Valek
I'm drowning.
The bond is tearing me apart from the inside, a chest wound with no exit, spilling everything I've spent so many fucking years bricking up behind walls so thick I forgot what was behind them.
And she's in it.
She's in the black. In the nothing. Swimming through the bloodied wreckage of every fucked-up thing I've ever done and been and survived, and I feel her inside my chest, in every cell, the tendrils of our shaky bond piercing into my very marrow.
My teeth are still buried in her shoulder.
I can't let go.
I have to. Have to pull my teeth free and slam the door shut and shove everything back down in the yawning pit inside me where it belongs.
My jaw is locked so tight it's hurting me, it must be hurting her, and her warm blood is so copper-sweet on my tongue there's nothing else I ever want to taste again.
But she's doing something to me.
I don't know what.
She's dragging me into the warmth like I'm a dog she's dragging into a warm house by the collar, coaxing me over a threshold without once letting go of me, my claws digging furrows.
She forces me into the light with sheer stubborn determination.
By flaying me alive from the inside out.
My jaw finally unlocks and my head drops forward against her collarbone, my whole body shuddering so hard my teeth chatter.
I'm still knotted inside her, still locked, still pulsing, but all the ecstasy coming inside her brought me is buried under the avalanche of everything the bond just ripped loose.
"Val," she whispers, her fingers in my hair. "Hey. I'm right here."
I can't speak.
My hands are shaking so badly I can't hold her. They keep slipping on her wet skin, finding her waist and losing it, grabbing at her ribs and sliding off.
Fucking useless.
I press my palms flat against her back and hold them there through sheer willpower, my fingers spread wide, and I feel her ribs expanding and contracting beneath my hands.
"Breathe with me," she says.
I try.
It comes out ragged and fucking stupid, more of a rasping snarl.
"Again."
I match her next inhale. My lungs burn. The exhale shudders out of me and my shoulders sag. It's a wonder I'm still able to sit up straight.
"Good." Her lips press against my temple and everything else ceases to matter. "That's good."
The bond is still wide open. I feel her inside it, warm and steady and absurdly calm. I'm waiting, barely able to breathe, for her to process what she must have felt when I marked her.
To realize I'm not like the others.
To realize she can't save me.
Her fingers run through my wet hair, her ribs vibrating beneath my palms, and I'm starting to fear she won't realize that at all.
Because she's… purring.
The vibration rumbles through her soft chest into my own ribcage where we're pressed together, and it's…
Fuck.
FUCK.
My eyes are burning and it isn't the fucking pepper spray anymore.
I bury my face harder into her collarbone.
"I've got you," she murmurs. "I'm not going anywhere."
A sound tears out of my throat. It's nothing I even knew I was capable of. It's just…
Pain.
I didn't fucking know I could even feel pain anymore and I hate it, and all I can do is snarl at it, and tear at it with everything I have. But it's inside me now, and there's fuck all I can do to freeze it out when I'm bonded to the sunniest, brightest creature that ever lived.
Her arms tighten around my neck, her chin resting on top of my head, her purr steady and beckoning me over that fucking threshold again.
Slowly, the snarling in my chest dies down.
Something sits in the void that wasn't there before.
I don't know what it is. It's small and warm and it has no fucking business being inside me, nestled in the black like an ember someone dropped into snow.
I don't trust it.
But I don't snuff it out.
My breathing evens out in increments until I realize I'm sagging against her like a pathetic whelp, my hands still clutching her against my body.
I lift my face out of her collarbone.
Her ocean eyes find mine, soft in the glow from the fire I built for her.
There's blood on her lips from my split lip, and blood on her shoulder where my mark is already silvering into the shape of my bite.
It sits layered over the others, and beneath all of them, the old burn scar she gave herself to escape another monster.
"Welcome back," she whispers, kissing me again.
My jaw works. "I didn't go anywhere," I manage.
"You did." She brushes wet hair off my forehead, her fingers gentle. "But you came home."
I don't know what to say to that, so I don't say anything at all.
We sit there together, still locked together in the middle of fucking nowhere, both of us soaked and battered and covered in scrapes and mud and each other's blood.
I've never felt less in control in my entire life. And for the first time, the absence of control doesn't make me reach for a knife.
I'm so fucking out of it, I barely register her reaching up to trace the fresh mark on her shoulder, wincing slightly at the tenderness. I watch her, unsure if it's regret, but when she cranes her neck to look at it, she smiles.
"It's pretty," she murmurs.
"It's a bite wound," I say flatly.
"Shouldn't that make it prettier to you?"
She pokes me in the sternum and I catch her finger.
She grins wildly at me, her eyes flicking to my own shoulder.
Something… stings.
There's a hot, throbbing ache in the flesh there beneath the cold, separate from the scrapes and the bruises and all the places the ground beat the living shit out of me.
This is different.
I twist my head to look.
Teeth marks.
"You bit me."
I press two fingers against the wound.
It stings worse.
I press harder.
She lets out a cute little satisfied sound and leans forward to kiss it apologetically. The stinging sensation flares at the touch and my cock twitches inside her.
"You're fucking insane," I mutter.
"That's rich, coming from you," she breathes, nuzzling into my neck.
Fair.
But omegas don't mark alphas. It isn't done.
Then again, Plague bit Whiskey, and nothing about this pack has ever been done the way it's supposed to.
The wound isn't healing just yet. It isn't the type of mark an alpha gives an omega, the type that turns a pretty silver over a few hours. This will be a normal scar, like the ones they gave each other.
This will also be my favorite scar.
There's something else, too, besides her vines and my thorns grafting her pure soul onto whatever fucked up shell is left of me.
Four other presences, faint but unmistakable.
One is fainter than the others, barely a shadow, the one whose mark hasn't been left on her yet, but who lives inside her ribcage all the same.
I've belonged to groups before. Alliances. Arrangements. Things held together by necessity and dissolved when necessity ended. Packs of strays.
This is eternal.
And fucking terrifying.
Ivy shivers and I pull her tighter against my chest, wrapping both arms around her and tucking her head under my chin because I don't know what the fuck else to do but keep her warm and hope to all the gods above and below that she doesn't want to talk about all this.
I'll make a mess of it. I can't formulate a single cohesive thought. She's hollowed me out and crawled inside what's left, and what's left isn't much.
She burrows deeper against me, her lingering purr quieting to a low, happy hum. I barely hear it over the crackle of the fire and the river just beyond it, but I feel it in my bones.
"Val?" she whispers.
Oh, fuck.
Here it goes.
Another conversation I don't know how to have, and I'm going to have it anyway because I'll do anything she wants from now until the end of fucking time.
My carved-out heart on a silver platter, if she likes.
"What?" I ask warily, even though I shouldn't.
She tips her head back, and both her hands come up and cup my face.
"The night isn't over yet." Her lips curve. "You still owe me dinner."