3. Into the Trees
Chapter three
Into the Trees
This was not making love. This was war. Two armies colliding in the dark, and the surrender, when it came, would be total.
The second night broke every rule Jace had left.
They'd returned from the lake camp in the late afternoon, the hike back brutal and silent, Canyon setting a pace that left no room for conversation.
Jace's body ached from the trail and from something else—a restlessness that had nothing to do with muscle fatigue and everything to do with what had happened in the tent with Theo.
He could still taste it: the salt, the musk, the bitter flood of another man's cum on his tongue.
The memory sat in his body like a second pulse, and every time Canyon glanced back at the group, those pale eyes sweeping, assessing, Jace felt it kick harder.
Dinner was venison and root vegetables, eaten in the lodge's amber lamplight.
Canyon sat at the head of the table and, again, did not eat.
His mug steamed with something dark and fragrant that smelled of iron and herbs, and his gaze rested on Jace with an attention that felt less like observation and more like a hand pressed flat against his chest, warm, firm, impossible to ignore.
Jace ate mechanically, chewing without tasting, aware of Canyon's eyes the way a compass is aware of north.
The group dispersed after the meal. Theo clapped Jace on the shoulder with a grin that was half conspiratorial, half predatory. Reed retired early, claiming his knees needed the rest. Milo scurried to his cabin, fleeing something he couldn't name.
Jace should have gone to his cabin. Rule One was clear: do not go into the forest alone after dark.
The treeline was already dissolving into the blackness beyond the lamplight, the pines merging into a wall of shadow that breathed with wind and secret sounds.
Every rational impulse told him to retreat, to lock his cabin door, to wrap himself in the wool blanket and wait for dawn.
Instead, he walked into the trees.
***
He couldn't have explained it if asked. The pull wasn't conscious, it was gravitational, a force operating below the threshold of decision, as if something in the forest had reached out and hooked a finger through his ribs and was now reeling him in with patient, inexorable strength.
His boots found the trail by feel, the pine needles soft and silent underfoot, the canopy overhead blotting the stars into scattered fragments of cold light.
The air was different in the forest at night: colder, denser, saturated with the smell of wet earth and resin and the faint, metallic tang he'd first noticed on Canyon's skin.
The darkness was total and alive. It moved around him, not the movement of wind or animals, but something more fundamental, as if the dark itself had substance and intention. Every hair on his body stood at attention, every nerve tuned to a force that could not be reasoned with.
He walked for ten minutes. Fifteen. The trail narrowed, then disappeared, and he was moving through unbroken forest, ducking under branches, stepping over roots that writhed beneath the needle floor like buried tendons.
The trees grew closer here, their trunks pressing in, their dead lower branches scraping his arms with dry, skeletal fingers.
The silence was so complete it had texture, velvety, suffocating, the silence of a room that had been sealed shut with something inside it.
You're not like the others.
Canyon's voice. Canyon's eyes. The way he moved, the way he smelled, the way he looked at Jace as if seeing through every defensive structure Jace had ever built and finding, beneath all of it, something worth hunting.
"You broke Rule One."
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere, low, resonant, carrying through the trees without echo, as if the forest had spoken in Canyon's register.
Jace spun, heart slamming, and there he was: Canyon Thibodeaux, standing at the clearing's edge in the deep shadow between two massive pines, his pale eyes catching the moonlight and throwing it back like mirrors.
He hadn't been there a second ago. There had been no sound of approach, no crack of twig or rustle of brush.
He had simply materialized, as if the darkness had condensed and taken his shape.
"I—" Jace started, but his voice died in his throat.
Canyon was moving toward him, and the movement was wrong, too fluid, too silent, each step covering distance that didn't match the stride length, as if the space between them was collapsing rather than being crossed.
In three steps Canyon was close enough to touch, and the scent of him hit Jace like a wall: pine and smoke and underneath it, that dark metallic note, stronger now, almost coppery, mixed with something animal and unmistakably male.
"You shouldn't be here." Canyon's voice was low, frayed at the edges. "I should be dragging you back to your cabin right now."
"Then why does it feel like you wanted me to come?
" Jace heard himself say, and the words surprised them both, raw, honest, stripped of the deflection he'd been hiding behind since he arrived.
He looked up into those silver eyes and saw, for the first time, what lived behind the control: a hunger so vast it made his own look like a candle beside a furnace.
Canyon's jaw tightened. A muscle worked in his temple.
His hands hung at his sides, but the fingers were curling, slowly, deliberately, like he was physically preventing himself from reaching out.
"What I want," he said, each word bitten off with precision, "and what is safe for you are two very different things, Jace. "
"Then tell me what you want."
The silence that followed was the loudest sound Jace had ever heard.
It filled the clearing like water filling a vessel, pressing against the trees, pressing against his chest, and in it he could hear his own heartbeat and, impossibly, another heartbeat, slower, deeper, the rhythm of something ancient pulsing in time with the mountain itself.
Canyon moved.
It wasn't a step. It was a strike—Canyon's hand closing around the back of Jace's neck with a grip that was firm without being painful, his body pressing Jace backward until his shoulders hit the trunk of a massive pine, the bark rough and biting through his thermal layer.
The impact knocked the breath from Jace's lungs, but before he could gasp it back, Canyon's mouth was on his.
The kiss was not gentle. It was not exploratory.
It was a claiming—Canyon's lips hard against Jace's, his tongue demanding entry and receiving it, and the taste of him was unlike anything Jace had experienced: cold at first, shockingly cold, like drinking from a mountain stream, and then hot, a surge of heat that spread from the point of contact through Jace's jaw, down his throat, into his chest where it detonated like a depth charge.
Canyon tasted of iron and pine and something dark and intoxicating that bypassed Jace's higher brain entirely and spoke directly to the animal underneath.
Jace kissed him back with a ferocity that should have frightened him.
His hands found Canyon's chest, hard, unyielding, the muscle beneath the henley dense as carved wood, and gripped, pulling him closer, eliminating the last fraction of space between them.
Their bodies pressed together from chest to thigh, and Jace felt Canyon's cock through the layers of fabric: massive, already hard, a thick ridge of heat pressed against his hip that made his own erection throb in sympathetic urgency.
Canyon tore his mouth away, forehead pressed to Jace's, breathing like a man surfacing from deep water. "Tell me to stop and I stop. Whatever else I am, that holds. Always."
"I don't want you to stop."
The sound Canyon made in answer was not human.
"I can smell everything on you," Canyon growled against Jace's mouth, his breath hot, his voice vibrating with something that was more than arousal, it was the sound of something caged rattling its bars.
"I could smell you from the lodge. Your sweat.
Your fear. Your want. You came out here soaked in it, the need, the hunger, do you have any idea what that scent does to me? "
Jace couldn't answer. Canyon's hand had slid from his neck to his chest, pushing up his thermal, fingers raking down bare skin that erupted in gooseflesh, the cold night air and the hot hand creating a contrast that made Jace's nerve endings sing.
Canyon's palm pressed flat against his stomach, feeling the muscles contract beneath, then slid lower, past the waistband, past the elastic, wrapping around Jace's cock with a grip that was supernaturally precise.
The strength in those fingers was inhuman.
Not painful, but undeniable, the grip of something that could have crushed if it chose to, and was choosing, with visible effort, not to.
"Look at you," Canyon breathed, his silver eyes luminous in the moonlight, fixed on Jace's face with an intensity that was almost devotional.
"Leaking all over my hand. Your cock's so hard it's pulsing—I can feel your heartbeat through it.
" He twisted on the upstroke, thumb pressing the ridge beneath the corona, and Jace's vision whited out for a half-second.
"You've been starving. I could smell it the moment you got off that bus.
Months of nothing, no one touching you, no one wanting you, and now here you are, breaking my rules, walking into the dark because some part of you already knows what I am. "
"What are you?" Jace managed, the words coming out in fragments, his hips thrusting into the fist that owned him, his cock slick with precum that dripped down Canyon's knuckles in warm, viscous trails.