Chapter 28
Decker
“Nothing’s changed,” Viktor says. “Whoever gave us the tip has gone silent. The council wants a verdict posted, and I’m running out of ways to delay.”
“And the search?”
“The number gave Vanya towers. It moved twice.” A pause I don’t like. “Both times along the corridor Faine marked.”
The valley below is one black line against another. I keep my voice level. “You’re sure?”
“I’m sure of the towers. Nothing else yet.” Papers turn on his end. “It’s a direction, Decker. It’s not a certainty. But it points where we thought, and it means we have to be more careful than ever. Nothing travels with her name on it. Nobody moves fast.”
Because fast gets a girl bled out instead of found. He doesn’t say it again. He doesn’t need to. It’s been gnawing at me since his office, and tonight it’s got a blood corridor that makes it real.
“Two days,” he says, and the line goes dead.
I pocket the phone and climb. The bear stops fighting me the moment I turn uphill; this direction he approves of. By the time I reach the entrance, he’s crowding me so hard my hands aren’t fully mine.
The main chamber is empty. Lantern low, cot empty, her boots by the ledge.
Then I hear water moving, and I’m already walking.
She’s coming up out of the pool when I reach the gap.
Water sheets off her as she climbs the shelf of rock—thighs, calves, into the gravel.
Bare skin. Her hair is dark and slicked to her skull, and a wet line of it runs down her spine to the center of her back.
She’s so damn small. It lands every time I see all of her at once, how little of her there is and how much of my world she takes up.
She turns her head and finds me. She doesn’t cover herself. Her chin comes up.
“The call,” she says.
“Later.”
Three steps in, the bear tells me what’s wrong.
She’s washed me off her. The scent that’s been on her skin for days—the one he’s been living inside—stripped away by cold water. To him that isn’t clean. That’s wrong, and it pulls at me hard and low in the gut.
I cross the rock. Her skin is cool when I get one hand at her hip and the other up her back, and she comes against me with no resistance at all.
The chill burns off her fast, her wolf running hot underneath it.
Her palms land flat on my chest—not to stop me.
She can feel what’s coming off me through the shirt, and her breath has already gone short.
“You’re wound tight,” she says.
“You washed it off.”
“Washed what off?” But she knows. Her mouth tips. “Your bear’s sulking.”
“He wants you back the way you were.”
She holds my eyes. “Then put it back.”
I get my mouth on her throat. She tips her head and gives it to me, and I work down—the wet hollow at the base of her throat, her breast, the hard point of her nipple until her fingers twist in my shirt and a sound breaks out of her.
I go to my knees on the stone to get the rest. She doesn’t stop me.
I run my hands up the backs of her thighs and open her, and put my mouth on her flesh.
Cold from the pool for half a breath; then hot, then slick, going wetter under my tongue with every pass.
I lick her open, drag up through her folds to her clit, and work it in slow circles until her hands drop to my head and her thighs start shaking against my jaw.
“Decker—fuck—” She’s loud in here. The chamber echoes it back off the stone—every ragged breath, every sound she can’t hold in.
I hum against her and suck down on her clit, and her cry comes out hoarse. A finger inside her is all it takes. She comes against my mouth with my name in the middle of it, knees buckling. I hold her up by the hips and keep at her until she’s pushing at my forehead.
“Okay.” She’s panting. “Too much. Done. I can’t—”
I stand. She’s flushed down to her breasts, breathing hard, her eyes gone soft and dark.
“You’re not done, though.” She glances down at where my jeans strain over my cock.
A shelf of slate juts low from the chamber wall, a step away.
She turns toward it, already moving—bends over it before my hand can ask, palms flat on the cold stone, hips tipped up and back.
Her thighs gleam with what my mouth did to her.
Her wolf is in every line of how she’s offering, and the bear reads it, and whatever caution I had left is gone.
I get my jeans open, fist my cock, and drag the head through her slick folds. She pushes back at the first touch, trying to take it before I give it.
“Now,” she says. Rough. Done waiting.
I push in, and she cries out.
She’s tight—always tight, small everywhere—and even soaked and used to me, it’s a slow, hard stretch, her body giving way around me a fraction at a time. She drops her forehead to the slate, hauls in a breath, and works herself backward onto me, greedy for the rest.
The sound she makes when I bottom out sits right on the line of pain, but she’s dripping around me. I can see it where she’s stretched wide, where I disappear into her.
“All of it,” she says. “Don’t go easy on me.”
I don’t.
I lock both hands on her hips and take her the way the rut wants it, the way she’s asking, and she meets every drive. The chamber fills with us—skin on skin, the wet slap where we’re joined, her voice cracking off the stone every time I hit the end of her.
“Oh God—harder. Right there. Please—fuck!”
I go harder. Her beast yields to mine, and she takes it, pushing back for more.
She comes with her cheek flat to the slate and her nails scraping the edge of the stone, clamping down on me in long pulls, and I keep going. She’s barely down from it before she’s rocking back again, chasing the next one.
I look down at her neck. The bare curve of it, water still beaded along her nape.
The bear wants the bite. It’s right there…teeth in, deep, done, no taking it back. I hold it.
Not now.
Not before she knows everything I’ve done with what she gave me. She chooses with all of that, or it isn’t a choice.
So I give him the other thing.
I pull out at the edge, fist my cock, and finish on her back—thick ropes of it across the dimples above her ass, up her spine, my scent going back where the water stole it. The sound that comes out of me is long and low and has nothing to do with the man.
She stays bent over the stone, catching her breath, while I drag my fingers through it and work it into her skin. Up her spine. The back of her neck.
She turns her head against the slate. “What are you doing?”
“You smelled like pool water.”
A laugh breaks out of her, breathless. “So now I smell like bear cum?”
“Like me.” I turn her over.
She settles onto her back across the slate, hissing at the cold, pale against the dark stone and flushed everywhere else.
I put a hand flat on her belly and run it up—between her breasts, around one, my thumb dragging over her nipple until her spine bows off the rock.
Then back down, the heel of my hand pressing low over her mound, where she’s swollen and open from me.
“That hurt?”
“In all the best ways.” She says it watching my face.
I’m hard again. I barely went soft—the rut doesn’t care what it’s already had, and with her laid out like this, neither do I. She reads it in me and spreads her thighs wide across the stone. Plain as words.
“More,” she whispers.
I tilt her hips up in my hands and push back into her, and it’s tight again, almost too much again, and again she takes it all and asks for more with her body. I watch where we meet, where she stretches around me. She watches me watch it.
“We shouldn’t fit,” she whispers. Her eyes come up to mine. “But we do.”
“Yeah,” I say, and it isn’t enough, but I don’t have more words in me right now.
She drives up off the stone to take me deeper, arms thrown out across the slate, and when I’m buried to the root she comes apart—head thrown back, her voice shredded.
“Decker—yes—don’t stop—”
I put my thumb on her clit and give her the last of it hard, and she goes over again. I go with her, bent down over her body with one hand braced by her head and choking out her name.
When I pull out, she reaches between her legs, wets her fingers in the mess of us, and draws them up her belly and over her chest—slow, eyes locked on mine the whole way. Marking herself with me.
It’s the most devastating thing I’ve ever watched. And under the wreck of it, a fact settles in and stays: I’m never letting her out of this. Whatever it takes.
Her hand comes to rest between her thighs, and she winces, then gives me a slow, wicked look. “You’ve ruined me, bear.”
I smile at that, then I pull her up off the stone and into my chest, both arms around her, and she folds in against me, soft and warm and breathing deep.
My hands cover most of her back. All over again I’m aware of how easily the world could break her, and how it’s not going to. Not while I’m breathing.
“No, sweetheart,” I tell her. “You’ve ruined me.”
She huffs against my chest and stays.
The bear goes quiet for the first time since the call—sated, scent-settled, her heartbeat slowing against my ribs.
And where the rut was, there’s something else now, lower and steadier, and it unsettles me more than the wanting ever did.
I’d put myself between her and anything with breath in it. I’d tear this mountain down first.
She tips her head back. “You went quiet.”
“I do that.”
“Not like this.” She studies my face, hunting for the thing out of place. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”
My jaw locks. She catches it. Of course she catches it.
Her sister isn’t waiting in a cell for a door to open.
She’s being bled, somewhere along a route that tonight grew towers and a direction, and one wrong move turns her from found into finished.
And the same blood runs in the woman standing in my arms with my scent worked into her skin.
If she knew what it’s worth, she’d be out there, handing herself over.
Not gonna happen.
“Decker.” Not a question now.
“Later,” I say.
Her eyes hold mine a beat too long. “You keep saying that.”