Chapter 6 #3
The heat of her mouth surrounds me. The slick pressure of her tongue works the underside in long, deliberate strokes.
Her jaw opens wider when my hips lift, and a sound vibrates in her throat when I push deeper than she intended, barely audible, impossible to miss.
Her hand wraps around the base where she can't follow, fingers tight, taking in the girth and the heat.
The dual sensation strips the coherent thoughts from my skull one at a time until the only thing left is the feel of her and the animal certainty that she's been mine since the cottage whether she's ready to hear it or not.
My wolf catches the scent change before I do.
The suppressant, which has been holding with diminishing authority since the cottage, loses another fraction of its ground, and what bleeds through is omega.
Not the faint thread I caught during the bandage change.
A full harmonic, sweet and dense and biologically unmistakable, her body responding to the alpha pheromones flooding the space between us.
The compound can mask her at rest. It can mask her during casual contact. It can't mask her while she's on her knees with her mouth on a compatible alpha and every receptor in her body is firing in a direction the suppressant wasn't designed to contain.
The slick follows. I can't see it but I can smell it, rich and warm, her body producing the one biological signal that no amount of professional framing can redefine as assessment.
She knows. I watch the knowledge arrive in her face, the fraction of a second where the healer processes what her body is doing and the woman behind the healer understands what it means.
A sound escapes her, low and involuntary, bitten off before it can become anything she'd have to acknowledge. She falters under my grip. Recovers. Resumes with desperation replacing the precision, racing to finish before the finish takes what she can't afford to lose.
My grip doesn't ease. The base of me swells against her palm, the alpha precursor she'd describe in medical terminology if she weren't experiencing it against her skin, the biology that says the body she's touching wants to lock and hold and keep.
She adapts instead of pulling away, her fingers accepting the thickening, and the knowledge that her hands are meeting my biology rather than retreating from it unravels the last thread of control I have.
I finish with her name in my mouth, bitten off before the second syllable, my back arched off the cot and my fist still locked in her braid.
Every muscle in my body strains against the drive to pull her up and put my mouth on the hollow of her throat and give both of us the irreversible thing she described in such careful language.
My hand opens. Her hair slides free.
The infirmary is quiet. My breathing sounds like I've been running for days.
Signe sits back on her heels. Wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. The gesture is practical, efficient, and it undoes me more completely than anything that preceded it.
She's putting the tools away after a completed procedure, and the fact that she can reduce what just happened to something completed is either the most impressive display of will I've ever witnessed or a wall I'm already planning to take apart.
"That was on my terms," she says. Her voice is steady.
Her left hand drifts toward the hollow of her throat before she catches it and folds it into her lap.
From where I'm lying, I can still catch the faintest trace of the omega harmonic the compound should have buried by now.
Whatever the suppressant lost tonight, it hasn't recovered it.
"The terms don't include reciprocation."
My hand was in her hair for every second of it. My grip set the pace and the depth and she followed where I led. There's nothing about what just happened that was on her terms. We both know it. The lie is the most controlled thing she's done all night.
I let it stand. She needs the fiction the way she needs the pestle and the grinding and the steady rhythm that puts everything back in its place.
"Your terms," I say instead.
She stands. Straightens her clothing. Turns back to the worktable, where the mortar and pestle sit exactly where she put them when she moved into the fortress infirmary. Signe may have changed rooms, but apparently her instruments aren't allowed the same freedom.
The grinding begins again, measured, constant, the sound she uses to reassemble what I just dismantled.
My left hand closes into a loose fist at my side. The fist is becoming a habit, and the habit is becoming a tell. It's holding something I'm not ready to name.
She grinds. I breathe. The infirmary holds both sounds, and the silence between them is full of every word neither of us is willing to say.
What stays with me is the taste of the compound on her breath, the scent of slick I shouldn't have caught, and the memory of her hands accommodating the swelling instead of pulling away. She calls them her terms.
My wolf doesn't believe a word of it.