21. Knox
KNOX
The second I touch her the wall comes down, and the thing behind it doesn't come quiet.
I get her up against the stacked wood, the rough split faces of it at her back, and I kiss her like I've been starving, because I have, because eleven years of careful goes to nothing the instant I let myself have the one thing I told myself I couldn't. The wolf's all the way up.
I can feel it looking out through my eyes, can feel it in my hands where they've fisted in her hair, in the sound that comes out of me when she arches into me and I get the full flood of her scent, wet leaves and cold pine and heat, the heat, the omega-sweet of it that's been pulling at me since the porch.
"I told you," I get out against her mouth. "Not gentle."
"I heard you." She drags my head back down. "I'm still here."
So I stop holding back the parts I was holding back.
I get her clothes off her between the woodpile and the wall, not careful with them, careful only with the bad leg, lifting it to hook around my hip so I'm taking her weight and the stitches don't pull.
Her hands are everywhere on me, nails dragging down my back hard enough to mark, and I want the marks, the wolf wants the marks, wants her scent in my skin and mine in hers until there's no telling whose is whose.
I get a hand between her thighs and she's soaked, slick running hot over my knuckles, ready and gasping when I work her open with my fingers, and the sounds she makes go straight through the last of my control.
"Knox." My name like a demand. She's not asking me to slow down. She's the opposite of asking me to slow down. "Now. I don't want to wait."
I line up and drive into her in one stroke and we both make a sound at it, her head going back against the wood, my forehead dropping to her shoulder.
She's tight and hot and fucking perfect around me, and for a second I have to just hold there, buried in her, breathing, the wolf roaring to move and the last scrap of the man making sure she's with me.
She's with me. She rolls her hips, impatient, and that's the end of it.
I take her against the woodpile hard and deep and exactly as rough as I warned her, and she meets every stroke of it, gives it back, pulls me deeper.
"Harder." Her teeth find my jaw, my ear.
"I'm not made of fucking glass, Knox. Harder.
" So I give her harder, and the sound she makes for it is going to live in me for the rest of my life.
There's nothing careful left in either of us.
The stack shifts behind her and I get an arm up to brace it and keep us from bringing a winter's worth of split cedar down on our heads and don't break rhythm doing it.
She's loud. I want her loud. Out here there's no door to be quiet behind, no house full of men holding a line, just the gray morning and the cold and the two of us and the steam coming off our skin.
I feel her start to go, feel her clench around me, and I get a hand down between us and work her clit with my thumb until she breaks, until she comes apart with my name in her mouth and her whole body shaking around mine, and I follow her right over the edge, buried deep, my teeth at the join of her neck and shoulder.
And the wolf wants to bite down. Wants to knot her. Wants to lock us together and make it permanent, the way the thing in me has wanted since the first night, and for one white second it has the leash all the way in its teeth.
I pull back from it. Christ, it costs me.
I don't knot her. I don't sink my teeth in.
I hold myself at that edge through sheer refusal and give her only what we agreed, and when it passes I'm shaking with the effort of the not-doing, my face buried in her throat, both of us wrecked and gasping against the wood.
"There it is," she says, after, breathless, her fingers in my hair. "The wrong part. I'm still here, Knox. Still all in one piece."
I lift my head and look at her, flushed and undone and entirely unafraid of the thing I just barely kept on its leash, and something in my chest that's been clenched for eleven years lets go a single notch.
"Yeah," I say. "You are."
I get us dressed. Her legs won't hold her, the leg and the heat and the rest of it, so I gather her up against my chest, and she lets me, and that's its own kind of strange, a woman who fought me on the porch going soft and trusting in my arms. The heat's banked again, eased for now, the sharing of it doing exactly what Gideon said it would.
I carry her out of the shed into the gray yard toward the house.
Halfway across the open ground I stop dead.
The wolf's still up, still right at the surface from her, and even soft in the head and useless the way I knew having her would make me, the nose doesn't lie. I turn my face into the wind and pull a breath and everything in me goes cold.
Iron. Wet stone. The cold-coin sharpness of old narrow blood.
Easton.
Fresh. Hours old, not days. While I was in that shed with her, deaf and blind to everything but the smell of her, somebody walked our south line.
A different one than the first scout, a younger note under it, but the same bloodline, the same careful tread, the same checking-not-hunting.
He came up to the edge of the cleared ground.
He stood about where I'm standing. And he left.
The exact thing I told her. The exact cost. The one day I can't afford to lose my edge, and I lost it, gladly, in a shed with my face in her neck, and an Easton scout walked our line while I did.
She feels me go rigid. "Knox?"
"Inside." I'm already moving, fast now, carrying her up onto the porch and through the door into the warm. "Now."
Cass is at the kitchen table. He takes one look at the two of us, at the marks on my neck and the flush on her and the wood-dust still on my back, and his face does the nothing it does.
He's been here the whole time. That's the thing I clock, standing in his kitchen with the smell of her all over me.
While I was in that shed losing my edge for a day, Cass was here, awake, holding the center, the way he held it the night Rhys had her and the night before that.
Three of us have gone to her now and Cass has watched every one of us come back wearing her scent and said nothing, done nothing, wanted her the whole time with a patience that would've broken a lesser man clean in half.
I came back from feral with the least left over and I still couldn't do what he's doing.
Waiting like that, while the thing you want most chooses everyone else first, takes a kind of strength I don't have and never will.
He's not last because she likes him least. He's last because he's the only one of us who could survive being last.
I set her down in a chair, careful, and straighten, and the man comes back up through the wolf because the man is what's needed now.
"I'm in," I tell Cass. The whole of it in two words. The wall, the woodshed, all of it.
"I know," Cass says. He's known since the roof. Probably before.
"There was a second scout at the line tonight." I hold his eyes. "Easton. Fresh. While we weren't watching. While I wasn't watching." I don't soften the last part. I earned it. "He came right up to the cleared ground and stood there and went home to report."
Something moves behind Cass's still face. Not anger. Calculation. The pack alpha doing the math on a clock that just jumped forward.
"Then we lay the trip lines at dawn," he says.