Chapter 17
Briar
I wake up warm. Not the heat, not the furnace that’s been running me for days. Just warm. Body warmth. The kind that comes from skin against skin, from someone else’s weight tucked around you.
My sleep-stupid brain registers the details before my conscious mind catches up: his chest against my back, his arm around my waist, his hand resting on my stomach.
His breathing, slow and deep against my hair.
And his thumb… his thumb is moving. A small, idle stroke across the skin below my navel.
Back and forth. Not sexual. Not deliberate.
The absent touch of a man who’s half asleep and touching what’s his.
My wolf sighs, which is new. Because the last three times we woke through the night, she pounced on him.
I should move. I should extract myself, put distance between us, reassert the terms of this arrangement: heat, biology, nothing more. I should do what I did in the clearing: run.
I don’t move.
His thumb keeps its rhythm. Back and forth. The calluses on his hand are rough against my skin, and the roughness feels good. And I’m not going to think about why it feels good or what it means that I’m lying still and letting it happen instead of driving my elbow into his ribs.
His hand drifts up. Slow. Still half-asleep, or pretending to be.
I can’t tell, and the not-knowing is part of what keeps me still.
His palm skims my ribs. The underswell of my breast. His fingers trace the curve, unhurried.
When his thumb brushes my nipple, I feel the touch in the pit of my stomach and lower, a slow curl of want that’s nothing like the heat’s brutal demand. This is quieter. Warmer.
I should stop this.
His mouth finds the back of my neck. Not the bite mark — the other side. Soft skin below my ear where no one’s ever put their mouth because I never allow this kind of intimacy. His lips are warm, and his stubble scrapes. The combination sends a shiver down my spine that I can’t hide.
“You’re awake,” I say.
“Mmm.” Not a word. A vibration against my neck.
“This isn’t—”
“Shh.”
He rolls me toward him. Slow, easy, his arm guiding me onto my back.
He’s propped on one elbow, looking down at me, and the expression on his face stops whatever I was about to say.
No smirk. No challenge. No alpha display.
He’s looking at me the way a man looks at something he can’t believe he’s touching.
The openness of it makes my chest tight.
Don’t. Don’t look at me like that. Don’t be a person. Don’t make this harder than it already is.
He kisses me.
It’s wrong. All wrong. Not the violent collision of yesterday, not the angry crash of two wolves tearing at each other.
This is… his mouth on mine, slow, his hand cradling the side of my face.
He’s kissing me like he’s asking a question.
Like the answer matters. Like I’m something worth being careful with.
No one has ever accused Briar of being something worth being careful with.
I should bite him. Shove him off. Snarl something vicious that puts us back on familiar ground where I hate him, and he wants me, and neither of us pretends it’s anything else.
I kiss him back.
My hand comes up to the back of his neck without permission, and I pull him closer.
The kiss deepens into something slower. His tongue against mine, tasting, not taking.
His hand slides from my face down my throat, over the bite mark — gentle there, careful, and the care makes my eyes sting — down between my breasts, over my stomach.
He settles between my thighs. His weight, familiar now, but different.
He’s not grinding against me, not driving.
Just resting there, the hard length of him against my heat.
Every inch of his skin is against every inch of mine, and he’s looking down at me with molten brown eyes, and the wolf is barely there. It’s just the man.
He pushes in. Slow. So slow I feel every inch of the stretch, and this time I don’t brace against it, don’t grit my teeth. My body takes him in with an ease that says I know you now.
He moves. Long and deep and unhurried. Each stroke reaches something the rough fucking didn’t touch.
My hands find his shoulders. His arms. The scars I gave him, silver lines on his forearms, and I trace one with my fingertip while he moves inside me.
The gesture is so far from the knife that made it that I almost can’t connect the two.
“Briar.” My name. Low. Not a growl. Something softer that I don’t want to hear and can’t stop hearing.
“Don’t,” I whisper. “Don’t say my name like that.”
“Like what?”
Like it means something. Like I mean something.
I pull his mouth back down to mine instead of answering.
The kiss swallows whatever he was going to say, and we move together.
It’s slow and deep, and the pleasure builds in long rolling waves instead of the sharp spikes of last night.
When I come, it’s quiet. A shudder that moves through my whole body, my face turned into his neck, my arms locked around him.
The sound I make is small and broken and nothing I’d ever let another person hear.
He follows. Not the roaring, wolf-driven release of last night — a groan pressed into my hair, his hips stuttering, his arms tight around me. There’s no knot this time, just warm pulsing as he comes inside me. My wolf settles with a contentment that would have horrified me yesterday.
We lie there. Connected. His weight on me, his face in my hair. My hands on his back, my fingers tracing the ridges of his spine without deciding to. What I feel coming from him isn’t the claiming drive or the shock. It’s something quieter. A warmth that matches the warmth of his body.
He slips free. Rolls to his side, pulling me with him, tucking me against his chest like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Like we do this. Like we’re people who hold each other after and breathe together and let the silence be warm.
We’re not those people. I’m not that person.
But I stay where I am.
“Tell me something,” he says. His voice is roughened. Post-sex, post-sleep, stripped of the alpha register.
“Like what?”
“Anything. Something real.”
I should give him nothing. Silence is my strongest weapon, and he’s asking me to put it down.
“My parents were killed when I was eleven,” I say.
I don’t know why I say it. The words come out in my flat voice, the one I use for things that live too close to the bone for inflection. “Territorial dispute. A pack moved on our land, and my father tried to negotiate, but they put him down. My mother fought. She lasted longer than he did.”
His arm tightens around me. Not a response. A reflex. The body’s answer when words don’t fit.
“Merric’s father took me in. Trained me. I grew up Frostbourne.”
“How old were you when you started fighting?”
“Twelve.”
“That’s young.”
“I was small. Small wolves learn fast, or they don’t learn at all.”
He’s quiet for a moment. His hand is on my back, his thumb doing that idle stroke again, and the rhythm of it is dangerously soothing.
“It’s strange,” he says eventually. “You don’t smell of magic. I don’t feel it in you either, even after we…” He stops.
I frown. “Why would I smell of magic?”
“Because you’re magic-blood?”
I lift my head from his chest and look up at him. “I’m not magic-blood, Garrett.”
His eyes meet mine, confusion there. “You’re not?”
“No. Why would you think that?”
“Because…” He pauses. “Because you came for revenge. For what we did to them. Why would you do that if you weren’t one of them?”
“One of them?” I shake my head. “There’s no ‘them and us’, Garrett. They’re wolves, like all the rest of us, just with extra powers. Some might say magic-bloods are superior.”
He scoffs. I narrow my eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “That was out of line.”
“Damn right, it was,” I mutter, feeling the languor evaporating. Something dawns on me. “Wait. Your wolf claimed me… and you let him. Even though you thought I was magic-blood? When you hate them?”
“I don’t hate them, Briar. It’s just…” He exhales. “It’s how it’s always been. They’re dangerous.”
I snort. “Dangerous? I’ve seen what was done to those wolves. I don’t think they’re the dangerous ones.”
“You’re right,” he says, surprising me. He waits a beat, then goes on, “My father built the corridor. Not me. Him.”
I don’t respond. Let the silence work.
“After my sister died, he sat in his chair, and he stopped. Just… stopped. Like something essential had been disconnected. He’d been alpha for twenty years, and overnight, he couldn’t make a decision about feed orders.
” His chest moves against mine — a breath deeper than the others.
“He made the corridor. The contacts. He set it up. I was helping by the time I was twenty-one because he couldn’t, and I took it over formally by taking over the pack when he wouldn’t even come out of the study anymore. ”
“And you just ran it.”
Like that should make it better?
“I took it the way you take a dying man’s last request. He wasn’t dying. But he was gone. And the one piece of him he had left was this thing he’d built to make sure no other child on this ranch died the way Maren did.”
“That’s not an excuse.”
“No.”
“Children went into those trucks, Garrett.”
“I know.” His voice has changed. Not defensive.
Not the alpha trying to justify anything.
Just a man with his arms around a woman, saying the words into the top of her head.
“I know what went into the trucks. I didn’t know what happened at the other end, and I didn’t try to find out.
I have to carry that. Always. Because forgetting would mean I really am the kind of monster who’d do that. ”
I press my face against his chest.
I don’t want to hear this. I don’t want to hear him sound like a person with a wound that makes sense, because then he becomes someone I have to reckon with instead of someone I can hate from a distance. And the distance is gone.
“My wolf chose you,” I say. I don’t know why I’m telling him this. “The first time I watched you ride to the stone. My wolf chose you then, and I’ve been fighting her ever since.”
“I know the feeling.”
“No. You don’t understand what it means for my wolf to choose someone. I’ve been a wolf more than I’ve been a human my entire life. I trust her more than I trust anything. And she chose the man who did what you did, and I can’t — I can’t reconcile that. I can’t make it fit.”
His thumb stops moving. His hand flattens against my back.
“Maybe it doesn’t have to fit yet,” he says.
“That’s a coward’s answer.”
“Probably.”
I almost laugh. Almost. The sound catches in my throat and dies, but it was there, and the fact that Garrett Forrester almost made me laugh while I’m lying naked in his arms in the forest is so absurd that I file it under Things I’ll Pretend Never Happened.
The heat is dropping.
I feel the fever break. The tide pulling back, leaving me on the shore with the full clarity of what I’ve been doing washing over me.
Last night and this morning. In the forest. With him. His hands on my body. His mouth on my skin. His cock inside me, the knot locking us together while I made sounds I didn’t know I could make and said things I didn’t mean to say. And then I let him touch my hair and hold me.
The clarity is unbearable.
“The heat’s passing,” I say.
He knows. His body is responding to the change in mine, the urgency in him dropping, the wolf’s manic drive easing. But something else arrives with the receding heat. Not relief.
He doesn’t want this to end. I can feel it.
I sit up. Pull away from his chest, his arms, his warmth. The air is cold on the skin where his body was.
“I need to go.”
“Briar—”
“The heat is over. This is over. Whatever this was—” I wave a hand at the trampled moss, the evidence of a night’s worth of what we did to each other and with each other. “It was biology. My body needed something; you were here. That’s all.”
“Is it?”
“Yes.”
I stand. My legs are unsteady. Too much exertion, not enough food. The heat’s departure has left my muscles wrung out. I need clothes. I need a shower. I need to put space between this man and me before the clarity finishes arriving.
He stands too. Slowly. Watching me. Not reaching, not trying to close the distance. Just watching. And the look on his face isn’t the alpha mask or the wolf’s intensity or even the openness that cracked me this morning.
It’s patience. He’s letting me go.
Good. It’s for the best.
“I want nothing from you,” I say. My voice is flat. Briar’s voice. The one I wear when the real one is too dangerous to use. “Nothing unless I’m killing you.”
“Okay.”
“I mean it, Garrett.”
“I know you do.” He says it without argument. Without the alpha pushing back.
I turn and walk into the trees.
I don’t look back. If I look back, I’ll see him standing there, and if I see him standing there, my wolf will turn me around, and if I turn around, I’m lost.
The forest closes behind me. The distance stretches. He stays where he is, in the moss and the morning light, and he lets me go.
I shift and head back to the compound. It’s only when I’m back in my room that I sit on my bed and put my head in my hands. I don’t cry because I never cry, but my body shakes.
The part of me that almost laughed at something Garrett Forrester said — that’s the part that scares me most.
Because that part didn’t feel like hate.
It felt like the beginning of something I’m not equipped to survive.