Chapter 8
Chapter eight
Jen
Morning light through the cabin window.
Thaw and Crull are still asleep beside me, breathing slow. Thaw's hand is heavy over my sternum. Crull's wrist is still locked over mine.
But the thread under my ribs is pulling me out from between them.
Harek.
I ease myself out. Thaw's thumb twitches against my chest. Crull's hand slides off my wrist.
My bare feet hit the cold floorboards. The oversized sweatshirt Dean gave me hangs to mid-thigh. Under it, my skin is still humming, but the heat has changed. It is not a fire anymore. It is a heavy steady weight in my pelvis that moves with me when I walk.
I open the bedroom door.
The front door at the end of it is open and the air smells like wet cedar.
Harek is not in the doorway anymore. He is on the floor at the far end of the kitchen, his back against the log wall, his knees drawn up to his chest. His massive arms are wrapped around his shins. His bright green eyes find me the second my feet clear the threshold.
It doesn’t look like he slept.
He does not have the words to ask, still mostly feral and broken from the facility. But his eyes are wide, tracking me as I cross the cold floor.
The thread between us does not yank. It tightens.
"Harek," I say.
His jaw works once. He does not move toward me. He is the unbonded male.
I drop to my knees on the floor in front of him. The wood is freezing against my bare skin.
I lift my hands.
I take his face between my palms.
Harek makes a sound.
A low click in his throat. His whole body goes rigid under my fingers, the muscle in his neck turning to iron, and his eyes lock onto mine. He does not pull away. He presses his cheek into my right palm. His long dark lashes flutter once against my skin.
"I'm here," I whisper. "Harek. I'm right here."
His hands come up slow and his large fingers find me. He does not squeeze. He just lays his palms against the sides of my thighs, his blunt claws pressing through the sweatshirt, anchoring me to the floor between his knees.
I lean forward and press my forehead against his.
He breathes me in. His chest expands against me, a massive shuddering intake of air.
"Mine?" he whispers.
The word is rough. The vowels clipped. The sound of a voice that has not been used for anything but survival in a very long time.
It is the first time he has asked.
"Yes," I say against his mouth. "Yours."
He does not crash into me.
He tilts his head. His mouth finds mine with a slow, broad, asking pressure. His lips are warm. His tongue comes against my teeth, asking. I open for him.
The thread under my ribs changes shape. It starts to braid. The unfinished line slides into the slot waiting for it under my sternum, alongside the others.
Harek groans into my mouth. He shifts his hands from my thighs to the hem of the sweatshirt, his palms sliding up under the fabric until he finds my bare waist. His skin is rough — facility scars, mountain calluses — and the friction of his hands against my ribs makes my belly clench.
He lifts me.
Smooth, sudden, his massive strength making the transition effortless. I am straddling his lap on the floor, my knees on either side of his hips, the sweatshirt bunched around my waist.
He looks up at me. His green eyes are wet at the rims. The skin at his temples and the line of his jaw has gone faintly luminous — the deep olive of him lit from underneath, the fae part of him surfacing for the first time since the corridor — and his dark green-black hair is falling across his forehead where I have been pulling at it.
"Jen," he says. The name is clearer this time. He shaped the consonants with his lips carefully. "Jen."
"I need you." My fingers tighten in his hair. "Harek. I need you inside me."
He rips his shirt over his head one-handed and then lifts us both off the floor and shoves his pants down, until he is free between us. He is thick, the tip already weeping a clear hot moisture against my thigh.
He positions the heavy head of his shaft against me, holding himself still on a single ragged breath, waiting.
I do not nod.
I press down.
I lower onto him an inch at a time. He is wider than Thaw. The stretch is sharper at the entry and I have to breathe through the first half because my body is sorting it — pain and need turning to pleasure. He bottoms out and I whimper,
He is so still under me he might as well be carved of stone.
His hands clamp onto my hips, his fingers digging into the flesh until the skin turns white, but his movement stops there. He holds himself completely still inside me, his forehead resting against me, his whole body trembling.
"Stay," he rasps into my skin. "Stay."
The word goes through me.
Not more. Not mine.
Stay.
I think about finding him on the kitchen floor.
He was waiting for me.
I wrap my arms around his shoulders. I pull him closer. My mouth finds the curve of his ear.
"I'm staying," I whisper. "I'm here, Harek. I am not going anywhere."
His whole body shudders.
He is trembling while holding himself completely still because he is asking the question with his whole body — will she still be here in one minute, in five, in an hour — and the only way he can ask it is to not move and find out.
I press my mouth against the side of his head.
I do not move either.
My answer is I am staying.
His pulse inside me steadies. The frantic heartbeat against my chest slows. One. Two. Three. I can feel him deciding to believe me one breath at a time.
When he moves, it is a single long slide upward.
He lifts his hips, his shaft dragging against the entire length of my walls, and I groan against his neck, my thighs tightening around him. He fills me to the brim.
The rhythm is slow. Each thrust is a deliberate weight shifting between us.
I am completely in my body. The cabin around us has gone quiet and the only thing in the world is Harek under me and inside me and breathing my name against my collarbone.
"Harek," I moan, my head falling back as the warmth in my belly deepens.
He feels it.
Heat is building in the line under my ribs. He speeds up. His thrusts turn shorter, harder, his breath coming in short grunts against my ear.
His hand slides up my back. His long fingers find the nape of my neck. He holds me steady as his hips slam into mine with a heavy final intent. I feel him so deep, pushing me higher, every thrust dragging across the spot that makes my whole body tighten around him.
The wave breaks.
It comes up through me from where he is buried, a hot full pulse that climbs my spine and locks my thighs around his hips, and I cry out into his shoulder, my body clenching around him in long rolling waves.
My fingers dig into the back of his neck.
I am shaking. I cannot stop shaking. The world has gone down to the place where he is inside me and the heat that is moving through me and his hand at my nape keeping me steady while I come apart.
"Mine," he growls, the word breaking into a three-note purr — the low continuous alpha note he used through the concrete wall of the cell.
He feels me coming around him and his body answers.
One last hard upward thrust and his whole body locks under me. His mouth finds the slope of my shoulder.
He does not bite to hurt. His teeth catch the skin right at the junction of my neck, pressing down with a sharp burning pressure, and a searing ring of heat flares on his neck and mine at the same time. The brand forms.
The third bond seals.
Harek comes with a long shattered roar that fills the kitchen, his body pulsing inside me over and over, the heat of his release pouring out around him onto the floorboards.
He stays buried in me. His head heavy on my shoulder. His purr vibrating into my lungs like a small steady engine.
The room feels quieter after.
The morning mist outside the window seems thicker. The house has stopped feeling like a place we are hiding in and has started feeling like a place where we are.
Harek does not slide out of me. He keeps his weight inside my body, his arms around my back, holding me against his chest while the brand on my neck cools to a permanent warmth.
From the bedroom, a low growl moves through the floorboards — Crull, awake now, acknowledging the change in the air. Then a second pulse, warm and clear down the oldest line — Thaw, sending a quiet welcome home across the house to the brother who finally crossed the threshold.
Harek lifts his head. His green eyes are clear, the black centers shrinking back until the bright intelligent green is fully readable. He looks at me. His mouth softens into something that is not a smile but lives in the same family.
"Jen," he says. His voice is flat and certain. "Ours."
"Ours," I say back.
I press my face into his neck, right over the warm fresh circle of his brand. He does not let me go. I feel his three-note purr rumble through his chest. He is not going to let me go for a long time. I do not want him to.