Chapter 25
Merric
Jonas walks us to the alpha quarters—a separate cabin behind the lodge, built for privacy.
It’s set back from the main compound by fifty yards of cleared ground, backed against a stand of white pines that make the air smell sharp and clean.
Inside, it’s as I left it—spare, functional, the furniture built by the same wolves who built the lodge.
Except for a vase of mountain wildflowers on the kitchen table that somebody put there while I was gone.
Yellow and white. The gesture is small and anonymous, and it loosens something in my chest.
Cameron takes the spare room without comment. He pauses in the doorway, looks back at Brenna and me standing together in the kitchen, and for a moment his face is unreadable.
Then he says, “Edda’s three wolves. The one on her left was scared. The other two were angry. There’s a difference.”
He closes his door. I frown at it for a moment. Seventeen, and he’s already sorting fear from conviction the way Brenna sorts intelligence. Is this another branch of his powers? I’m starting to believe we’ve only scratched the surface of what he’s capable of.
Brenna stands at the window, looking out at the compound. The lodge lights are warm through the pines. Wolves move between buildings, their breath visible in the mountain air. Somewhere, a door closes. A dog barks. The ordinary sounds of pack life.
“It’s different from what I expected,” she says.
“How?”
“Bigger. More established. More…” She searches for the word. “Rooted. This pack has been here for generations. You can feel it in the ground.”
She’s right. Frostbourne isn’t a ranch with thirty refugees.
It’s a functioning pack with countless wolves, a political seat, infrastructure, history.
Three generations of alphas built this valley into something that endures.
What I did tonight—announcing her, claiming Cameron—sends waves through a structure that took a hundred years to build.
“Edda’s going to move against you,” Brenna says. She turns from the window.
“I know.”
“She’ll have Bern’s backing. Maybe not openly. But the communication channels are there.”
“I know that too.”
“And those vehicles Jonas mentioned. Night runs on logging roads leading to your compound.” She crosses her arms. “Someone’s preparing something, Merric.
The timing of Bern’s visit, the intelligence he gathered at the ranch, and now surveillance on Frostbourne…
That’s not three separate events. That’s a campaign. ”
“We’ll handle it.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Because it keeps being true.”
She holds my eyes, and I know what’s unsaid. She’s worried, but she trusts me. And that’s something I could never have dreamed would happen.
“Let’s go to bed,” I say.
“It’s barely nine o’clock.”
“And?”
The corner of her mouth lifts. She uncrosses her arms. Walks past me toward the bedroom. Pauses in the doorway.
“If these walls are thin,” she says, “that’s your problem.”
She disappears inside.
I check the front door. Check the windows. Cameron’s room is quiet; the kid can sleep through anything, which is either a gift or a survival mechanism. Probably both.
I step into the bedroom, and she’s already pulled her shirt over her head.
Standing in the moonlight from the window in her jeans and a bra that isn’t designed to be attractive and is the most attractive thing I’ve ever seen because it’s on her body, in my room, in the cabin where I’ve slept alone for my entire adult life.
“You’re staring,” she says.
“I’m appreciating.”
“Appreciate faster.”
I cross the room. My hands find her waist, the curve of muscle over her hips, the warmth of her skin, the flare of her ribcage.
She reaches for my shirt and pulls it up and off, and her palms splay on my chest. The contact—her hands on me, warm on my flesh, exploring—sends a flood of electricity through me.
I think it’s always going to be that way.
We’re different now. The desperation is gone, or at least it’s reduced, because I’ll never get enough of her.
What replaces it is intention. She’s here.
She chose to be here. She walked into this compound and faced a pack of hostile wolves.
She stood at my left and took Edda’s fire.
Now, she’s standing in my bedroom, choosing me. Again. Always.
I kiss her. Slowly. Savoring her. She tastes like the mint tea she drank at dinner, and her mouth is warm and sweet.
Her hands work my belt. Mine unbutton her jeans. We undress each other with the measured urgency of two people who aren’t rushed but aren’t patient either. Her bra. My jeans. The last layers stripped away until we’re standing naked in the silver light.
“God. You’re so fucking beautiful.” My voice is hoarse. I raise a hand and trace my fingertips down her chest. Cup a moonlit breast.
She pulls in a breath, then puts a hand on my chest and pushes. I sit on the bed. She stays standing while I sit, and it puts her above me. The look on her face tells me that’s exactly where she wants to be.
“Lie back,” she says.
I lie back. The mattress is the same one I’ve slept on for a decade, and it has never felt like this. The cool sheets against my back, the anticipation singing through my blood, the woman climbing onto the bed and straddling my hips with the deliberate confidence of someone claiming territory.
Because that’s what this is. In a compound where she’s the outsider, in a cabin that belongs to me, in a bed where no one has been but me, she’s claiming it. Making it hers. The wolf in her knows what this means. So does the wolf in me, and he’s more than willing to let her take what she wants.
She settles over me. The heat of her core against my length, not taking me in, just resting there, and the tease of it makes me grip her thighs hard enough that she smiles.
“Patience,” she says.
“Not my strongest quality.”
“I’ve noticed.”
She rolls her hips. A slow, deliberate grind that drags a sound out of me I don’t entirely control.
Her hands are on my chest, her eyes locked on mine, and I can feel what she’s feeling: the power of this position, the control, the satisfaction of making a man who commands a company of wolves come apart under her hands.
She lifts. Takes my shaft in her hand. Guides the head of my cock to her entrance and teases me there.
“Fuck,” I choke out.
“Still impatient.” She grins. Then sinks down—slow, inch by inch, her teeth catching her lower lip, her eyes never leaving mine. The feeling of her around me, tight and wet and searingly warm, shuts down every higher function in my brain. My hands find her hips. She pins them to the mattress.
“My turn,” she says.
She rides me. Slow at first, long, deep rolls that take me to the root and hold me there.
I’m drowning in sensation; what I feel and what she feels, the fullness and the stretch and the angle she finds that makes her go tight for a half-second before she moves again, harder.
Her pace builds. Her fingers thread through mine on the mattress, pressing my hands down, using them for leverage.
I watch her. The moonlight cutting across her body, the muscle in her thighs, the sway of her breasts, the mate mark on her throat glowing faint silver.
She’s the most powerful thing I’ve ever seen.
Not because of the magic. Because of the choice.
Because this woman walked through hell and came out the other side and is choosing to be here, above me, taking what she wants with a focus that makes the world feel very small and very right.
Her pace shifts. Faster. Harder. Taking me all the way in. The sight of her lips stretched around the gleaming girth of my cock is the sexiest thing I’ve ever fucking seen.
“God!” I growl, heat rising in me till it feels like every cell is burning.
She leans forward, releases my hands, braces her palms on my chest, and the new angle changes everything. Her eyes flash with the wolf inside as she tightens around me, and her breath goes ragged. I feel the orgasm building in her, a rising pressure that mirrors the one building in me.
“Merric—”
“I’m here.”
“I know you are. That’s the point.”
She comes. Head back, spine curved, my name on her lips; not screamed, spoken, with a certainty that makes it sound like a fact of nature.
I feel the crest, the break, the flood of heat, and it pulls me over with her.
My hips drive up, and she meets me, grinding down.
I spill into her with a groan that I muffle against her shoulder because the walls are thin and my son is sleeping twenty feet away and we’ve already traumatized him enough for one lifetime.
She collapses onto my chest. I wrap my arms around her. We breathe.
“Mine,” she says against my collarbone. Soft. Satisfied. Not a question.
“Yours,” I confirm. “The cabin. The bed. The alpha. All of it.”
“What if you’re not alpha forever?”
“Then I’ll be whatever I am, and you’ll still have me.”
She lifts her head. Looks at me. Her eyes are soft in a way I’ve only seen them in these moments… the after, the settling, when the walls she maintains for the rest of the world come down, and it’s just her. Just us.
“Whatever’s coming starts tomorrow,” she says.
“Tomorrow.”
“And tonight?”
“Tonight you’re here. That’s what matters.”
She settles against my chest. Her breathing evens out. Our mate connection hums between us—warm, anchored—and outside the cabin window, Frostbourne sleeps under the mountain sky.
I hold her. I listen.
Tomorrow, the fight. Tonight, this.