20. Emma
TWENTY
EMMA
Emma woke to gray morning light through a cracked window and the steady, unmistakable sound of Jace’s heartbeat under her ear.
The storm had passed sometime in the night.
She could tell by the quiet, by the way the cabin no longer shook with every gust, by the thin band of sun finding its way through the curtains.
Her side ached in a deep, newly-stitched way that told her Milo had done careful work while she drifted in and out, and her strength, while still thin, had stopped feeling borrowed on credit.
Milo had stepped out at first light to radio Tucker an update, leaving the cabin quiet.
“You’re awake.” Jace’s voice came rough with sleep and a tension that hadn’t fully released since the bridge. He slid sideways, careful of her side, and pressed his lips to her forehead like he needed to confirm she was real before he trusted the sight of her. “How do you feel?”
“As if I got into a fight with a bridge and the bridge won.” She flexed her fingers, testing. “Sore. Stitched. Deeply unwilling to fall off anything ever again. Ten out of ten, wouldn’t recommend the gorge experience to a friend.”
“Milo says you were lucky. Another inch and that laceration would have needed surgery instead of stitches.” His arms tightened around her, careful but certain. “Watching you fall took ten years off my life. I’m fairly sure I aged out of my thirties somewhere over that gorge.”
“I noticed. You screamed my name as if the world were ending, which, considering the circumstances, was a reasonable overreaction.”
“It was ending. My version of it, anyway.” His palm found her cheek instead, unhurried despite the urgency still audible underneath his calm. “Kane and the Chairman are both in federal custody. Roman confirmed it an hour ago. No matter what comes next, that part’s over.”
Emma let that settle and found herself smiling despite the ache in her side. “It’s over.”
“It’s over.” He pressed his forehead to hers, exhaling slow. Then he pulled back far enough to look at her properly, and the relief in his face went sharp for a second, something harder surfacing underneath it. “There’s a thing I need to say before I let this be only good news.”
“Okay.”
“You looked me in the eye and lied to me.” He said it plainly, without heat, and something about the quiet of it made her chest go tight in a way real anger wouldn’t have touched.
“I asked you for one promise. You gave it to me knowing you didn’t mean it, and I spent the whole drive to that compound thinking about that more than I probably should have, given everything else going on. ”
Emma didn’t flinch. “I know. I’d make the same choice again, if it meant nobody else I loved got hurt because of me—I need you to understand that part isn’t going to change.
But I’m still sorry I did it to you specifically.
You’d earned better than a lie, even a well-intentioned one. Even one I still believe was right.”
“I’m not asking you to be a different person.” His thumb traced her cheekbone, slow. “I’m asking you to fight it out with me next time instead of deciding for both of us in the dark. I can survive you being brave. I don’t know if I can survive you being brave and quiet about it at the same time.”
“Next time, I fight it out with you first.” She caught his hand, held it against her cheek. “I promise that one and I mean it.”
“Good.” He kissed her knuckles, and whatever had been sitting sharp behind his eyes finally eased all the way loose.
“Also, Roman wants you to know Diesel’s dog has been fed twice this morning by two people who didn’t know the other one had already done it.
Apparently that’s your problem now, since you’re the one who’s good at organizing chaos. ”
“That dog is going to be enormous by Christmas.”
“That dog is already enormous.” He kissed her, slow and thorough, both arms banded around her, infinitely careful, infinitely his, and pulled back only far enough to look her dead in the eye. “There’s one thing left.”
“Am I supposed to be nervous?”
“You get to be exactly as certain as I am.”
She knew what he meant before he said it, had known since the safe house, maybe before, the way his wolf had watched her with a certainty she’d only recently started to trust as real instead of overwhelming.
“Are you asking?”
“I’m telling you what I want, and asking whether you want it too.
” His palm settled warm against her jaw, reverent.
“I want to mark you, Emma. Fully. Permanently. Not because the danger’s finally over, and not because you nearly died in front of me, though both of those things are making it noticeably harder to wait even one more day than I already have. ”
Something in her chest cinched, and underneath the certainty sat one small, honest flicker of nerves she hadn’t expected.
“This is permanent. Genuinely permanent. Not fake-engagement permanent, not paperwork permanent. I don’t fully know what it’s going to feel like, and that’s a strange thing to want this badly anyway. ”
“Terrified?”
“A little. Mostly curious.” She held his eyes, refusing to look away from either the nerves or the truth underneath them. “What does it actually feel like, on your end? You’ve had a wolf your whole life. I’ve had exactly one broken engagement and a very healthy skepticism of permanent things.”
“Like the missing half of an instinct finally showing up.” His voice dropped, rough. “I won’t be able to lie to you again even if I wanted to. You’ll know exactly what I’m feeling, the second I feel it, whether either of us is ready for that or not.”
“That sounds terrifying and also like exactly what I want.” She didn’t hesitate again. “Then yes.”
“Yes,” he echoed, low, like he’d been waiting a long time to hear it settled instead of only felt. He kissed her, slow and reverent, tasting the truth of it on her mouth, and helped her up from the narrow bed with hands that had gone gentle in a way she’d only ever seen him manage around her.
What followed had none of the frantic urgency of their first time, none of the quiet unhurried patience of their second.
This was its own different animal entirely—hungrier than either of the times before it, and more honest, two people meeting each other with absolutely nothing left unsaid, every touch a choice both of them had already made out loud.
He undressed her slow, deliberate, mouth following every inch his hands uncovered, worshipping the parts of her that had survived this war right alongside the parts that hadn’t been touched by it at all.
She arched into him, fingers digging into his shoulders, and when he finally settled his weight over her, skin against skin in the cabin’s thin morning light, his eyes had gone half-gold, wolf pushing close to the surface and staying there.
“Look at me,” he murmured, low and rough. “The whole time. I want you watching when it happens.”
She held his eyes as he pushed inside her, slow, and the fullness of it dragged a broken sound out of both of them at once.
He set a pace that built and built without ever rushing, deep and deliberate, every thrust punctuated with a fresh confession spoken against her skin—her name, a filthy promise, a truth he’d clearly been saving.
Her nails dragged down his back. His growl vibrated straight through her chest.
“Faster,” she gasped, hips rising to meet him. “Jace—”
He obliged, driving into her harder, and the sounds coming out of both of them stopped resembling anything careful or restrained. The climax built low and relentless through her, and he swelled thick inside her the way she’d learned meant he was close too, and his mouth found her ear.
“Now,” he growled. “Come with me. Right now, Emma.”
“Now,” she echoed, and release tore through her exactly as he said the word, her whole body clenching around him in wave after wave.
He came with her, groaning her name into her skin, and at the precise, blinding peak of it his teeth closed on the back of her shoulder—not gentle, not tentative, a claiming bite that fused pain and pleasure into one single unbearable sensation—and the bond snapped into place the instant his release and hers crested as one.
The world went white, then gold, then wholly, permanently rearranged.
Warmth flooded through her with no clean edges, no beginning she could point to, only the sudden, total knowledge of him settling into her chest like he’d always belonged there.
His relief registered plainly, distinct from her own.
So did his love, woven through hers so completely she couldn’t find the seam.
He licked gently over the bite mark, soothing it, and gathered her against his chest, both of them shaking.
“I feel you,” she whispered, wondering, tears she hadn’t expected slipping free. “I don’t have a framework for this. I only feel you, like you’ve always been there.”
“I have been.” His voice came thick. “You only didn’t have the bond yet to know it.”
Rescue helicopters found the ranger cabin an hour after dawn, the storm finally, fully broken, and Emma woke fully bonded to a world gone entirely different in ways she had no vocabulary for.
Gerri met them at the medical tent, took one look at the mark blooming dark and unmistakable at Emma’s shoulder, and threw both hands in the air, triumphant, as though she’d won a bet nobody else knew she’d placed.
“FINALLY.” Her voice carried across the entire tent, several federal agents turning to stare.
“Do you have any idea how long I have been waiting for that mark to show up? I matched you two before either of you could spell your own feelings, and you took your sweet time getting here, and I am simply thrilled, and I would also like it noted, publicly and permanently, that I am never wrong, not once, not ever.”
“Gerri—”