Chapter 16 #2
I don't go inside. I don't knock. I don't bring firewood or make noise or fill the silence, because my wolf is tearing itself apart against my ribs and the only thing holding it back is the knowledge that breaking the door down would prove her right about every alpha she's ever feared.
Time passes. I don't count it. My wolf paces inside me with the focused fury of an animal that has never in its life sat still when movement was possible, and the sitting is costing me more than the truth did.
The door opens.
Signe stands in the frame. The firelight behind her catches the silver-blonde of her hair and the hard, steady lines of her face. Her hands are at her sides. The pestle isn't in them.
"I'm not making the compound anymore."
The words are clinical. Precise. Delivered in the professional register she uses for diagnoses and treatment plans and every piece of information she considers final.
She's not saying I choose you. She's not saying I forgive you.
She's saying the thing in her language, in the only register that carries the weight of what she means, and the meaning underneath the clinical phrasing is louder than anything she could say with softer words.
I'm on my feet. I don't remember standing. My body covered the distance between the wall and the doorway before my brain caught up. My body never asks permission where she's concerned, and the not-asking is the most honest thing about me.
She doesn't step back. I step forward, and she holds her ground, and the space between us compresses to the width of a breath.
I kiss her. Not gently. The kiss has the same quality as every other time I've put my mouth on hers: it takes.
But what it takes is different. It takes the space between us and closes it.
It takes the clinical distance she's maintained since the first bandage change and burns it to the ground.
Her mouth opens against mine, and I taste the herbs she was grinding, the salt of the walk up the mountain, and underneath both is the omega that no compound will ever contain again.
My hands find her waist and move her backward, into the cottage, toward the worktable where the mortar sits with its half-ground contents and the pestle lies on the floor where it fell.
I walk her into the room without breaking the kiss.
The walking is the claim: I'm entering her space the way I entered her life, without permission and without apology.
The cloak falls between us. Each layer of her clothing I remove puts more of her scent into the air, the omega pouring off her skin without a barrier, rich and devastating.
I put my mouth on the bonding site. The skin just left of the hollow of her throat, the diagonal toward the clavicle. I don't bite. I breathe against it, and the not-biting costs me the way it costs me every time.
Her head falls back. The sound she makes is raw and stripped of every register she's ever used professionally, and it's the sound that tells me the clinical mind has gone offline.
I lift her onto the worktable. The mortar slides. She lets it go, and my restraint cracks open, because the mortar is the tool she uses to build walls and she just watched it slide toward the edge without reaching for it.
My mouth moves down her body. I take my time.
My tongue traces the underside of her breast, circles the nipple, draws it into my mouth and holds it with a pressure that makes her hips lift off the table.
I move lower, kissing the contour of her rib cage, the soft skin below her navel.
When my mouth reaches the slick heat between her thighs, I put my tongue against her with the slow, deliberate focus of a man who has been starving for this and intends to taste every second.
She's soaked. The slick coats my tongue and my chin and the inside of her thighs with the particular sweetness of an omega whose suppressant is gone, whose body is finally producing what it was always meant to produce.
I work her with my mouth until her fingers are in my hair and her thighs are shaking and the sounds she's making have stopped carrying any resemblance to the woman who tells patients to hold still.
I don't let her finish. I pull back, and the noise she makes at the loss of contact hits me somewhere primal.
My clothes are suddenly intolerable. I strip them off without taking my eyes from her, dragging my shirt over my head, kicking free of my boots and shoving everything else down and out of the way with more speed than grace.
She watches me the entire time, flushed and open, breathing hard, and whatever restraint I had left doesn't survive the sight of her.
Then there's nothing between us.
I push inside her in one slow stroke that seats me to the hilt, and the sound that comes out of both of us isn't words. Her body opens around me with a wet heat and gripping pressure I've felt before but never like this. Every other time there was a wall between us.
The wall is gone.
The omega welcomes me with contractions that pull me deeper, greedy and rhythmic, her inner muscles clenching around my cock in rolling waves that drag me into her with a force her conscious mind didn't authorize.
I hold still. Fully seated. Letting her feel every inch of what's inside her, the stretch of me, the fullness, the pressure of my hips against hers.
Her omega scent surges, thick enough to taste, flooding the cottage with a sweetness that sinks into the walls and the stone and my skin. The slick coats us both, running from where we're joined down the inside of her thigh and onto the worktable.
"You feel that." My voice comes out rough, low, carrying the possessive edge the man usually holds back and the wolf never does. "That's what it feels like with nothing between us. That's what your body does when it stops pretending it doesn't want me inside it."
She doesn't answer. She can't. Her head is back, her throat exposed, the bonding site bared in a way that hits me in the base of the spine. Her hips roll against mine, trying to create friction I haven't given her permission for.
I start moving. Slow. Each thrust a deliberate withdrawal to the edge, the head of my cock barely inside her, letting her feel the near absence before I push back in to the hilt.
The pace would infuriate the woman I pinned against a wall, and that's the point.
The slowness isn't gentleness. It's greed.
I want every second of what's happening inside her, every clench and flutter, every fresh rush of slick that eases the stroke and tells me her omega is giving me things she'd never offer in words.
She wraps her legs around me and tries to pull me faster. I grip her hips and hold her still. The noise she makes against my jaw is raw frustration, and the frustration is the most honest thing she's given me tonight because it means she's stopped pretending and started wanting.
"I've thought about this." My mouth finds the bonding site again, my tongue tracing the skin just left of the hollow of her throat.
"Every night on that cot. Every time you bent over a patient and your suppressant slipped and I could smell what you are underneath the compound.
I thought about being inside you exactly like this, with nothing between us, and the thinking kept me up more nights than the wounds did. "
Her inner walls clench hard enough to pull a groan from my chest. I thrust deeper in response, harder, and the wet sound of our bodies meeting fills the cottage alongside the fire's crackle. The omega contracts around me in rhythmic pulses that feel like a demand my body was built to answer.
My thumb presses against her clit. I circle, maintaining the slow pace of my hips while my hand works her with the calculated patience of a wolf who's already caught what he's chasing and intends to take his time with it.
She gasps. Her hips buck against my grip. The omega clenches around me so hard my rhythm falters, the only concession my body makes to what hers is doing to me.
I suck the bonding site while my thumb circles her clit and my cock fills her with each slow, devastating stroke, and the triple contact breaks her open the way clinical language never could.
The orgasm hits her in a wave that locks her body around mine, her inner muscles seizing in contractions so strong I can feel them in my spine.
She comes with her face pressed into the crook of my neck and a cry she buries in my skin because the cry belongs to the omega and the omega has never been allowed to be this loud.
I don't stop. I thrust through the contractions, through the clenching that grips me so tight each stroke is a battle, through the aftershocks that ripple through her in waves.
The omega milks me with rhythmic, involuntary pulses, and my wolf howls behind my teeth because the body underneath mine is doing exactly what it was built for.
The knot begins to form.
The swelling builds at the root, the pressure that's caught against her entrance and been forced down in every time before. This time I don't force it down.
With each thrust the base stretches wider, and I feel her body respond with a fresh flood of slick, the omega recognizing what's coming and preparing for the lock with a biological urgency that mirrors my own.
The thickening catches at her entrance, stretching her around the widening base, and the stretch pulls a sound from her throat that I'll remember until the day I stop breathing.
"The knot." My voice doesn't sound like mine. "It's forming."
Her eyes lock on mine. The clinical mind surfaces for one instant behind the blown pupils and the flushed skin, long enough to register what she already knows: a knot locks, it can't be undone until the biology releases, the forced stillness lasts.
She can feel me hesitate, feel the old reflex to clench my jaw and force the swelling down the way I've forced it down before.
"Don't stop."
I thrust deep one final time and the knot locks.