12. Invasive Species #3
Jace came first. The orgasm erupted from the base of his spine with the force of a dam breaking, his cock pulsing untouched, jets of cum arcing between their bodies, splattering Canyon's chest and stomach and the scars that crossed his skin like ancient roads.
The clench of his body around Canyon's shaft triggered the response—Canyon drove up one final time, burying himself to the root, and came with a roar that sent birds scattering from the canopy, his cock pulsing inside Jace in powerful, volcanic jets that Jace felt as heat and fullness and the intimate vibration of another body emptying itself completely into his.
They collapsed together on the pine needles.
Jace's head on Canyon's chest, Canyon's arm around him, the mess of their combined release cooling between them in the evening air.
Canyon's heartbeat was faster than Jace had ever heard it—a comparatively rapid pulse that said the ancient creature had been pushed to its limits and found, in those limits, something worth reaching for.
"Yours," Canyon said into Jace's hair. The word was simple and total and carried no qualifications, no history, no centuries of context. Just the raw, present-tense truth of a creature that had chosen.
Jace pressed his ear to the heartbeat. Counted the slowing pulses. And let the jealousy drain from him into the earth, where the mountain absorbed it and stored it alongside everything else it had witnessed in its four million years of watching creatures fight for what they loved.
***
They walked back to the lodge in the dark, and the first thing Jace saw through the window was Lucien, sitting in the great hall by the fire, reading a book with the untroubled serenity of a man for whom the evening had gone exactly as planned.
Because it had. Jace understood this with a clarity that was cold and clean: Lucien had wanted him to find them in the kitchen.
Had orchestrated the scene, the body language, the foreign-language argument that looked like intimacy, specifically to trigger this response.
The jealousy, the confrontation, the desperate reclaiming in the forest, all of it was data.
All of it told Lucien exactly what he needed to know about the bond, about its strength, about its vulnerabilities.
"He played us," Jace said.
"Yes."
"And we played right into it."
"Yes."
Jace looked at Lucien through the window. The golden-haired vampire turned a page, and his lips curved in that warm, charming smile, and Jace felt the chill of understanding settle over him like frost.
This was not a battle he could win with passion. Lucien operated on a different board, with different pieces, and the rules of his game were invisible to human players.
But Jace was learning. The mountain was teaching him. And the thing Lucien hadn't calculated, the variable he'd left out of his elegant equation, was that Jace Warren was not the same man who'd stepped off the bus ten days ago.
That man had been hollow. Empty. A performance with nothing underneath.
This man had been filled. By the mountain. By Canyon. By the terrifying alchemy of loving something dangerous and choosing it anyway.
And filled men, Jace was discovering, were considerably harder to break.
"His hands," Milo said quietly. He'd been waiting at the clearing's edge, ostensibly hauling kindling, and he fell into step beside Jace as Canyon moved ahead toward the lodge.
"When Lucien talks to you, his hands are perfectly still.
But when he talks to Canyon, when they argue in that other language, his right hand moves.
Touches his chest. Right here." Milo pressed his own hand to his sternum. "Same spot every time."
"You noticed that?"
"When you're scared all the time, you learn to read people.
It's the only way to predict when they're going to hurt you.
" Milo's eyes were steady, the clarity of a man whose lifelong hypervigilance was finally being applied to a useful context.
"Lucien's performing with you. With Canyon, he's remembering something. Something that lives in his chest."
Jace looked at Milo, really looked, past the nervous exterior, and thought: This man sees everything. And no one knows it because everyone's too busy watching the louder people in the room.
He looked at Canyon. Squeezed his hand. And walked into the lodge with the steady gait of a man who had lost a battle and was already planning the war.
Lucien glanced up from his book. Smiled. "Pleasant evening?"
"Very," Jace said, and walked past without stopping.
Behind him, Canyon's eyes caught the firelight, silver, sharp, predatory, and fixed on Lucien with a gaze that said, more clearly than any words in any language: I know what you did. And it didn't work.
Lucien turned another page. His smile didn't waver.
But something behind the cognac eyes, something deeper than strategy, deeper than the game, flickered. Just for a moment. Just long enough for the firelight to catch it.
It looked, Jace thought as he climbed the stairs to Canyon's quarters, almost like hunger.
Not the strategic hunger of a Collector's agent assessing an asset.
Real hunger. The kind that Canyon carried. The kind that recognized something rare and wanted it not because it was useful, but because it was beautiful.
Jace closed the door and locked it. And in the silence of Canyon's room, with the ancient heartbeat approaching through the corridor, he made a note in the margin of his understanding:
Lucien is not just playing a game. Lucien is hungry too. And hungry creatures make mistakes.
The mountain heard the thought. And smiled.