Chapter 20 Criss
CRISS
She'd fallen asleep against his shoulder within minutes, her breathing evening out with the sudden, total surrender.
Criss lay in the dirt with her weight warm against his side and the stars wheeling overhead and his tiger so still inside him it was almost silent, which was worse than the restlessness.
The restlessness he could fight. The stillness meant the animal had made up its mind.
He didn't sleep. Every time he closed his eyes, the collapse replayed behind his lids.
The sound of the trench folding inward. The crack of the ridge face splitting apart above her head.
The half second where he'd been airborne, and shifted with his instinct aimed at the only thing in the world that mattered, and the sick certainty that he might not make it in time.
He'd made it. She was here, breathing, alive, curled against him with her hand resting on his chest and her dark curls dusted white and her heartbeat slow and steady under his palm.
And during what had happened after, somewhere in the middle of it, when she'd pulled him in and he'd felt her body lock around his and they'd come apart together in the dirt and the dust and the ruin of everything she'd worked for, something had clicked into place inside him with the finality of a deadbolt turning.
He knew what it was. He'd known since the first night at the tavern, maybe since the Griddle & Grind, maybe since her scent had hit him across a room. He'd just been very, very good at not looking at it directly.
He lay awake until the eastern horizon started to soften from black to grey, the first pale suggestion of dawn bleeding through the tree canopy. Then he eased out from under her arm and sat up, every muscle stiff from the cold ground and the hours of holding still.
Steph stirred. Her eyes opened, unfocused and heavy, and found him sitting beside her in the grey light. She blinked, registered the brightening sky, and pushed herself up on one elbow.
"What time is it?"
"Early. Just past five."
She looked at him, then at the destroyed basin beyond the oak roots, then back at him. Something moved across her face, the quick calculation of a woman deciding how to frame the last twelve hours. "I should get back. I need to file a report on the collapse before anyone else sees the site."
"Yeah. I should get moving too."
She nodded and reached for her thermal, shaking the dust out of it before pulling it over her head.
He watched her dress with the efficient, unselfconscious movements of someone reassembling armor.
Jeans, boots, jacket. Hair twisted back and secured with the pencil she'd somehow kept through a near-death experience and everything that followed.
By the time she was done, Stephanie Ward the professional was back in place, and the woman who'd pulled him down into the dirt and screamed his name was tucked away.
"Criss." She paused near the tree line, pack over her shoulder, and looked back at him. "Thank you."
"Anytime."
She held his gaze for a beat longer than casual. Then she turned and headed down the trail toward town.
He waited until she was out of sight before he shifted.
The change was easier this time, his tiger rising to meet the transformation like it had been waiting for permission.
He ran back to the cabin through the early morning woods, covering the distance in long, ground-eating strides, the cool air sharp in his lungs and the forest blurring past in shades of silver and green.
He shifted back on the cabin porch and stood naked in the dawn for a long moment, breathing hard, staring at the main house where warm light already glowed in the kitchen window.
Freya was up. Which meant Kieran was up.
Which meant the conversation he needed to have was waiting for him whether he was ready for it or not.
He showered, dressed, and crossed the yard with wet hair and the particular expression of a man walking into something he couldn't walk out of.
Kieran was at the kitchen table with coffee and the Gazette.
Freya was at the counter slicing bread, Sage on her knees in a chair beside her mashing banana into her own face with cheerful determination.
The kitchen smelled like toast and the herbs Freya kept drying above the stove.
It was so warm and domestic that Criss wanted to turn around and leave.
He poured coffee instead and sat down across from Kieran.
"You were out all night," Kieran said without looking up from the paper.
"Went for a run."
"A twelve-hour run."
"I'm thorough. You've said so yourself."
Kieran turned a page. Freya glanced over her shoulder clearly reading the subtext.
She caught something in Criss's face, because she quietly picked up Sage and the banana and left the room without a word.
Freya was good like that. She knew when to give the Holts space to be difficult with each other.
The kitchen went quiet. Criss stared into the coffee.
"Can I ask you something?"
"You're going to regardless."
"When you and Freya..." He stopped. Started again. "How did you know? About the bond. The mate thing. How did you actually know it was that and not just attraction?"
Kieran set the paper down. His eyes found Criss's. "Why are you asking?"
"Curiosity."
"You don't have curious questions, Criss. You have deflections shaped like questions. Try again."
Criss took a sip of coffee that was too hot and burned his tongue. "Fine. How did your tiger know before you did? And how long did you try to talk yourself out of it?"
Kieran crossed his arms over his broad chest.
"My tiger knew the first time I scented her.
Properly scented her, not just caught her in passing.
" His voice was measured, choosing words with care.
"It wasn't attraction. Attraction I understood.
This was different. It was like every other scent in the world went flat.
Like my tiger had been listening to noise my whole life and suddenly heard music. "
"And you just accepted that?"
Kieran almost laughed. "I fought it for weeks. Told myself it was proximity, pheromones, the investigation throwing us together. I had a list of reasons it couldn't be real that I added to every night."
"What happened to the list?"
"Freya happened to the list." The warmth in his voice when he said her name was quiet and absolute.
"She didn't do anything dramatic. She just kept being herself.
Stubborn and brilliant and completely unimpressed by my attempts to keep distance.
And eventually my list ran out of reasons that mattered. "
Criss turned his mug in his hands, watching the coffee swirl. "And the claiming. The bond. When it locked in. What did that feel like?"
"Like coming home to a place I didn't know I'd been looking for." Kieran studied him. "Why?"
"Just wondering."
"You're not wondering. You're asking because something happened and you're trying to figure out if it means what you think it means." Kieran uncrossed his arms and leaned forward, elbows on the table. "Does it?"
"Does it what?"
"Mean what you think it means."
The kitchen clock ticked. Sage babbled from the other room. Somewhere outside, a bird launched into its morning song with the aggressive optimism that Criss usually found irritating and today found unbearable.
"I don't know," he said. Which was a lie.
He knew. His tiger knew. The animal had gone cathedral-quiet inside him, the kind of stillness that came not from uncertainty but from absolute conviction.
The fight was over. The question was answered.
The only thing left was what Criss chose to do with it.
And what terrified him, more than Rydan Ashkar and more than the collapsing ridge and more than the sixteen years of erased history sitting in Kieran's study, was the understanding that hit him somewhere during the night, lying in the dirt with Steph asleep on his chest. Claiming her meant vulnerability.
It meant accountability. It meant becoming the kind of man who could be broken by losing someone, and Criss had built his entire adult life around being unbreakable by never letting anything matter enough to hurt.
She had to choose him. Not because his tiger demanded it or because fate had drawn some invisible line between them. She had to choose him freely, knowing what he was and what he wasn't, and if she didn't, he'd have to live with that.
"Kieran."
"Yeah."
"If someone's mate doesn't know about the bond. If the shifter knows but the other person doesn't. What happens if the shifter never tells them?"
Kieran was quiet for a long time. When he spoke, his voice was careful. "The bond doesn't go away. It just becomes something you carry alone. And it gets heavier."
Criss nodded and stood up.
"Thanks."
"Criss."
He stopped in the doorway.
"She deserves the truth."
Criss looked back at his cousin sitting at the kitchen table in the warm house he'd built with the mate he'd chosen and the life he'd earned through years of doing the hard, honest thing. Kieran, who had never once taken the easy road and had somehow ended up exactly where he was supposed to be.
"Yeah," Criss said. "I know."
He walked back to the guest cabin and sat on the porch in the morning sun and let the weight of it settle as he tried to decide if he was ready for something like this. But deep down he knew that didn’t matter anymore.