Chapter 7
Gemma
The last night on the mountain, we don’t sleep.
I know it’s the last night before he says anything.
He cooks—tonight it’s something with rice and peppers he’s been rationing.
It’s the best thing I’ve ever eaten, and I tell him that.
He looks at me the way he does when I say things he doesn’t know what to do with. He puts more in my bowl without asking.
The stars out here are different. No light pollution, no town glow on the horizon—just the whole sky doing exactly what it wants.
I lie on my back on the sleeping pad outside the tent and look at them, trying to find Orion, which I can never find.
Decklan sits beside me, reaches up, traces the shape of it without being asked.
“That one’s easier in winter,” he says. “More contrast.”
“I can see it now.” I can. His hand made a shape I can hold in my head. “Do you know all of them?”
“Most of them.” He lies down beside me. His shoulder against mine. “Three years of clear mountain nights.”
I think about that. Three years of this sky and no one to show it to. “That sounds lonely,” I say.
“It was.” He says it without drama. Like reporting a weather condition.
“Not tonight.”
“No.” A beat. “Not tonight.”
I roll onto my side to look at him. He’s still looking at the stars, jaw tipped up, and in the starlight his profile is something I want to memorize.
The beard, the lines of his face, the way he goes still when he’s thinking.
He’s been thinking all night. I can feel it in him—something he’s working toward or working around.
“Ask me,” I say.
He turns his head. “What?”
“Whatever you’re trying to ask me. You’ve been circling it all night.” I prop my head on my hand. “I can tell when you’re quiet at me versus quiet at the stars.”
“You’ve known me four days.”
“I told you I was going to figure you out.”
A long pause. His eyes are on mine, gold in the last of the firelight. “The marking,” he says. “I won’t do it unless you ask.”
I don’t say anything yet. I know what a mark means—he explained it after the canyon. Permanent. Visible. A wolf’s claim, worn on the skin. It’ll sit on my shoulder for the rest of my life, darker than the brown around it, where anything with a nose can read it.
“What does it feel like,” I ask. “For you. When you give it.”
He doesn’t answer immediately. He looks back at the stars. “Like a lock closing,” he says finally.
“And for me?”
“For the mate, it—the bond settles. You’d feel me. Not always, not like a full pack bond. Just—there. The way you know where you are in a room even in the dark.”
I lie on my back and look up at Orion. I can hold the shape of it now.
“Decklan.”
“Yeah.”
“I want everyone to know.” I turn my head. He’s watching me. “The other wolves, Eli when you call him, whoever else is out there in Harlow who needs to see it. I want them to know.” I hold his gaze. “And I want you to know. Because I don’t think you entirely believe I’m staying.”
His jaw moves. He doesn’t look away and he doesn’t answer.
“I’m staying,” I say. “I’ve been saying it. This is the version you can see.”
He reaches over and cups my jaw. His thumb at my cheekbone. He doesn’t say anything because he’s Decklan and this is how he does things—he touches instead of talks, he acts instead of explains—and I lean into his palm.
“Come here,” he says, low.
I go.
Inside the tent it’s dark and warm and he takes his time in a way that feels different from the last four days.
Slower. More deliberate. Like he’s trying to do it right.
He strips me out of every layer with his hands shaking slightly—just the once, at my zipper—and then out of his own, and I take his face in both hands and make him look at me.
“You’ve got me,” I say.
“I know.” He kisses me once. “I know.”
He goes down on me in the dark.
He takes his time. His hands run down my sides first—slow, deliberate—his palms spanning my waist and spreading wide over my hips like he’s learning every curve.
He says something low I can’t quite hear and his hands don’t move for a moment, just hold me there, and when his mouth finally finds me I’m already shaking.
His tongue parts my pussy slow. Not circling yet—just there, warm and unhurried, a pressure that builds in increments.
My hands go to his hair. He makes a sound against me that vibrates through everything.
My hips roll up. His hands flatten on my inner thighs and press me down. Hold me exactly where he wants me.
“Decklan—”
“I’ve got you.” Against me. Another vibration. “Let me.”
He circles my clit. Slow at first. Building the rhythm he knows already—he’s been paying attention all trip, in the canyon, in the tent, by the fire—and when he gets it right I arch and he does it again. And again. The same care he puts into everything. He knows what I need before I’ve said it.
He brings me right to the edge. I can feel it gathering—close, pulling, just one more?—
He eases back.
“No—”
“Tell me what you want,” he says. Low. Roughened.
“Your mouth. More—please?—”
He gives me his tongue inside me. Deep, slow thrust of it, then back up to my clit, and two fingers work into my pussy while his lips close and suck.
I try to keep quiet and fail completely.
The sounds in the tent are mine, bouncing off the tent wall, and I stop caring.
His fingers curl. His mouth stays on my pussy. The edge rushes back fast and hard?—
“Please,” I say. “Please, Decklan, please?—”
He lets me go over.
Long and slow, all the way through it, his mouth gentling as I come down but not leaving. I’m still shaking when he lifts his head and moves up my body and his face is in the shadows and I can feel how much he wants me in the weight of his cock against my thigh.
“Good girl,” he says, very quiet. Like it means something. Like everything he doesn’t say out loud is in those two words.
I’m still shaking when he pushes inside me. I pull him down so he’s covering me fully—all that weight held just off—and he drives in slow until he’s all the way seated. The stretch hits me. The fullness. I exhale.
“Hey,” I say softly.
“Hey.” He presses his forehead to mine.
We move together in the dark, slow now, the urgency worn down to something quieter. He says my name. Just that. Just Gemma, against my temple, and I pull him closer.
“I was heading nowhere,” I say. He’s moving slow and deep and I’m talking between it, getting my breath when I can. “That trip I said I was taking—figuring out the next thing. I was actually just moving because standing still felt worse than moving. I didn’t have a direction.”
“You have one now,” he says.
“I have one now.” I arch into him. “You. Harlow. Whatever comes after.”
He drives into me and I gasp and he does it again, deliberate, finding the thing that undoes me.
His rhythm picks up. Rougher. I grab his back and hold on and we go where we’re going together—both of us climbing, both of us breathing hard, and he’s murmuring things against my neck, I’m yours I’ll take care of you you’re mine you’re perfect, going to give you everything, going to fill you up and keep you full, all of it in the low wrecked voice he only has when he’s past thinking.
I tip over the edge. He drives through it. The knot starts to swell—I know it now, I know the feel of it coming—and I push into it and let it catch.
“Gemma.” Strained. Right at the edge.
“Give me the mark,” I tell him. “I want it. Right now. Do it.”
He bites.
His teeth find the curve of my neck and shoulder and close—not a break, but enough, a proper pressure with the weight of something permanent behind it—and the mate bond hits like a door clicking shut. Like Orion’s shape, finally held in my head.
He makes a sound against my skin that is nothing like anything he’s made before—raw and gone and finished. I’m going to hear it in my head for the rest of my life.
The knot locks. He fills me—his cum flooding hot and deep as the bite seals—both of us still. His mouth gentling against where his teeth just were.
Warm on my temples. On my jaw. I’m crying. I’m not upset. I don’t have words for what I am.
“Hey.” He pulls back enough to see my face in the dark. “Hey?—”
“I’m fine.” I catch his face in my hands. “I’m good. This is just—a lot. The good kind of a lot.”
He looks at me. His thumb brushes my temple. His expression is—he’s never looked like this before. Stripped of every barrier he carries, all the quiet competence and the deliberate stillness. He looks like a man who got something he’d stopped letting himself want.
“You’re beautiful,” he says. It’s the first time he’s said it. It sounds like a conclusion he’s been coming to for four days and just finished reaching.
I cry a little more. He pulls me against his chest.
We lie tied together under the stars, and I track their slow rotation overhead through the tent wall. Decklan’s heartbeat is under my palm. His hand is big and steady on the back of my head. His chin rests on my hair.
“Three years,” I say, eventually.
“Yeah.”
“You were up here alone for three years.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s done.”
A pause. His arm tightens around me. “Yeah,” he says. “That’s done.”
The mountain is very quiet. The stars keep moving.
I stay awake for a long time, just feeling where I am.
I’m home. I don’t know Harlow yet. I don’t know what comes after the trailhead. But I’m exactly right. Settled.
I’m going to be very smug about the fact that I figured it out before him.
I fall asleep smiling. His heartbeat under my hand. Steady. There when I look for it.
There when I don’t.