Chapter 32
Grace
Marek walks half a step behind me and one to the side, but I barely notice because I’m still turning the meeting over.
You were the one they’d blame when someone got close.
That’s what I was. Months of starving every drop down to nothing, checking each scrap twice so it couldn’t hurt anyone, hating myself anyway—and none of it was ever the point. They kept me the way you keep a spare part. Something to bolt the blame to later.
And the one door I wanted opened stayed shut. Your sister’s search is separate. It doesn’t come into this room. Viktor said it kindly, for Viktor, and it still hurt.
So my head is full. It should be the only thing I’m feeling.
It isn’t.
Because under all of it, my body is fixated on something else. Decker stood six feet from me for that entire session, and I couldn’t touch him. Six feet. It felt like six miles.
In the den I could reach out any hour of the day or night, and there he was. Warm, solid, mine to touch. I didn’t know what I had until this building pulled us apart. Now he’s right here, and I can’t reach him. Now, when I feel like I need him more than ever.
My wolf has been pacing since last night. Since his tread stopped outside my door and moved on. She doesn’t understand walls. She understands that he’s close and I’m not going to him, and she’s starting to claw.
Behind us, the corridor picks up a sound I’d know anywhere.
His tread. Unhurried, even, closing.
My whole back comes alive before I turn around. Marek stops. Decker comes up the corridor behind us, and I turn. His eyes are on me, and whatever he sees in my face makes his step slow.
We stand there. Two people in a hallway, a guard between us, doors somewhere behind us with people behind the doors.
Nobody says anything. The space between us is closing, and each step closer makes my skin tighten.
His jaw is tight. His hands hang loose at his sides the way they do when he’s keeping them steady.
He feels it too. I know it. He’s holding still the way he did in the briefing room, and it’s as hard for him as it is for me.
The pull under my ribs leans so hard it almost moves my feet.
“I need a word with Decker,” I say to Marek. My voice comes out level. I have no idea how. “Privately.”
The guard looks at Decker. Then at me. Whatever conclusion he reaches, he keeps to himself.
“Her door in fifteen,” he says, and walks to the junction and posts himself with his back to us.
I don’t wait to see if Decker follows. There’s an emergency exit off to the side. I push through it, and he comes in behind me. It leads to a silent stairwell and a bare landing. The door swings shut behind us.
“What’s this about?” he says.
I turn around and throw myself at him.
He catches me because he always catches me, and for half a second he’s rigid. I get my fingers in his hair and my mouth on his, and I feel the exact moment he lets go.
It’s fast. That’s what shocks me, even now, even knowing him.
One breath he’s the contained man from the meeting, and the next his hands have gone hard on my hips, and he’s turned us, and my back meets the cold block wall.
A sound starts in his chest, low, rising, and he swallows it.
The effort shudders down his arms and into me.
“Now,” I say against his mouth. “I need you now.”
“Grace.” Low, hoarse. “Here?”
“Here.” I’m pulling his shirt out of his jeans. My hands are shaking. “Before I lose my nerve.”
“Quiet,” he breathes. It isn’t a request. It’s the one condition.
“Then keep me quiet, bear.”
Something goes out of his eyes at that. Whatever was left of the careful man goes with it.
He gets my jeans open and shoves them down with my underwear, one side, far enough for me to spread my legs for him.
His hand pushes between my thighs and finds me already soaked.
His breath leaves him at the feel of it.
Two fingers slide through my folds, find my clit, and my head goes back against the block.
I groan, and his other hand covers my mouth. Big and warm, sealing it in.
I moan into his palm. He works me open with his fingers, quick, nothing patient about it, his forehead dropped forward, both of us breathing through the same inch of air. I’ve had free access to him for days, and now they’ve locked us apart, and my body has been aching for him.
I shove at his waistband. He gets his jeans open one-handed, and his cock comes free into my grip, hot and hard and already slick at the head. The size of him in my hand pulls another sound out of me that his palm muffles.
He lifts me. One arm under my thigh, the wall taking my weight, and there’s nothing slow about any of it.
The angle is awkward, but I don’t care; I twist my hips to give him access.
He lines up and pushes in, and even wet, even wanting it, he’s a stretch that makes my fingers tighten on his shoulders.
My cry lands in his hand. He stills, buried deep, shaking with the effort of not moving.
I bite his palm.
Move.
I’m pleading with my eyes because if he takes his hand away, there’s no chance I’m keeping quiet.
His hips drive forward, shoving me against the hard surface behind me. My nostrils flare with the sound that wants to come out.
It’s nothing like the den. No room to be loud, no time to be slow. The cold wall at my back and his heat at my front and the whole building a foot of concrete away. He drives into me hard and fast, and every thrust knocks a sound loose that has nowhere to go.
Somewhere above us a locked mechanical floor hums. Somewhere behind the door, fifteen minutes are running out.
Marek knows exactly where we are. Anyone with a nose will know later.
All of it is real, and all of it makes it sharper.
I don’t recognize the woman grinding down to meet a bear in a dead stairwell—except I do.
She’s the one who was hiding the whole time. Taking what’s hers.
“Grace.” His face is buried in my neck, and I feel his mouth open against the skin there.
Feel his teeth. Not soft. They press in, testing, a blunt threat riding the edge of my pulse, and everything in me goes molten and still at once.
My wolf lunges for it. Whatever it is, wherever it comes from, she wants his teeth in me, wants it more than the rest of this.
I hear myself make a sound against his hand that isn’t fear. It’s yes.
He feels it. Of course he feels it. And he wrenches his mouth off my throat like it burned him, drags it up to my jaw, breathing hard and ragged, his whole body locked around the effort of not going back. He’s shaking, and it isn’t the sex.
“Not that,” he grinds out, so low I feel it more than hear it. “Not yet.”
I don’t know what I asked for. I only know he took it away, and my wolf claws after it, and my body’s still climbing without it.
“Close,” I get out against his palm. “I’m so close.”
He doesn’t stop. His hand leaves my mouth and closes on my jaw, tips my face up, and he watches me while he gives me the last of it.
That’s what undoes me: his eyes holding mine while his body drives me into the wall.
I break apart with my mouth pressed shut, and the cry locked behind my teeth, shaking around him.
The clenching takes him with me. He drops his face into my neck and comes, deep, pulsing, and this time his mouth stays open on my skin without the teeth, just his lips and his breath.
The growl he strangles in his chest vibrates through both of us.
We stay like that. Him in me, me pinned, both of us breathing hard and trying to do it silently.
The meeting’s weight is still there. I feel it—the story they made of me, the door Viktor shut.
And it’s lighter than when I carried it out of that room.
Not because anything changed. Because something in me stopped pacing.
My wolf has gone quiet for the first time since we left the cave, settled low and warm.
She chose this male a long time before I let her. We’re finally on the same page.
Decker lifts his head. His eyes are still dark, still not all the way back to human, and he looks at me the way he looked at me across that slate in the pool chamber.
“You,” he says, as if answering my thoughts. Just that.
“Me, what?” I push his hair back off his forehead. My hand is still trembling.
“You’re everything.” His voice is gravel.
I swallow, taking in the weight of that. It’s so much. I’m not sure what to do with it. “You’re just saying that because the sex is so good.” I keep my tone light. It doesn’t work.
“That’s not what this is, sweetheart.” His lips graze mine, and I breathe out a soft sigh.
“I hate that they’ve put us in separate rooms,” I say. “Your people have terrible rules.”
“They’re not my people.” He eases out of me slow, and holds me steady while my legs remember their job, and then his hands are pulling my jeans up, setting my clothes right.
Careful now, where nothing was careful two minutes ago.
He tucks himself away and zips up. Straightens my collar.
Takes my face in both hands. For a second neither of us moves.
“This doesn’t happen again,” he says. “Like this.”
“Liar.”
His mouth almost gives me the smile. “Not here, then. Not where—”
Footsteps.
On the stairs. Below us, coming up—unhurried, someone climbing with a purpose that has nothing to do with us and everything to do with the door we’re standing behind.
Decker moves me behind him with one arm before I’ve finished hearing it.
The steps reach the landing below. Stop.
A radio crackles, a man’s voice answers it, bored, and the steps turn around and go back down.
A door somewhere below swings and clunks shut.
Neither of us has breathed.
Decker’s arm lowers. I come out from behind him, and we look at each other in the dim stairwell light.
The air between us is thick with what we just did.
His scent and mine, wound together. It’s going to walk out that door with us and down the corridor past Marek and past every shifter nose in this building.
“Fifteen minutes,” I whisper.
“Closer to twenty.”
We straighten what’s left to straighten. He puts his hand on the door and stops and looks back at me once, and the pull under my ribs answers him before I can, and neither of us says the thing that’s now sitting plainly between us.
That this was the first time since the den.
And that neither of us is going to survive it being the last.