12. The Magnolia Grove #2
She had not made a sound like that in days, he would have bet his life on it.
Not a sound torn out of her by a thief in the dark, but a sound she released freely without thought.
He held her through it with his hand spread wide on her spine and understood that he was, in a way he would never be able to explain, watching her take herself back.
One sound at a time. One yes at a time. The shadows that lived in her now had nothing to do with this part.
This part was only her, remembering that she was allowed.
***
Callum’s jaw locked.
He pulled back before his teeth could touch skin.
His hand at the back of her neck went tender. The other stayed spread against her spine. He held her there while she came down.
The wolf had come all the way up to the surface of him and it wanted one thing, and the one thing was older than Callum, older than language, a pull so deep and so simple that calling it desire was an insult to how total it was.
Bite. Here. The soft place where her neck ran into her shoulder.
Sink in, let the venom carry and the bond lock home and never, for the rest of either of their lives, lie in the dark and wonder where she was.
The wolf did not care that it would likely kill her.
The wolf did not believe a thing fated to it could die.
Callum cared. Callum kept caring with everything he had, one breath at a time, his teeth a hair's breadth from her skin and his whole body shaking from the effort of denying himself of his fate, his instinct; that most sacred innate function of himself.
This was the part his brothers did not see, because he never let them see it.
The anchor held, but it was a sacrifice.
The cost of being the steady one was that the wanting never got to win, not even here, not even with her coming apart against his chest and the bond singing, “yes!” through all three of them at once.
He drew his mouth back to a kiss. He made the kiss enough.
He would make it enough for as long as he had to.
She came down one breath at a time. She didn’t come down far. Her mouth found his again on the way back up and she kissed him harder this time, demanding. Jasper’s mouth went lower on her body sparking a memory in Callum of the taste of her honey in his own mouth on a bed of scattered magnets.
She came again on Eli’s hand, Jasper’s mouth and Callum’s chest. Her fingernails scored the back of his neck.
He held her through it.
***
Jasper’s voice came against her pulse.
“I want to mark you. Fuck, you just don’t know. But I won’t. Not in his house. Not here either. I don’t even know what that would fucking do.”
She turned her face into his neck and bit him on purpose.
The sound he made against her skin was pure animal frustration.
Callum knew exactly what it cost his brother to say it and not do it, because he was exercising the same level of restraint.
Jasper wrote his own rules; he always had, the only one of the three of them who treated a law as a suggestion he had not yet been persuaded by.
That he was holding this line, here, with her shaking between them and the bond screaming for it, told Callum more than any words would have about what she was to all of them.
You do not watch Jasper Voss decline a thing he wants.
Callum watched him decline it now, jaw locked, restraint coming off him so hard it bent the air, and loved him for it, and did not say so, because there are some things brothers do not need to say.
“It’s not just Jasper,” Eli said at her ear, controlled enough that the strain underneath it stood out more. “The bond is hitting all of us; the struggle is real.”
She murmured in a way that was for all three of them.
Callum bent his head to her throat where the pulse ran under the skin. He did not put his teeth there. He put his mouth there. Open. Tongue against her pulse.
The wolf wanted to slide his fangs into her throat.
It had wanted to mate her since the garage apartment, since the duffel bag, the charm and her tired, brave mouth, and it did not care what dangers the bite carried.
A mating bite put venom into the blood. For a wolf, the venom was the whole point, the lock clicking home, a pleasure and a thing his kind had built a thousand years of law and feast and funeral around.
For a woman whose blood was not made for it, the bite was a coin toss, and the coin came up grave more often than it came up bride.
Callum knew exactly how she would taste with his teeth in her.
He kept them behind his lips and gave her the soft of his mouth instead, and the ache of his desire sat in his jaw like pains in the stomach of a starving man.
“Mine,” he said. Against her throat. “Yours.”
The chord surged. Eli called it a bond. The thought struck as hard as the orgasm did.
Serena turned her face into the crook of his neck and came a third time. The bond ran it through all three of them at the same instant.
Jasper went over against her shoulder.
Eli went slack against her back.
Callum lasted longer taking his time to carry her over again one more time before allowing himself to let go of that last shred of control. He held her through it.
For a long stretch none of them moved.
***
The marks were already going through.
Jasper’s mouth at her throat. Eli’s grip at the inside of her thigh. Callum’s hand at the back of her neck. The bond was carrying them across the bridge to her body in the chamber.
Marcus was going to see the fingerprints.
Callum discovered he wanted that more than he wanted sleep. He nipped at her jaw; hard enough to bruise without breaking the skin.
Let the thief see it. Let him walk into that wood-paneled room and find another man’s mouth printed on the throat of the woman he had locked away, find three other men’s hands written into her skin in a place he could not reach and could not undo.
Callum was not a cruel male. His mother had raised him with a patience he understood better now that he loved someone the way Marcus only pretended to.
But there was a low and ancient satisfaction in marking what was being stolen from you, a way of saying across any distance, you are touching what is ours, and it costs you, and we are coming.
He kissed a bruise into her jaw and the base of her throat at her collarbone and meant every part of it.
***
Then she went still on the bridge in a way that wasn’t afterglow.
“He’s coming,” she said. Against Callum’s throat.
The chord tightened. He could read the chamber through her. The dark-paneled room. The candle dimmer than it had been. The slide of the bolt on the iron-hinged door.
Her body in the grove began to ease back to the other side.
She turned her head and looked at him.
“Don’t lose me,” she said.
“I’ve got you,” Callum said.
“Please.”
“Always, baby.”
She looked at Jasper. She looked at Eli. She didn’t say anything else.
The bridge released her.
She went.
The moss between the three of them was empty.
Callum held the bond, flooding it with every ounce he had left. You are not alone.
The empty moss was the worst thing the grove had ever shown him.
A breath ago she had been warm and real under his hands and now there was only the shape of where she had been, the moss already lifting to fill it, and she was maybe a hundred miles south in a room he could not reach, going back to the man who owned the door.
Every animal instinct Callum had was built to put his body between her and that, and his body was here, in the wet dark, kneeling.
There is a particular helplessness that belongs to males made for protecting who find themselves far from the thing they were made to protect.
Callum had been living inside it for days.
It did not get easier. He poured what he had down the dark thread of their bond instead, all of it, and then a little more after that, because the alternative was to do nothing, and doing nothing would have killed him faster than Marcus ever could.
***
Across the bridge, the silence in the chamber went strange.
Marcus had come into the room.