Chapter 36 #2
I stay with her. My eyes on hers while the knot seals and the pressure builds, and I feel myself tipping toward the edge. She’s right there with me, I can feel her through the connection between us, both of us climbing the same wave—
She comes first. Her body clenching around the knot, the internal muscles gripping me with a force that triggers my own release.
I spill into her with a groan that I bury against her throat.
The pleasure is blinding, doubled through the bond, hers and mine braided together, and the knot holds us locked in it, the waves rolling through both of us.
And in the peak of it — at the crest, where the pleasure is widest, and our bodies are as joined as two bodies can be — she bites me.
I feel her teeth change against my neck. The sharpening. The extension. Wolf canines emerging, the same transformation I felt in my own mouth in the clearing when my wolf bit her. Her teeth find the junction of my neck and shoulder — the mirror of her mark, the exact placement — and she bites down.
The pain is sharp. Clean. Her teeth puncturing skin, breaking through to muscle. The shock of it rides the tail of the orgasm, and the two sensations merge into something I have no reference for. My body jerks. My arms lock around her. The sound I make is not human.
The bond opens.
Not the one-way channel I’ve been living with.
Something else. Something that floods both directions simultaneously, pouring through the puncture wounds the way water pours through a broken dam.
Her — entering me. Not just her emotions, or her presence, or the awareness I’ve carried since the clearing.
Her.
The full force of who she is, rushing into me through the bite.
Her wolf — fierce, loyal, the animal that chose me and has been fighting her human ever since.
Her fury — still there, banked but present.
Her fear — of this, of us, of the vulnerability of loving someone who’s capable of catastrophic mistakes.
And the love. Under everything. The thing she’s been refusing to admit, running from, fighting with every weapon she has. It hits me, and my eyes burn. My arms tighten around her, and I bury my face in her hair because the force of it is more than I can take with my eyes open.
She holds the bite. Her jaw locked, her teeth deep, her slick channel still clamped around the knot. I can feel her wolf meeting mine, and the meeting is recognition. Two animals that have been circling each other for weeks finally touching.
There you are. There you are.
Her jaw loosens. Her teeth withdraw. The blood is warm, running down my neck. She lifts her head and looks at me, and her mouth is red with it. My blood on her lips.
I bring my mouth to her neck. To the scar I left in the clearing.
The ragged tissue where my wolf’s teeth tore through her skin while she screamed, and the bond was born.
I press my lips against it. Gently. The gentlest thing I’ve ever done, my mouth on the wound I made.
Not a wound, a claiming. I feel her breath catch, and her hand comes up to the back of my head, and she holds me there.
“Do it again,” she whispers.
I frown. “What?”
“The mark. Make it again.” She tips her head, stretching the skin beneath my lips.
“Briar…”
“Do it, Garret.”
I let my teeth extend, press them against the mark, then bite down. Almost too gently.
She shudders against me. “More.”
The wolf steps in, and my teeth sink deep. Hard. Brutal. I fight the urge to tear into her flesh. The need to possess is overwhelming.
“Yes!” she cries out, bucking against me. “God! Yes!”
I watch as she rides out another orgasm that almost takes me along, even though I just emptied myself in her.
Her arms are wrapped tightly around my neck as she finally comes down, breathing hard.
The bond settles. Both directions. Full.
Complete. I can feel her heartbeat as clearly as my own.
I can feel the warmth in her belly — the baby, our baby — as if my hand were still on her skin.
I can feel the edges of her thoughts, not the words but the shapes, and what she’s thinking right now is simple and enormous.
Mate.
“Mate,” she says. Out loud. Against my hair. “You’re my mate, Garrett Forrester.”
The word enters me through the bite mark she just made.
Through the blood. Through the bond that’s now a two-way road with no roadblocks and no detours.
It settles into me and takes root. And I know — the way I know the land and the sky and the smell of cedar in June — that I will carry this word for the rest of my life.
“Mate,” I say back, against the mark I made. My lips on the place where everything started.
We sit in the wrecked cot. Locked together. Her legs around my waist, my arms around her back, her face in my neck, and mine in hers. Both of us bleeding from the bite we gave each other. Both of us breathing hard.
The knot holds us. The bond holds us.
The cabin is dark. The compound is quiet. Somewhere outside, a bird is singing — three notes, a pause, three notes. The bird doesn’t know what happened in this room. The bird doesn’t care. The bird is doing what birds do. Claiming its ground. Singing its name into the dark.
I hold her. She lets me hold her.
When the knot finally releases and our bodies separate, she doesn’t leave. She stays in my lap with her forehead against mine and her blood on my mouth and mine on hers. The link between us feels… unbreakable.
“The cot held,” she says.
“Barely.”
“We need a real bed.”
“Yeah.”
“A big one.”
“As big as you want.”
She pulls back enough to look at me. Her face in the dark. The gray eyes. Her mouth stained red.
“Take me home, Garrett.”
Four words. The simplest she’s ever said to me. No conditions, no lists, no qualifications. Just the request, and the trust inside it, and the future it opens.
“Tomorrow,” I say, swallowing hard.
“Tomorrow.” She kisses me. Light. Quick. “But tonight—”
“Tonight?”
“Tonight I’m staying in this cot.”
“It’s going to break.”
“Then it breaks.”
She settles against me. My back against the wall, her back against my chest. My arm around her. My hand on her belly. The bite on my neck throbbing in time with my pulse. The mark she gave me, the claim she made.
Her breathing slows. Her weight gets heavier against me.
She’s falling asleep. In my arms. In the guest cabin at the edge of a compound that isn’t ours, on a cot that’s barely holding it together, with blood drying on both our necks.
And with a bond that runs both ways. And a child growing between us.
“Briar.”
“Mm.”
“I love you.”
Silence. Long enough that I think she’s asleep.
“I know,” she murmurs. Then, quieter, half into sleep: “Me too.”
I close my eyes.