Chapter 29 #2
I pull his shirt over his head. His shoulder is wrapped, and he winces when I lift his arm. I’m careful with it, careful in a way I haven’t been with him before. Not because he’s breakable. Because he’s mine, and the things that are mine I protect.
The thought surprises me. My wolf doesn’t find it surprising at all.
His fingers seek out the buttons of my shirt. He flicks them open, then pushes it off my shoulders. We stand for a while, just staring at each other. I’ve seen him bare before, the wide expanse of taut muscle and skin… but I’ve never truly seen him. Now, I take it all in with a sense of… ownership.
He’s mine. Flaws and all. I’ve picked him… my wolf did. And it feels right.
Dipping his head, his mouth goes to my throat, the hollow at the base where my pulse is hammering.
His teeth graze the skin, and something electric runs through me…
not just arousal, something deeper. The bond, responding.
My magic stirs in my chest, warm and liquid, rising toward the place where his mouth meets my skin.
“Here,” I whisper. I touch the junction of my neck and shoulder, the place where a mate bond is sealed. The marking point. “When you’re inside me. Here.”
He lifts his head. Looks at me. His eyes are dark, intent, the wolf fully present behind the human expression. He understands what I’m offering. The finality of it. The permanence.
“Are you certain about this?” he says.
“I told you what I’m choosing. Don’t make me say it twice.”
We strip each other in the dusty tack room, his jeans, my boots, the careful negotiation of his injured shoulder.
The saddle blankets stacked on the lower rack are rough wool, and he pulls two down and spreads them on the floor without ceremony.
It’s not romantic. It’s a tack room. But when he lowers me onto the blankets and settles between my legs, the weight of him presses against me, and the bond opens wide between us like a door that’s been locked finally swinging free.
It’s the most intimate I’ve ever felt with anyone.
He enters me slowly. Watching my face. Reading me with his whole attention, missing nothing.
The stretch of him is familiar now, and my body opens for him with an ease that feels like the most natural thing in the world.
I have his weight on me and his mouth on my throat and the bond singing between us, and my anger feels like it’s melting away.
“More. I want to feel all of you,” I tell him. Not a whisper. A demand. And he gives me what I ask for, the careful restraint dissolving into something raw and animal, his hips driving deep, the sound of our bodies meeting filling the small room.
I feel the bond building. Not in my chest…
everywhere. In my skin, in my blood, in the magic that’s been volatile for days and is now flowing with a direction and purpose it’s never had.
The power rises as he moves inside me, rising with the pleasure, rising with the trust, rising toward the moment when the bond seals and everything I am meets everything he is.
“Now,” I say as the pleasure rises. I turn my head. Expose the junction of neck and shoulder. “Now, Conner!”
He comes. And as the orgasm tears through both of us, his teeth find the marking point, and he bites down…
not gently, not brutally, but with the precise pressure of a wolf claiming his mate.
The pain is sharp and sweet, and it lasts exactly as long as the pleasure, the two sensations fusing into something that defies either word.
I bite him back, and my magic detonates.
Not an explosion. A completion. Everything I am—the thread-sense, the wards, the combat magic Brenna taught me, the power that’s been flaring and retreating for weeks—rises to its full strength and locks into place.
The room fills with light. Not visible to human eyes, maybe, but to wolf senses, to the bond, it’s luminous.
I can feel every wolf on the property. Every heartbeat.
The world expands in all directions, vivid and precise and more alive than anything I’ve felt before.
He holds me through it. Doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t pull away.
His arms tighten around me, and his face is against my neck where the mark is fresh.
His breathing is ragged, and his wolf is making a sound I’ve never heard from him…
deep, sustained, the vibration of an animal that’s found what it was made for.
The light fades. The power settles. Not diminished… integrated. Part of me now, the way the magic has always been part of me.
We lie on the saddle blankets in the tack room. His arm is across my waist, the good arm, the other one held against his chest. The mark on my neck throbs with my pulse. His breathing has evened out, but he hasn’t let go. I don’t think he’s going to.
“That was—” he starts.
“If you say ‘magical,’ I’ll kill you.”
He laughs. Short, surprised, genuine. The sound fills the tack room and bounces off the saddles and the bridles, and I think, absurdly, that this is the first time he’s laughed since Cedar Falls.
I turn in his arms. Face him. The late sun is on his face, catching the scar through his eyebrow, the stubble on his jaw. He looks exhausted and injured and more at peace than I’ve ever seen him.
He’s beautiful.
“I love you,” he says.
I look at him. And I smile. Warm, real, unguarded. The first of many more, I hope.
His eyes soften. He doesn’t press me to say it back. I’m not ready yet. But it’s there. Three words making their presence known, just the way the bond did. Unexpectedly. Against all logic and rational thought.
He brushes his lips against mine, gentle and sweet. “We’d better get back to the others. There’s a lot to be done.”
“Yes,” I agree. There’s so much to be done, and we’ve barely scratched the surface.
We get dressed. His shoulder needs re-wrapping.
I do it, hands steady, touch clinical, nothing romantic about medical gauze.
But when I’m done, I press my mouth to the muscle of his shoulder above the bandage.
Once. Quick. A gesture that isn’t tenderness so much as declaration: these injuries are mine to tend now.
He catches my hand when I pull back. Holds it. Doesn’t speak.
We walk out of the tack room and into the setting sun. The wolves are loading vehicles, and Brenna is giving orders. Briar is studying a chart, and Merric is standing with his arms folded, watching the operation come together.
Nobody looks at us twice. Or maybe everyone does, and I’ve stopped caring.
The convoy leaves at dawn. We have wolves to move. A territory to reach. A homecoming to deliver.
And a bond, thrumming between us like a second pulse, that says: finally.