22. Chapter 22 #2
"Come on," I said rough against her nape, my rhythm losing itself. "Come for me, I've got you, I've always got you..."
She clenched hard around me and came with my name muffled against her own arm, shaking, and the feel of her wringing at my cock dragged me over the edge behind her.
I spilled into her deep and pressed my forehead between her shoulder blades and just breathed, the both of us trembling, the fish smoking on above us as though the world hadn't just narrowed to this.
I did not tell her what the song was, even then, even with the bond answered and her body still warm and shaking around mine in the smoke-warm dark, some careful coward part of me still guarded that last small thing, because a man who has hidden something for six months does not learn in three days how to stop.
The stolen moments were easy. The trouble came at Daska's fire, when the three of us sat together and I found myself facing a truth I had no name for.
* * *
I should have hated the bear.
That is the plain wolf-truth of it, the truth of every pack law I'd been raised in and every instinct that had made me an alpha.
A male who's answered his fated bond does not sit easy across a fire from another male who shares his mate's furs.
The blood is supposed to rise; the hackles are supposed to lift.
Somewhere in the old animal cellar of me there should have been a low growl at the sight of Daska's big measured hands moving over the woman I'd bled six months for, the same hands that had closed my own wound after the bison, gently, without a word of grievance, when he'd every right in the world to grieve.
And there was nothing; I searched for the growl and it wasn't there.
What was there, when I let myself look at it, was worse and stranger and harder to hold.
When Ellie sat between us at the healer's fire in the evening, leaning into Daska's warmth with the easy trust of a creature that has finally found somewhere safe to be tired, and reaching back with one hand to hook her fingers into mine as though it cost her nothing, as though a woman was made to hold two men at once and it was the most natural arrangement under the goddess's sky, what rose in me then was not jealousy.
It was something I hadn't felt since I'd walked away from my own pack and left the fires of Hanging Rock behind me for good.
It felt like family; it felt like a den with more than one fire in it and every fire warm.
I'd led a pack most of my life, and I knew the feeling of a thing that's whole, bodies gathered close against the cold, each in their place, each holding a corner of the same warmth.
Losing it had grieved me more than I'd let any living soul see when I gave up my alpha's seat to follow a human woman east into the unknown.
Finding it again had never once entered my reckoning.
Least of all here, at a bear's fire, in a lion's country, with my fated mate's hand in mine and the bear's warmth close enough to tempt even a fool as stubborn as me.
Daska caught me watching them once. Ellie had drifted toward sleep against his side, worn down by a long day of council and craft, her breathing gone slow and even, and I'd been looking at the two of them without any guard on my face because I'd forgotten to keep one up.
The bear met my eyes across the low flames, and there was no challenge in his broad quiet face, and no wariness either.
Only a kind of patient knowing, the look of a man who reads bodies for his living and had read mine before I'd read it myself.
He didn't say anything that night. He only shifted his arm so Ellie settled more comfortably against him, and tipped his head a fraction toward the space at his other side, at the warm place by the fire that was plainly meant for me, and went back to grinding his herbs; I sat where I was.
I was not ready to walk through that particular door, and he did not push me toward it, because Daska never pushed anyone anywhere in his life, he only left the way open and waited, patient as stone, until you found your own legs.
I lay awake that night with the truth bright and unavoidable in me.
I wanted them both. Not like that, Daska was my brother, though I would never begrudge another man his own honest desires.
Not Ellie with the bear tolerated at the edge, but the three of us, neither man grudging the other his place.
The wanting had no name in any of my tongues, and it frightened me because it sounded too much like the greed Ellie feared in herself.
Yet I'd told her a heart could be large without being broken.
In the dark, I began to wonder whether mine might be the same.
* * *
Daska said it plainly, in the end, because Daska said everything plainly. It was one of his gifts, the one that made him a healer, he could name the thing in the room that everyone else was walking carefully around, and name it so gently that it landed as a mercy instead of a wound.
We were mending a snare-line together the next evening, the two of us, while Ellie was gone to Eleya's fire on some errand of the council's that had her humming to herself as she left.
The work gave our hands something to do and our eyes somewhere to rest that wasn't each other, which I think was why he chose it, because Daska chose everything.
"You watch her with me," he said, not looking up from the sinew he was knotting.
His wolf-tongue was slow and deliberate, an easterner's accent worn soft by a winter among my people, but there was nothing cautious in what he said with it.
"In the evenings, when she sleeps against my side, you watch, and I've been trying to read what's in your face when you do it, because I'm a healer and reading faces is the whole of my craft, and for a while I couldn't make it out at all. "
I said nothing at all, and my hands had gone still on the snare between them.
"I thought at first it might be the old thing," he went on, easy as a man discussing the weather, his big fingers working the knot.
"The thing between males over a shared mate.
I braced for it. I've faced it before, being what I am, going where I've gone, I know the shape of a wolf deciding whether to fight me for a woman, and I made my peace long ago with facing it again.
But that's not what's in your face, Rivik.
That's what I couldn't work out. There's no fight in you when you look at us. "
"There's no fight in me for you," I said, low, and it was all I could manage past the tightness in my throat.
"What's in your face is longing," he said, without weight, without demand, as he'd have told me a wound was clean or a fever was breaking, a plain finding, offered for my own good.
"Not for her only. You've got her; the bond's answered; I felt it settle in her three days past, same as you did.
It's not her you're hungry for when you sit at my fire and go quiet.
" He tied off the sinew and finally looked up, his deep brown eyes steady on mine across the last of the light.
"It's the fire itself. The whole of it. You want in, and you don't know how to ask, and you're half-sick thinking the wanting makes you greedy.
I've watched it eat at you for three days.
" A pause, and then the gentlest thing anyone had said to me in years.
"And it doesn't make you greedy, whatever the old wolf laws taught you.
I know that better than most, because I've wanted the same thing since the road and been too much a coward to say it, a poor showing from a man who tells everyone else to speak their hearts. "
The fire cracked between us; somewhere in the settlement a child laughed and was hushed.
"She's big enough to hold us both," Daska said.
"You've seen it as plain as I have, and you've felt it settle, she near enough said it to me herself, the day she came for my blessing, that her heart had got too large for one man to fill and she'd stopped being ashamed of it.
The only question left standing is whether we're big enough to hold each other.
Whether a bear and a wolf can share one fire and call it brotherhood instead of a wound.
" He went back to his snare, giving me the mercy of somewhere else to look.
"I think we can. I've thought so a long while.
I've only been waiting for you to stop drowning long enough to hear it. "
I opened my mouth to answer him, though I had no notion what I meant to say, and that was the moment I caught the change in the air.
A scent came to me on the smoke, hers, close, closer than it had any business being, carrying the fast salt-sharpness of a heart gone suddenly wild.
I turned, and Daska turned with me, both our heads coming round like the wolf and bear we were under our skins, and there stood Ellie at the edge of the firelight, a hand of gathered herbs forgotten in her grip, come back early from Eleya's fire by some path that had carried her within earshot of every word.
She'd heard all of it. The truth was written all over her, in the wideness of her dark eyes, the colour drained clean out of her face, the utter stillness that had come over her, the stillness of a woman who has just heard a thing she has spent her whole life being certain she would never be allowed to have, and has not yet decided whether to believe her own ears.
She stood there in the firelight with the herbs crushed forgotten in her fist, and she did not seem to be breathing at all.