Decker
We’re falling into a rhythm. Yesterday gave me nothing to worry about. The slope was clean when I walked it—my marks holding at every approach, no new scent on the ground, no wings over the ridge. I brought up provisions and the day closed in quiet around the two of us.
I’m no longer arguing about what this is or even surprised about it. Rutting is normal for my kind. Just not for me. Yet the urge drove all night, and most of the morning after it. I can’t keep my hands off her.
Grace is crossing the cave.
She moves unhurried, bare to the cold, like a woman with nowhere to be.
My scent’s on her skin. I can track it from the cot without trying.
She reaches the shelf and tilts the lantern to check the fuel the way I showed her two days ago, then sets it back where it was.
She runs one palm along the stone lip, not looking for anything. Just moving.
The bear comes up the same second I do.
He doesn’t need a reason. The drive runs constant and low. It doesn’t much care that we’ve been at this since first light. Four times, and the rut doesn’t track numbers. It registers her. She’s five feet away. It sharpens the way it always does when she’s close.
I get up.
She hears me before I’ve crossed half the stone. Her shoulders don’t lift—she’s past flinching at my movements. Just a small tilt of her chin. Tracking me by sound.
I come up behind her and put my hands at the small of her back. Warm there under my palms, the wolf’s heat running just below the surface. I slide both hands down over the curve of her ass and pull her back against me, then stroke my fingertips between her thighs.
She laughs.
Genuine and quick, then her hands are on mine, lifting them off her, stepping sideways out of my hold. She turns, catches both my wrists, presses my hands together while she looks up at me.
“No,” she says. “I’m a little sore. You have had me four times since we woke up.”
“I’m aware.”
“You’re insatiable.” She says it like a fact, not a complaint. “Are you always like this?”
“No.” I step back. She lets my wrists go. “Only in the rut.”
Might as well tell her.
“The rut?” She looks at me. “I don’t know what that is.”
I find the edge of stone beside the shelf and sit. She stays standing, arms folded.
“Bear males rut annually,” I say. “A week, sometimes less. It’s a drive—not something I’d choose. It just runs. The urge to take a female to den. Keep her there.” I pause. “Take her again and again until it eases.”
She turns that over. “Like a wolf’s heat.”
“Similar idea. Different mechanism. Wolf heat is the female’s cycle. This is the male’s version. The compulsion is mine, not yours.”
“What do she-bears feel?”
“They become receptive,” I say. “But the pull to den, to keep going—that belongs to the male. She-bears don’t experience it the same way.”
She takes this in, quiet for a moment. “So any female could trigger it? Any bear female that happened to be nearby?”
“No.” The word comes flat. “It doesn’t work that way. It fixes on one female. Not just any—the one it’s running for. That’s the only one the male wants.”
She goes quiet. “And for you, right now?”
“You,” I say. “Only you.”
The truth locks in as I say it.
She holds that. Then: “And when I said sore. You stopped.”
“I would never hurt you, Grace.”
“But the rut thing… It’s still running?”
“Yes.”
Her eyes track down to my still-hard cock and back up. She isn’t coy about it—she just noticed, and she looked.
“Right,” she says. A pause. Then: “I need an hour before I’m up for another round. But that doesn’t mean I can’t do anything.” She looks at me. “I’m not going to let my bear go needing when I can do something about it.”
Her bear.
The words go through me. Two words—my bear—and she didn’t notice she’d said them. She wasn’t claiming me on purpose. She didn’t know it was already done. The bear settles, still and warm, around the two words.
She’s already moving toward me, reading whatever’s on my face as agreement, which I suppose it is.
“Grace—”
“Don’t overthink it.” She steps between my knees. Even with me sitting, her face comes to my chest—she has to tip her chin up to look me in the eye. She sets both hands flat against my belly and looks up at me. “I want to.”
She drops to her knees on the stone in front of me.
She looks up at me from there, and whatever I was going to say goes straight out of my head.
“Relax,” she says, and I realize I’m holding myself rigid.
She wraps one hand around my shaft and holds it a moment—not hesitant, just getting the feel of it. Her thumb tracks the underside, and my jaw goes tight. Then she flicks her tongue around the head of it.
“Fuck.” The heat hits right away. She works the head first, lips dragging slowly across the ridge, and makes a low sound in her throat—interested, unhurried, like this is something she wants to be doing.
She opens her mouth wide, and takes what she can, covers the rest with her hands, works both together in a steady pull.
Suction building, her grip tightening in rhythm. No room for anything in my head.
I brace both hands on the stone behind me.
She pulls back for a breath and looks up. “Has anyone ever done this to you?”
“Not to finish,” I say.
She takes that in. Her hand keeps moving. “Bear-sized problem,” she says. Not a question, her own conclusion.
“Yeah.”
She hums and goes back. Takes me in deeper than before, and this time she doesn’t ease into it; she pushes past the limit she set at the start. My hand comes forward and fists in her hair.
She pulls back again after a while, hand still working. “Has it ever run before?” she asks. “The rut. With anyone else?”
I look down at her.
“No,” I say.
“Only with me?”
“Yeah.” It’s getting harder to speak.
She holds my eyes. Her face changes—she keeps it still, mostly, but her eyes go clear the way they do when her magic’s down, and she’s not managing anything. Then she goes back to what she was doing. I let her.
I know it isn’t the way of things, what she just heard. The rut has a duration. It runs and eases, and I go back to what I was.
But the bear chose her before the rut started.
He chose her at Aurora, before I’d said a word to her. He settled in a way I hadn’t felt from him in years. I told myself for days it was the investigation. I’ve stopped telling myself that now.
She does something with her tongue that clears out every thought I was holding.
There’s only this—the heat of her mouth, the grip of her hand, the tight suction that’s been building since she started.
Her eyes come up once and find mine. What I see in them is hunger, not duty.
She holds my look for a full second, then drops back down and takes me deeper.
I stop trying to hold back.
“Grace,” I gasp, my hand in her hair as her head bobs faster. “God… Fuck!”
“Ummm…” she hums, the sound rippling down my shaft. My head drops back as the sensations roll over me. Wet warmth engulfing me, her small hand pumping my flesh. The heat coils in my balls and starts surging up my length.
“Wait,” I choke, reaching down to pull her face up before I empty in her mouth. She bats me away with one hand and pushes her lips further down, gagging as my head hits the back of her throat and then further. Her breath is hot against the curls around my base, saliva drooling down my flesh.
It’s all just too much. My hips pump up, no longer caring that she’s choking and gagging. I don’t think she cares either because she’s humming small sounds of encouragement.
I come with her name in my throat—the rest of it has no words—one hand fisted in her hair, the other flat to the stone behind me.
She stays through it, takes what she can, pulls back slow.
She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.
Sits back on her heels. Looks up at me, wet dripping down her chin.
Fuck. That’s so goddamn hot.
I pull her up before either of us can say anything. She comes without argument, presses her face against my chest. Her hands flat against me. We stay like that, breathing.
After a while: “You okay, sweetheart?”
“Yes.” She nods.
“Good.” I press my lips to the top of her head.
A pause. “Decker.”
“What?”
She pulls back far enough to look up at my face. “You don’t have to tell me what any of it means. I know you’re not—” She stops. Tries again, careful with it. “I just want to know we’re okay. Right now. You and me.”
I look at her face. The sky-blue stare, direct and open. The glamour down.
“We’re okay,” I say.
She nods, presses back in. Her ear settles against my chest. The tension in her shoulders drops; it takes a moment, then it’s gone. Her breathing evens out slow against me. The rut sits banked—still there, just lower.
It will ease. Two more days, maybe three.
The drive thins out, and this cave goes back to being what it is—a hold point on a mountain while Vanya pulls a thread down in the valley and the file with Grace’s name on it stays open.
None of that finished while we were wrapped up in each other. It’s all still down there, waiting.
My bear, she said.
Nobody has ever called me theirs. I built a life where nobody could—no clan, no elder seat, no council I answered to. She said “my bear” without noticing she’d done it, and instead of the old urge to shake loose, there’s this: my face down in her hair, holding still so it lasts.
Viktor’s call is due tonight.
I’ll stand out on the dark slope with the phone he gave me and hear whether the thread has moved.
What I won’t say—not to him, because he already knows, and not to her, because she can’t know—is the rest of it.
Her sister isn’t waiting in a cell. She’s stock in the trade Faine warned us about, and one wrong move gets her drained instead of found.
Sangrey blood carries a price. Grace is wearing it right now, warm against my chest, and she has no idea.
If she knew, she’d be down this mountain by dark, offering herself as the trade. She’s already walked into one trap for her sister with her eyes open.
Tonight I’ll find out if we’re any closer. She’ll read my face the second I come back through past the boulder.
I’d better make sure I tell her what she wants to hear.