Chapter Seventeen #4
I understood, suddenly and completely, what Braham had been feeling since I entered his office.
The certainty of it. The weight. It settled into me like it had always been there, humming quietly somewhere below my sternum, a live connection that felt less like something new and more like something that had been waiting for me to notice it.
The sound Braham made against my skin was the most undone thing I had ever heard from him. Low and broken and raw, the satisfied noise of a man who had been holding something back for so long that the release of it came with its own gravity.
His forehead pressed to my temple, his breath hot and ragged against my skin, and his hips drove deep and held there as the knot began to swell.
I felt it through every nerve.
The fullness of it, the stretch and the heat and the absolute, biological certainty of being locked together. Braham’s knot pressed against me, swelling, locking us in place, and the completion of it traveled through my body like a circuit closing.
I came hard—Braham’s name in my mouth, my back arching off the mattress, my good hand fisted in the sheets—and he followed immediately, his forehead pressed to my temple, his breathing rough against my skin, one hand spread flat over the bite mark like he was holding it there on purpose.
We stayed knotted. My pulse slowed against his chest. The thread hummed quietly somewhere in my sternum, warm and unfamiliar and already somehow familiar, like a language I’d been hearing fragments of and had finally learned to speak.
I took inventory. Bruised ribs, throbbing in time with my heartbeat.
Torn shoulder, the bandaging probably compromised.
Split lip, definitely reopened. Bite mark at the curve of my throat that was going to be spectacular in the morning, purple and angry and visible to every wolf in the territory who caught my scent.
I felt, objectively, terrible. My body was a catalogue of damage that would take weeks to heal, and I was lying in a pool of sweat on ruined sheets with a Prime Alpha wolf knotted inside me and a claiming mark on my throat that would never, ever fade.
I also felt—and I would rather die than say this out loud, to Braham or to anyone, ever—completely fine. Better than fine. The kind of fine that lived somewhere beyond physical comfort and several miles past rational thought.
“You said ‘do it,’” Braham said. Very quietly. His voice was rough, spent, the sound of a man who had just come harder than he’d intended to and was still processing the aftermath.
“I did.”
“I wasn’t expecting that.”
“I know.” I turned my head slightly. The movement pulled at the bite, and the sting was immediate and bright. “Don’t make it weird.”
A pause. The fire popped. An ember spiraled up the chimney and vanished.
“You’re wearing my mark,” Braham said.
“I am aware.”
Braham’s brow flickered. “That’s not weird to you?”
I considered this with genuine seriousness.
The kind of consideration that required me to look at the timber ceiling and weigh the question against everything I knew about myself, about him, about the thread humming quietly in my chest that felt less like something new and more like something I’d been carrying for longer than I wanted to admit.
“Ask me again,” I said, “when I’m not knotted and exhausted and running on adrenaline and scotch and the aftermath of having a wolf’s teeth in my throat. The answer is probably still no. But let me have the drama of the question.”
Braham’s chest moved over me.
When we finally separated—the knot releasing with a slow, deliberate ease that traveled through every nerve ending I possessed—Braham pulled me in without asking.
One arm was thrown across my chest, his hand flat against my sternum, his body warm and solid against my back. I let him. Which at this point was not a concession. It was just where I wanted to be.
The fire burned low. Outside, the Douglas fir stood dark and still against a cloudy sky, and the occasional rustle of something moving through underbrush carried through the open French doors and faded into the particular quiet of a forest that had seen everything and was not impressed.
I lay in the dark with Braham’s arm across me and the thread humming quietly somewhere in my chest, new and strange and already somehow familiar, thinking about Grace asleep down the hall in her white pine crib.
About the word “legal” and the word “together” and the word “mate,” which I had been arguing with for weeks and which had apparently won.
“I’m going to need a better author bio,” I said to the ceiling.
“What?”
“My current one says I live alone with strong opinions about coffee.” I traced the edge of Braham’s forearm with my fingertips.
The muscle was warm under my touch, corded and relaxed in the particular way of something that had expended itself thoroughly and was content to exist. “That’s going to need updating. ”
Silence. The kind that suggested Braham was weighing several responses and finding all of them inadequate to the moment.
“Go to sleep, Jai.”
“I’m just saying. Logistically. ‘Lives with a wolf, a baby, and significantly fewer strong opinions than previously advertised.’ That’s going to require its own paragraph.”
“Sleep.”
I did.