Epilogue
GABI
SEVEN MONTHS LATER
Reese's bear comes back on a Tuesday.
I feel it before he does. Middle of the night, his body temperature spikes against my back, a full degree hotter than the already ridiculous furnace he runs during the Long Sleep. His arm tightens around my waist. A rumble comes from deep in his chest. His bear waking after five months of silence.
My own bear lifts her head in answer.
We've been nesting since November. Five months in this cabin that Ezra expanded in October, knocking out the east wall to add a second room while Reese stood behind him looking pained about the noise.
Sterling deeded us the land the week after the blood claiming, a ceremony I'll carry in my body until I die.
Thirty bears in human form, standing in a clearing cut back sixty years ago, watching a polar bear take her place in a grizzly sleuth.
Sterling spoke the old words. Reese bit the junction of my neck and shoulder with canines that had lengthened past human, and the bond snapped closed so clean that every bear in the clearing heard it.
Mabel cried. Hank cried. I cried. Reese didn't cry because Reese doesn't cry, except later that night in our bed when he traced the silver mark on my shoulder and his eyes went wet and he buried his face in my neck without saying a word.
That was October. Then the Long Sleep pulled him under.
Five months of his body heavy against mine.
Twelve-hour nights. His hands shaking the first month, the bear demanding rest the man didn't know how to give.
I wrote in his lap. Finished the revisions on the manuscript while his breath warmed the back of my neck.
Sent the book to three publishers in January, typing emails one-handed because his arm was around my waist and moving it would have woken him.
Now the Waking. His bear rising through him while dawn turns the bedroom gray. His mouth finds my shoulder, my neck, the claiming mark that heats under his lips.
"Morning," I murmur.
He doesn't answer with words. His hand slides from my waist to my hip, pulling me back against him. He's hard. The Waking does that, Sterling warned me. Everything comes back at once. Hunger, energy, desire. Five months of dormancy burning off in a single body.
His mouth drags along the curve of my neck. Teeth scrape the mark. My bear rolls, cold and wanting, pressing toward his heat.
"Reese."
"Mmm." Against my skin. His hand moves from my hip to my stomach, up under the thermal I sleep in, fingers spreading across my ribs. His thumb traces the underside of my breast. Slow. Deliberate.
"You're awake."
"Very." He cups my breast, thumb rolling the nipple until it peaks against his palm. His cock presses against my ass through the thin cotton of my shorts. "Been dreaming about you for five months."
"You've been sleeping next to me for five months."
"Dreaming is different." He pulls the thermal over my head. Rolls me onto my back. The cold March air prickles my bare skin for half a second before his body covers mine, all that heat flooding down. His mouth closes over my nipple, tongue circling, sucking until my spine lifts off the mattress.
"God."
His hand pushes into my shorts. Finds me already wet. Two fingers slide through my folds, parting, pressing, finding my clit with an accuracy that seven months of learning my body has given him.
"Every morning," he says against my breast. "Every morning for the rest of my life."
I grab his waistband. Push his shorts down. His cock springs free, thick, flushed dark at the head. He kicks the shorts off the bed. Gets mine down my legs in one pull. Settles between my thighs.
No condom. We stopped using them two months ago, a conversation that happened in this bed during a long December afternoon when the snow pressed against the windows and I told him I was ready to stop choosing the end of things.
He pushes in slow. Filling me inch by inch while his eyes hold mine, gold swallowing the green. My legs wrap around his waist. He sinks deep. Holds.
"Je t'aime," I whisper.
He taught himself that one. Said it back to me for the first time on Christmas morning, the accent terrible, the pronunciation butchered, the sentiment so genuine that I laughed into his mouth while he kissed me.
"Je t'aime." Against my forehead, still awful, still perfect. Then he moves.
Long, grinding strokes that press him against every nerve inside me. His hand slides under my knee, hitches my leg higher, changes the angle until his cock drags over the spot that makes my vision go white. The pace builds. His thumb finds my clit, pressing circles in time with his thrusts.
"Right there. Don't stop."
He doesn't. His forehead drops to mine. His breathing goes ragged. The gold in his eyes floods full and his bear rumbles in his chest, the sound vibrating through my sternum where our bodies press together.
"Come for me, Gabi."
My fingers dig into his back. The orgasm crests, breaks, rolls through me in waves that pull sounds from my throat I stopped being embarrassed about months ago.
My pussy clenches around him. He groans, thrusts deep twice more, spills inside me with his face buried in my neck, teeth grazing the claiming mark.
We lie there. Breathing. His weight on me, grounding, real.
"I need to tell you something."
He lifts his head. Studies my face. The gold fading back to green, his expression shifting from sated to alert in the space of a breath.
"I saw Doc Winters on Friday."
His whole body goes still. That Redwood stillness. Bear-still.
"Gabi."
"Six weeks." I take his hand. Press it flat against my stomach. "Doc Winters confirmed it yesterday while you were sleeping."
He doesn't speak. His hand stays on my stomach, warm, enormous against my skin. His eyes search my face, and whatever he finds there makes his jaw work once before the rest of him catches up.
He drops. Forehead to my belly. Shoulders shaking.
Reese Redwood, who speaks forty words a day on a good one, who has carved me twelve animals from bone and never once explained why, who kissed me on a porch in the dark and walked away because he was afraid of how much he meant it.
He presses his mouth to the soft skin below my navel and cries without sound.
My hands go to his hair. Threading through. Holding him there.
"Hey." Soft. "Hey. Look at me."
He lifts his head. Wet eyes. Gold and green and wrecked.
"They're going to know everything," I tell him. "Both languages. The stories. The names. What a polar bear looks like under moonlight. They'll carry it because we'll teach them to carry it."
"Gabi."
"The line doesn't end with me. It changes. It grows into something new."
His hand presses my stomach. Gentle. Reverent. His bear rumbles underneath, low and constant, already guarding what's growing there.
"I'm going to build a crib," he says. Voice rough. "Ezra'll help. He'll show up with lumber before I ask, the way he always does."
"I know."
"Sterling's going to lose his mind."
"I know." Laughing now. Crying a little. Both.
"Mabel's gonna find out before I tell anyone. She always does."
"She already knows. She looked at me over the counter on Friday and said 'you're glowing, sweetheart,' then packed me extra biscuits without a word."
He drops his forehead back to my stomach. Laughs. The vibration runs through my skin, warm, alive, the opposite of everything I came to this mountain expecting to find.
The morning light fills the cabin. Our cabin, on our land, in a valley that has kept the Redwood secret for a hundred and forty years and now keeps mine too. My manuscript sits on the kitchen table, accepted by a publisher in New York two weeks ago. A living record, not an ending.
Reese lifts his head. Kisses my stomach once. Climbs back up to lie beside me, pulls me against his chest, his hand resting on my belly.
"I love you," he says. Quiet. Certain.
Outside, the mountain is waking up. Snow melting off the pines. Creek running fast with melt. Somewhere down the valley, Sterling Redwood will feel the new life in his territory and smile.
The last polar bear shifter in the lower forty-eight closes her eyes against a grizzly's chest.
She is not the last of anything anymore.