Chapter Fifteen
Christa?
We drive back from clan territory well after dark, and I doze against the window for the last stretch of road, worn out in the particular, satisfied way you get after a day that asks a lot of you and gives back more than it takes.
I catch Toby glancing over at me more than once, something thoughtful sitting behind his eyes that I can’t quite place, like he’s turning over a conversation he hasn’t shared with me yet.
I don’t press him on it. Whatever it is, I trust by now that he’ll tell me in his own time, the same unhurried way he tells me everything else that has ever mattered.
I find out later that Marlow had pulled him aside near the end of the day, while I was deep in conversation with Priya about nothing in particular, and told him something that has apparently stuck with him the whole drive home, that he watched me all afternoon and seen in me,
the kind of steadiness that will anchor a clan someday, not just a man.
Toby hasn’t told me that part yet. He’s still turning it over, I think, deciding how to hand it to me without making it sound like more pressure that it’s ever meant to be.
I wake fully when he pulls into our own drive, blinking against the dark, the porch light throwing its familiar warm glow across the yard.
“Good day?” he asks, already knowing the answer.
“Best day,” I say. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a whole day like that. Where nothing went wrong. Where I didn’t spend half of it waiting for something to.”
Something crosses his face hearing that.
Gratitude and grief tangled together, the way it usually does when I talk about my old life without meaning to.
He reaches over, lacing his fingers through mine, and for a moment neither of us says anything else, just sit there in the quiet cab of the truck with the engine ticking as it cools.
“There’s something else Marlow told me today,” he says finally. “Something I want to explain properly, if you’re not too tired.”
“I’m not too tired.”
We sit together on the porch once we’re home, the same spot we always end up, and he tells me what he was apparently turning over the whole drive back, the last piece of what being mates actually means among his people,
the piece he held back until now because it asks something bigger of me than anything he’s asked before.
“The bond you already feel, that’s real and it’s permanent in its own way,” he says.
“But there’s a deeper version of it. A claiming. It happens during… during intimacy, if both people want it. A bite, right here.”
He touches the curve of his own neck, where it would go on me.
“It seals the bond fully. Ties us together in a way that’s harder to explain than to feel, you’d know things about me sometimes, without being told. I’d know things about you. It’s not something either of us could take back once it’s done.”
“Has anyone in your family done it? The mark I mean?”
“My parents have theirs. I remember asking my mother about it once as a kid, why she had a small scar on her neck she never talked about. She told me that was the day she stopped being able to imagine a version of her life without my father in it,
not because it was proof of a choice she’d already made completely,” he pauses considering.
“I always thought that sounded like the kind of thing worth waiting for the right person to have with. I didn’t know, for a long time, if I’d ever get the chance.”
I’m quiet, turning it over with the same careful weight I give everything these days. “Does it hurt?”
“For a moment. Not more than that,” he holds my eyes and I can tell he wants the next part heard clearly.
“I need you to know there’s no version of this where I’d ever ask for it before you were ready, or make you feel like less of a mate for waiting as long as you needed to. This isn’t a requirement. It’s an option, and only one that means anything if you choose it freely.”
“What happens if we never do it?”
“Then we’re still exactly what we are right now. Mates, in every way that’s mattered so far. The bond doesn’t need the mark to be real. The mark just makes it, permanent, in a way even death doesn’t undo. Some people wait years. Some people never do it at all. There’s no wrong version of this.”
I ask him a dozen more questions after that, working through it the way I work through most things that matter, carefully, methodically, unwilling to let myself leap before I actually look.
Whether it changes anything about how he treats me.
Whether it’s something the whole clan will know about, or just the two of us.
Whether it can ever be undone, in any circumstance, and whether that permanence frightens him the way some small, honest part of it frightens me.
He answers every question plainly, without impatience, the same steady patience he’s given me since the very first night, and by the time I’ve run out of questions, the fear underneath then has mostly burned away, replaced by something closer to certainty than I expected to feel so quickly.
I sit with that a long time, watching the dark treeline, and he lets me have the silence, the way he’s learned to let me have most silences that matter.
“I want it,” I say finally, quiet and certain in a way that surprises even me with how fast it arrived.
“I’ve spent my whole life being temporary to people. Foster homes, placements, even him. Nothing ever felt permanent, not really, not in any way I could trust. I want something that can’t be taken back. I want to belong to something that isn’t going anywhere,
and I want you to belong to me the same way.”
“I already do,” he says. “The mark won’t change what I feel. It’ll just make it undeniable. To both of us, and to anyone else who ever doubts it.”
I turn to look at him, something fierce and certain settling behind my own eyes now. “Then let’s make it undeniable.”
He grabs and picks me up, chucking me over his shoulder.
“Toby!” I squeal, and I’m rewarded with a slap across my ass.
“You have no idea how long I’ve waited for this, for you.” He whispers as he gently lowers me to the bed.
He leans over and claims my mouth as his hands undo my jeans. Before I know it, I’m completely naked. I prop myself up onto my elbows as I watch him undress, my nerves threatening to break free, but I push them back, I want this… no, I need this. I need him.
Once he’s naked he stands looking at me. “I’m going to need you on all fours baby, ass up. This is how we claim our mates.” He practically growls.
I squeeze my legs together as I do what he says, once I’m on all fours I cast him a shy look over my shoulder.
“Like this?” I whisper.
“Yeah, just like that.”
He climbs onto the bed behind me, one hand grabbing my tit, the other slides between my legs.
“So fucking wet for me already huh?”
“Always.” I pant.
He spreads my cheeks and the head of his cock pushes against my entrance, slowly he slides his length inside me. I can feel him even more in this position, even more so when he pulls out and thrusts in deeper, dragging a low moan from me. I can feel him smiles against my neck.
“Fuck, you feel so good Christa.” He grunts as his thrusts become faster and deeper.
Every stroke of his cock is like pure fucking heaven, the only sounds are skin on skin and my cries of pleasure.
“Oh fuck Tobias! Don’t stop, please don’t stop.” I scream.
He pounds into me harder and harder, his grip on my hips getting tighter with thrust I’m sure will leave bruises.
A second later without warning, I explode all over his cock but he doesn’t stop hammering into me.
Then he arches over me and I feel a sharp sting at the curve of my neck and I can feel a second orgasm taking over me.
My pussy clamps down so hard it actually hurts a little, he releases my neck and with a roar, empties himself inside of me.
“Toby…” I gasp.
He wraps his arms around me and pulls me close.
Warmth is spreading out from the point of the bite, a sensation I don’t have words for, something that feels less like an injury and more like a door swinging open somewhere deep inside my chest.
I feel him, in a way I haven’t before, not thoughts exactly, nothing so clear as words, but something closer to certainty, an overwhelming, wordless knowledge of how completely he’s mine and I’m his, layered underneath everything we’ve already built together over four careful months.
He soothes over the mark gently, lips moving soft against skin that still throbs faintly, murmuring something low I can’t quite make out, and I feel tears prick unexpectedly at my eyes, not sadness, nothing close to that, just the sheer overwhelming size of finally,
fully belonging to something that isn’t going anywhere.
“Okay?” He asks, voice rough as he pulls back to check my face properly.
“More than okay,” I say and feel the truth of it settle somewhere deep and permanent, a certainty I’ve never once let myself feel about in twenty-four years of learning not to trust permanence at all. “I feel you. I actually feel you.”
“I feel you too,” he says, wonder plain in his voice, like even he didn’t fully believe it until this exact moment, how completely the bond will deliver on everything it promised. “Every part of you. I don’t think I’m ever going to get used to that.”
He cups my face and turns me to face him fully. “I… I love you Christa.”
My eyes widen in shock. “You do?” I whisper.
He nods. “I do, I’ve loved you for a while now. I just didn’t want to scare you, but I can’t hold it back anymore. I love you, I’m totally, completely in love with you.”
“I love you too!” I cry out as I throw my arms around his neck.
We stay tangled together for a long while, neither of us in any hurry to move, the low lamp burning down slow beside the bed.
I trace the shape of him in the dim light, the scars, the steady rise and fall of his chest, the small, satisfied curve of his mouth that hasn’t fully faded sine the bite and feel something in me settle that has been unsettled for twenty-four years, some deep,
exhausted vigilance finally allowed to stand down.
“Tell me something,” I say quietly into the dark. “What does it feel like, on your end? The bond, now that it’s sealed.”
He considers the question seriously, the way he considers most things.
“Like knowing where north is,” he says finally.
“Not thinking about it constantly. Just always, underneath everything else, having that orientation. I know roughly how you’re feeling right now, even with my eyes closed. Not the details. Just the shape of it. Content, warm, a little overwhelmed maybe, in a good way.”
“That’s exactly right,” I say, surprised despite everything he’s already told me to expect. “How do you know that’s not just you guessing, based on the night we’ve had?”
“I don’t, not for certain, not yet. We’ll learn the shape of it together I think, the same way we’ve learned everything else.” He presses a slow kiss to my temple. “That’s kind of the point, isn’t it? Neither of us walking into any of this alone anymore.”
We continue to lie tangled together, the mark on my neck still warm, some new, wordless awareness of him settling into place like it has always belonged there.
I trace my fingers absently along his forearm, still catching my breath, still absorbing the strange, quiet enormity of what had just happened between us.
It doesn’t feel like the dramatic, world-altering shift some part of me had expected.
Instead it feels like something settling into a shape it’s always meant to take, gentle and inevitable, the way a key finally turns all the way in a lock it was cut for.
I think about the woman who broke down on this land four months ago with nothing but a duffel bag and four hundred dollars, certain that safe didn’t really exist, that it was just a story she told herself to survive the drive.
I think about all the versions of myself before her, the girl in foster care learning not to unpack her bags fully, the woman who’d mistaken a controlling grip for devotion because nobody had ever shown her what the real thing looked like.
Every one of those versions of me had been quietly, desperately looking for exactly this, without every having the language to say so.
She’d been wrong. Safe exists. It has a name, and warm hands, and a bear sleeping quiet and satisfied somewhere just under his skin.
I fall asleep marked, claimed and for the first time in my entire life, completely, permanently certain of exactly where I belong.