I release her throat slowly. My tongue passes over the mark without my permission, sealing it. She is shaking under me. Her chest is heaving. Her hand has gone slack in my hair.
I lift my head.
She is looking up at me with her pupils blown, her mouth swollen, her hair spread across the pillow.
Her hand drifts up and presses against my jaw, half there, half not.
She does not say anything about the mark.
I do not think she has registered what has happened.
Her body is still pulsing around me. Her heart is hammering against my chest.
I should be horrified.
And I am. Somewhere underneath this. Somewhere underneath the bond singing and her body still gripping mine and the heat of her body against mine, I am horrified at what I have just done.
The wolf is not horrified. The wolf is rumbling in satisfaction.
I lower my mouth down to Sienna’s. I kiss her. She kisses me back like she is still trying to win something, her teeth catching at my lower lip.
I am still hard inside her. She feels it. Her gaze sharpens. Her hand fists in my hair again.
I press my forehead to hers. I cannot make the words come out smoothly. My voice is still rough and low. “We’re not done.”
Her breath hitches.
I kiss her again. Slowly this time. I let my mouth open against hers, let my tongue slide against hers, let the kiss go deep and dark and hungry.
My hand cups her jaw. My thumb traces the corner of her mouth.
The kiss is still possessive, but the edge has softened, and she makes a small sound into it that is not one of anger.
It’s different now. Closer to surrender.
I do not stop kissing her as I start to move inside her again.
I am standing in a field.
The light is honeyed, late afternoon, and the grass is high and moving in a slow wind.
A child is laughing somewhere close by. I turn my head, and the sound resolves into two kids, a boy and a girl, both dark-haired, chasing each other through the grass with the absolute focus children give to nothing important.
The boy is older. The girl shrieks when he catches her.
A hand slips into mine.
Sienna.
She is glowing. There is no other word for it. Her hair is loose around her shoulders, her face is warm from the sun, and when she smiles up at me, I feel it behind my ribs. Her other hand rests on the curve of her belly. She is heavy with our third.
“They are exhausting,” she murmurs, and there is so much love in her voice, it almost knocks me down. “Tell me again why we wanted three.”
“Because you said so.” I lift her hand and press my mouth to her knuckles. “I always do what you say.”
She laughs. She tips her face up as I lean over to kiss her, and the world is the kind of warm that does not exist beyond this field.
“Beautiful family, isn’t it?”
A woman has stepped up beside me.
I did not see her arrive. She is just there, on my other side, looking out at the children. She is tall, dark-haired, her face half in shadow.
“It is.” My voice comes out sounding odd, slow. “It really is.”
“This was once my dream.” Her tone is soft. “It was my dream, and it was snatched from me.”
I blink.
A strangeness filters in around the edges of the warmth. I look more closely at the woman beside me, but I cannot quite make out her face. The light has changed. The honey has gone out of it. Above us, the sky is pulling down toward gray.
“What did you say?” I ask her.
She turns her head to look at me. Her smile is gentle.
“It was snatched from me,” she repeats.
The sky goes black.
The wind comes up forcefully. I turn toward the children, their names rising in my throat, but they are gone. There is grass blowing where they were standing, and then there is dust where the grass was. The dust lifts and unspools in the wind, and a piece of me tears loose and goes with it.
“No!” The word rips out of me. “No, no—”
I turn to Sienna. Her hand is flat on her stomach, which is empty. Her face is wet.
“Lucas,” she is whispering. “Lucas, what’s happening to me?”
I reach for her, and the marks bloom.
They start at her wrists, black and creeping, and they climb.
Up her forearms. Into the crook of her elbow.
Across her collarbone. She makes a small sound that is the beginning of a scream, and then her knees give out.
I catch her, I catch her, and the marks keep climbing, and her mouth opens, and the sound that comes out of her is—
I jerk awake.
I realize I am sitting straight up in the bed. My heart hammers against my ribs. My breath saws in my throat. The sheets are damp where I have been lying. The dark of the room presses in on me, and for one disoriented second, I do not know where I am.
Then, I feel her.
She is curled on her side, her face turned toward me on the pillow, her dark hair spread across the white linen. Her arm is folded under her head. Her breathing is slow. I feel the hum of the bond, low and steady.
A dream.
I drag my hand down my face. My palm comes away damp. I close my eyes and breathe through my teeth and tell myself it was only a dream. The bond is alive between us. She is sleeping next to me, on her back now. There is nothing in this room but the two of us.
I open my eyes and look at her.
She is so beautiful in this light. The line of her shoulder. The slope of her back where the sheet has slipped down. The mark on the side of her neck, dark and clean against her skin, exactly where my mouth went.
The horror I held off all night comes back through my entire body in a slow, cold wave.
I marked her. I broke the most important promise I ever made to myself.
I broke the promise my father spent twenty years making me memorize.
Sienna is going to wake up bonded to me for life, and I do not know how to tell her what that is going to do to her.
A dream, I say to myself again. The bond is whole. She is breathing.
She moves in her sleep. Lets out a small, contented sound and rolls toward me again. Her arm slides across the sheet. Her hair falls back from her shoulder. The pillow shifts under her cheek.
My eyes drop to the space below her neck.
There is a mark there.
Not the mating mark. The mating mark is on the other side, raised and warm and right where I put it.
This mark is on her collarbone. It is small. The size of a fingertip. Black. Faint.
Crawling.
All the blood in my body goes cold.
I cannot move. I cannot make my hand reach toward her. I am sitting up in the bed with her sleeping beside me, the bond singing softly between us, and I am staring at a single black tendril on her skin. Behind my ribs, my wolf is making a sound I have never heard him make before.
The dream is no longer a dream.
I cannot wake Sienna because I cannot bear to be the one who shows her what I have done.
I sit there in the dark, my mating mark on her throat and the curse on her collarbone, and I cannot breathe.