Chapter 17 #2
Emmy moved quickly, and moments later, the wolf was practically inhaling the food, but only after Zander gave the okay. Their Spence was submissive and obedient in every form.
And Emmy was pleased. Their boy had needed what they’d given him, but it was time for the pain to end, and now it had. The change had healed everything, and now the wolf was eating, and would sleep peacefully through the night, she was certain.
She watched the wolf consume every scrap, licking blood from the marble floor, then moving a few feet away to lick his paws and clean his face.
When he was finished, they led him back to bed, pointed for him to jump in, and Zander told him, “Good boy. Now sleep, and wake in whatever form you choose, but not until after the sun rises and has reached its peak.”
The wolf’s eyes closed immediately, and within seconds, his breathing deepened into true sleep.
“He’ll probably be disappointed when he wakes pain-free,” Emmy noted.
“Yes, he’ll feel cheated,” Zander lay down behind her, his cool body pressed against her back, one arm draping over both her and the wolf.
“We’ll tell him it wasn’t his choice to make.
We decide when he heals and when he doesn’t — and then we’ll fuck his ass sore all over again, me first, while he eats you, and then you can mount the ogre dildo in a harness and go to town on him while I fuck his throat. ”
Emmy felt herself smiling despite her exhaustion. “He’ll accept it even without the ogre dildo, but that will make it better.”
“Yes, on both counts.” Zander’s lips brushed her temple.
The promise of it sent warmth through Emmy’s body, but she was too tired to do more than imagine it. She was pretty exhausted from the scene, too, and it didn’t take long for sleep to take her under, curled around the wolf with Zander’s cool presence at her back.
She knew Zander would leave once she fell asleep, but that was fine. He had an empire to run and meetings to attend, but he stayed with her while she fell asleep, just the same.
Emmy was checking on the pregnant does when she caught the scent of old books, parchment, ink, and underneath it all, the cool stillness of a vampire who’d spent centuries in libraries.
“Chase.” She didn’t turn, just smiled. “I thought you were in Boston?”
“Not yet. The conference on medieval manuscript preservation doesn’t start until tomorrow. I fly out in a few hours.” His footsteps were nearly silent on the stable floor. “Heard you were out here, and I wanted to see your soon-to-be-famous rabbits.”
She glanced over her shoulder, and he looked the same as always when dressed — wire-rimmed glasses, charcoal sweater over dark jeans, hair a little too long and falling into his eyes. Academic vampire to his core.
“Want to keep me company while I check vitals?” She gestured to the hutches. “I’ve got about twenty minutes of work left.”
“Of course.” Chase settled onto a hay bale, long legs stretched out, completely at ease despite the un-library-like setting. “How’s the research progressing?”
“Gen1 rabbits are thriving, it’s just a matter of waiting until they hit sexual maturity, so I can prove they’re viable. Test results show they are, but…”
“The proof is in the pudding. Yes.”
They fell into easy conversation — the kind they’d always had, even back when they’d been fucking between intellectual debates.
Chase asked about her CRISPR methodology, she asked about his latest find in a monastery’s archives.
Two academics talking shop, comfortable in the shared language of research and discovery.
Emmy moved to the next hutch, Chase still talking about a twelfth-century text he’d discovered with annotations that might rewrite the timeline of a particular philosophical movement.
“I worried we might lose this,” Emmy told him when he finished his story. “I mean, without the sex.”
He smiled and gave a tiny shake of his head. “I value our friendship, and you are radiantly happy with your triangle. All is as it should be.”
She checked the last doe’s vitals, made final notes, then sat beside him on the hay bale. The stable was quiet except for soft animal sounds, the rustle of straw.
“Can I ask you something?” Emmy said after a moment.
“Always.”
“The blood bond. Zander has never mentioned it. Would never push—” She stopped, started again. “But the two of them have it, and I feel like I’m crippling us by not bringing it up. The full bond, not just telepathy, but I’m…” She trailed off.
“Afraid,” Chase finished quietly.
“Yeah.”
He was quiet for a long moment, then: “Do you know Kierkegaard?”
“Danish philosopher. Existentialism. That’s about the limit of my knowledge.”
“He wrote, ‘ To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. To not dare is to lose oneself .’” Chase’s voice was soft, thoughtful. “I’ve always found that captures something essential about fear.”
Emmy turned the words over in her mind.
“He also said,” Chase continued, “that anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. The vertigo that comes from standing at the edge of possibility, knowing you could choose anything, including the choice that terrifies you.”
“So I’m dizzy because I’m free to choose,” Emmy said slowly. “And the fear is just … vertigo. From looking down at all the possibilities.”
“Including the possibility of forever with two men who love you.” Chase adjusted his glasses. “But here’s what Kierkegaard understood: the fear isn’t the problem. The fear is healthy. It means you understand the magnitude of what you’re choosing.”
“So what’s the unhealthy part?”
“Letting the fear make the choice for you.” He met her gaze, dark eyes serious behind the glasses.
“There’s a difference between fear that protects you — don’t touch the hot stove, don’t trust the vampire who wants to own you — and fear that imprisons you.
One keeps you alive. The other keeps you from living. ”
Emmy sat with that a few seconds. “Which kind is this?” she asked.
“Only you can answer that.” Chase stood, brushed hay from his jeans.
“But I’ll tell you what I see: a woman who’s spent her whole life running from anything that might pin her down, who’s finally found something — someone, two someones — worth staying for.
The fear you’re feeling? You’ll have to decide whether it’s danger, or merely unfamiliar territory. ”
“How do I know the difference?”
“Ask yourself: if you don’t do this, will you regret it?” He paused at the stable door. “And then ask: if you do this and it goes wrong somehow, will you regret having tried?”
Emmy thought about living without the bond. Thought about centuries of being close-but-not-quite-complete with Zander and Spence. Thought about always wondering what it would have felt like to take that final step.
And then Chase was gone, leaving Emmy alone with the rabbits and the weight of a decision that suddenly felt less like vertigo and more like standing at the edge of something beautiful, ready to jump.
Because she’d regret not trying. Not taking the leap.