Epilogue #2
He stripped me slowly. His mouth against my sternum, my heartbeat slamming against his lips, then lower, following the line of my stomach while I got my fingers into his hair and held on.
I’d thought about this, but nothing I’d conjured came close to the reality of his mouth on my skin when I burned with heat.
When his tongue dipped lower and he sucked me down, I was lost to sensation, and I hated every moment of him putting on a condom.
By the time he had me stretched open and shaking, I’d said his name more times than I could count and stopped being embarrassed about it.
He’d taken his time with me, his mouth and his fingers working through the slick until I was a mess underneath him, and when he finally lifted his head and pressed his lips to my inner thigh, I heard him exhale like he was holding himself together by a thread.
“You taste so good,” he said, rough and low.
He was patient in a way that the heat made brutal, but when he finally pushed into me I made a sound that echoed off the walls and buried my face in his neck and felt the bonding thread go incandescent.
“I love you, Soren,” he said against my skin. “You’re doing so well, sweetheart.”
I wrapped my legs around his hips and pulled him closer, and he started to move, and my brain went offline.
I registered it in pieces after that. The rhythm of it, deep and steady, his weight above me, and my claws extended and digging into his shoulders.
The bonding thread ran bright between us, pulling tighter with every movement.
I couldn’t separate it from my heat. Couldn’t separate anything from anything.
Just him, and the pressure building, and then the thick stretch as he was coming inside me, the thick stretch as he knotted me, and my orgasm hit so hard my vision went white.
He nuzzled into my neck. “I love you.”
He bit me.
The pain was sharp, and then it dissolved, unraveling from the bite all the way through me, and the bond strengthened and settled.
That was the only word for it. I’d felt the thread for weeks now, the pull of him specifically, and now it was finished being a pull—now it was just real, and beautiful, and I pulled his mouth tighter against the mark because I didn’t want him to stop, not yet, not until it was finished.
He licked across the bite when he finally released it, slow and deliberate, and every pass of his tongue sent another aftershock rolling through me, small and sweet, until I was shaking with it.
I turned my face into his shoulder and breathed him in, woodsmoke and pine and something underneath that was only ever him, and I didn’t move, because I wasn’t ready for any part of it to end.
He held me. His knot kept us tied together and neither of us moved, and the fire had burned low in the grate.
The room had dimmed around us, and I could feel his heartbeat against my chest and his breath in my hair and the bond settling deeper with every exhale.
Not like something new. Like something that had been trying to exist for a long time, finally allowed to.
“Mine,” he said, into my hair.
I traced the marks I’d left on him with my claws and felt the bond warm and certain in my chest. I’d wanted this. I’d wanted him, specifically, for longer than I’d ever understood.
“Mine,” I said back. Quiet enough that he could still pretend not to have heard if it scared him, I said the rest. “One day I want a baby. Yours.” My throat tightened around it.
“Not because anyone told me to. Not because my body’s worth something to somebody’s bloodline.
Because I love you.” I pressed my palm flat over his heart, needing to feel it going as fast as mine. “Do you want that? With me?”
He was quiet, still buried deep, still holding me like I might come apart if he let go, and for a second, I thought I’d said too much, too soon.
Then his arms tightened, and I felt him nod against my hair before he found his voice.
“Yeah,” he said, rough. “I want that.”
I loved Cassian. I reached for him through our bond, the happiness and peace right there for me to feel.
“Can we run?” I asked, cautiously, as his knot subsided. He might not want that, and seeing him sprawled on the bed, my cum marking his skin, I was hoping he’d see past the claiming and want to run together in our fur.
He took my hand. “Please.”
We stumbled downstairs, wrapped in blankets, and skidded like kids into the kitchen.
“Yeah, yeah, bonded. We heard.” Brec said with a smile in his voice.
“Ronan?” Cassian asked so much in that one question. It had to hurt for Ronan to know his brother’s mate had found someone else.
“Raff would have wanted you to be happy, Cass,” he said, his voice cracking, then he inhaled before gesturing at the door.
“Go!” he added. Asha was propped against his shoulder, and he patted her back with the easy confidence of a man who’d done this a lot in the last few weeks.
Beside him, Brec had one arm braced along the back of the couch, watching Asha and Ronan with a smile.
“We’ve got her. Go run your fur off.”
Cassian’s hand found mine before I’d even finished pulling on my boots, and I was nervous, because tonight wasn’t just any run.
Tonight was the first time since Asha was born that both of us would be shifted together, with nothing between us and the mountain except cold air and the promise we’d made each other weeks ago in that kitchen.
The night was clear enough that stars had come out in scattered handfuls above the tree line, the snow thinned now into patches where dark earth and stubborn new grass pushed through.
I stood at the edge of the clearing with my heart hammering—not from fear this time—and stared at Cassian, who was already watching me with that quiet, waiting patience he never seemed to run out of.