Chapter 28
Rafael
Sable reaches for me first. After everything—Faith’s ruined face on the asphalt, Creed’s headlights disappearing down the mountain, Brenna’s voice on the phone asking if Sable was safe from me, the twenty-four captives waiting somewhere I can still imagine too clearly—she reaches.
Her hand finds my jaw. Her thumb settles against the corner of my mouth. The touch is warm and deliberate and has nothing to do with checking my pulse.
“You’re here,” she says. “Really here.”
“Yeah.”
“Mine.”
“Yours.”
She pulls me away from the bathroom doorframe. Her other hand slides to the back of my neck, fingers curling into my still-damp hair. The power that stirred between us a moment ago is still there, low and warm, waiting under my skin like it knows something I don’t.
The room is bathed in cheap yellow light and shower steam and the smell of pine cleaner and old carpet. Food wrappers on the table. The drip from the bathroom. One bed with a quilted spread that should be on pension.
But it’s a room with a door that we locked ourselves.
She’s looking at me as if she can see past the blood, the scars, the number, all the way to the man I’m still trying to become.
“I don’t understand,” I say. “How can you look at me like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like I’m someone worth giving everything up for. After all that you’ve seen me do.”
Her hand tightens on the back of my neck. “You stopped a dragon mid-shift. You held off a Syndicate extraction team. You spoke for yourself to an alpha who was ready to write you off.” Her thumb moves against the base of my skull. “That’s what I saw.”
“I mutilated a man.”
“You protected us.”
“Sable—”
“Stop.” Her voice is quiet. Hard. “Stop telling me what you are. I know what you are. I’ve known since the moment they brought you to my quarters for healing.”
Her eyes hold mine. The brown is dark in the low light, the pupils wide.
“Take what you need from me,” she says.
The words hit my chest like a hand pressed flat.
“I mean it,” she says. “You’ve had nothing that was yours. No name, no body, no choice. Everything taken, everything decided for you.” Her hand slides from my neck to my jaw. “I’m giving this to you. Take what you need. I’m not afraid of anything you might do.”
My wolf surges. The man holds—barely—because the man needs to understand what she’s offering before the wolf accepts it.
“Sable,” I whisper.
Before she can respond, I kiss her.
Not carefully. I kiss her the way the wolf wants to, my hand twisting into her hair, pulling her head back, my mouth on hers hard enough that she makes a sound against my teeth. A good sound. The kind that makes my stomach tighten and my hips press forward.
“Mmmm…” she moans against my mouth. Her hands grip my shoulders, pulling me in. Her nails dig through the borrowed shirt, and the sting of it is bright, clean, nothing like the pain I know. This pain belongs to her. I want more of it.
I back her toward the bed. Her calves hit the frame, and she sits. I follow her down, one knee on the mattress, my mouth never leaving hers. The jacket she’s been wearing—the tactical jacket, too big, zipped to her throat—is between us. I reach for the zipper.
My hand is steady. The zipper goes down, and the jacket opens, and she’s bare underneath. The sight of her skin in the yellow light makes my breath stop.
I know her body. I’ve watched it move through locked rooms and containment cells and mountain snow.
She bathed me, shaved me, dressed my wounds with hands that knew every scar.
But I’ve never seen her like this: on her back on a motel bed, looking up at me with her hair spread on the quilted spread and her chest rising fast.
My mouth finds her throat. The skin there is warm, thin, and I can feel her pulse against my lips. Fast. Matching mine. My teeth scrape the tendon, and she arches. The sound she makes runs through my chest and down my spine.
I move lower. Her collarbone. The hollow between her breasts. The curve of her ribs. I run the tip of my tongue between each one, feeling her twitch, feeling the gooseflesh rise on her silken skin.
Her hand is in my hair. Not guiding. Gripping. Letting me go where I want, how I want, because she told me to take what I need, and what I need is every inch of her that I was too drugged, too broken to properly learn the first time.
I pull the jacket off her arms. She lifts to help. The shirt I’m wearing goes next; she strips it over my head with efficient hands, and then her palms are on my chest, my shoulders, the scars she’s touched a hundred times with gauze and antiseptic.
Now her hands are just hands. On a man’s body. In a room with a locked door and no glass.
“Come here,” she says.
I go. My body covers hers, and the full-length contact is a shock, the way it was in the cave—skin on skin, her heat against mine. My mouth finds hers again, and her legs open around my hips, and the borrowed pants are the only thing between us.
“These need to go.” Her voice is hoarse. She reaches for my waistband. Her fingers are efficient. She doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t slow down. She pushes the pants down, and I kick them off, and then there’s nothing.
Just us. Just skin.
I settle between her thighs. The heat of her is against me, the slick warmth where her body is ready, and my hips rock forward without permission; not entering, pressing, the length of my shaft sliding against her wet flesh. She inhales. Short. Sharp.
“Yes,” she says. “Like that.”
I do it again. Slower. Watching her face.
The way her eyes half-close, the way her lips part, the way her hips lift to meet mine.
My wolf is close to the surface—closer than he should be—but he’s not fighting the man for control.
He’s with me. Both of us focused on the same thing: the woman underneath us and the sounds she makes when we move.
I reach between us. Find her furred mound with my fingers. She’s wet, swollen, and when I touch her clit, her whole body jerks.
“There,” she manages.
I stay there. My fingers move with patience, reading her response, adjusting pressure, learning the rhythm her body wants.
She’s gripping my forearm, her nails leaving marks.
When her breathing fractures, I slide a finger inside her, curling, pressing the spot that makes her hips come off the mattress.
“Stop holding back,” she says. Her voice is rough. Her eyes are open, locked on mine. “I told you. Take what you need.”
I take.
I pull my hand away and push into her. One thrust, deep, and it’s like sliding into heaven. She’s tight, hot, her body clenching around me, and the sensation is so intense my arms nearly give.
“God! Oh, my God!” Her legs wrap around my hips. Her heels press into my lower back. She wants the weight of me, the force, the man who’s been held down and held back and is finished being careful.
I move. Hard. Deep. The bed frame protests. The headboard bumps the wall, and neither of us cares. Her nails rake my shoulders, my back, and the sting of it mixes with the heat of her until I can’t separate pain from pleasure. I don’t want to.
The hum builds. The low vibration from before—the one that flickered the lights and trembled the glass—rises with every thrust. I can feel it spreading through my body into hers, through her body back into mine.
A feedback loop that amplifies everything.
Every nerve. Every point of contact. Every sound she makes that I swallow with my mouth on hers.
She breaks the kiss. “I can feel it,” she gasps. “That thing you do. It’s…”
“I know.”
“Don’t stop.”
I don’t.
I pin her wrists above her head. Because she told me to take, and the wolf wants her held, wants her pinned, wants her knowing who she belongs to. Her eyes go wide. Her pulse jumps under my fingers where I hold her wrists, and the scent that rises off her skin isn’t fear.
“More,” she says. “I want to feel more of you.”
I drive harder. Faster. The angle shifts when I lift one of her legs higher on my hip.
“Oh! Fuck!” she gasps. “Deep… You’re so deep.” Her back arches, breasts thrust out, nipples brushing against my chest like hard little nubs.
The vibration swells between us. The bedside lamp flickers. The water in the bathroom stops dripping, and the silence underneath is filled with the hum…the frequency we make together, the sound of two bodies tuned to the same note.
I’m close. She is, too. I can feel it in the way her body tightens around me, the way her breathing goes short and sharp, the way her wrists strain against my grip.
My mouth finds her throat.
My teeth find the place. That place. The junction of her neck and shoulder.
The place where the wolf marks what belongs to him.
The skin is thin over the muscle, her pulse hammering underneath, and the instinct is so strong my jaw locks.
My teeth sharpen and press into her skin.
The pressure builds. One more ounce, and the skin will break, and the bond will seal, and she will be mine in a way that nothing can undo.
She tips her head. Baring her throat. Giving me access. She knows what this is. She wants it.
“Yes,” she breathes. “Yes. Do it.” Her body is taut against me, tight with anticipation.
I pull back.
The effort of it nearly tears me apart. My jaw aches from clenching. My teeth leave red marks on her skin that don’t bleed. The wolf howls…a sound inside my chest that has no outlet, no expression, just the raw grief of wanting something and choosing not to take it.
Sable’s eyes fly open. “Why—?”
“Not yet.” My voice is shredded. I’m still inside her, still hard, still shaking with the effort of stopping. “When I do that. When I mark you. I want it to be mine.”
“It is yours.”
“Not yet.” I press my forehead against hers.
“There are pieces of me that are still missing. Things she put in my body that I haven’t found yet.
” My hand releases her wrists, finds her face, cups her cheek.
“When I mark you, I want to know it’s me choosing.
Not something she left behind. Not something broken. ”
Sable’s jaw tenses. “You’re not broken.”
“I’m not whole yet either.”
“I don’t care—”
“I do.” I hold her eyes. “You deserve the man choosing from certainty. Not the wolf marking from fear.”
She stares at me. Her throat is red where my teeth pressed. Her hair is wild around her face. Her body is still wrapped around mine, still trembling with the orgasm she was about to have.
“That’s the most infuriating thing anyone’s ever said to me in bed,” she says.
My mouth moves. Another of those smiles I’m learning to enjoy. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Her hand comes up to my face. Her thumb traces the line of my jaw. “And it’s why I know the bite will be worth waiting for.”
Her hips shift. A deliberate rock that sends heat through my entire body and makes my arms shake.
“But right now,” she says, “you’re not done.”
I’m not.
I move again. Slower now. Deeper. Without the frenzy, without the race toward the edge that almost broke me. Her hands are free, and she uses them…on my back, in my hair, on my jaw, holding my face close to hers so every breath is shared.
The power settles between us, low and warm, steady enough that my body stops bracing against it and starts listening.
“God,” she moans. “I can feel you. That buzzing…it’s setting all my nerves on fire.”
“Then burn,” I whisper against her lips. “Burn for me, Sable.”
“Yes! Fuck, yes! Rafael!” She comes with my name on her mouth and her body locked against mine, and the sound of it—my name, in her voice, with the power moving through both of us—breaks something open that I didn’t know was still closed.
I follow her over the edge. My face pressed into the red marks on her throat, shuddering with the force of it.
The force crests, then settles into a note that holds inside our shaking bodies.
The sound that leaves my chest isn’t the wolf’s snarl or the weapon’s roar.
It’s the note I’ve been looking for. The one that comes from the time before it all went wrong.
We lie tangled on the motel bed. Cheap sheets. Damp skin. The bedside lamp still flickering faintly.
Her head is on my chest. My hand is in her hair. The red marks on her throat are vivid against her skin, and I trace them with my thumb.
“I’ll wait,” she says against my collarbone. “As long as it takes. Whatever you need.”
My thumb rests on the unbroken skin where the bite would go.
“You already are,” I say. “What I need.”
Her breathing slows. The power settles to a vibration so quiet it’s almost silence. The motel room is dark around us except for the lamp, and the lamp is steady now, and the only sound is her heart against my ribs.
I’m not cured. The conditioned responses are still in my body. Faith is alive somewhere with her face stitched together and her ice-blue eyes unchanged, and Creed is reporting to whatever Syndicate council decides what happens next, and twenty-four captives are waiting in rooms I know the smell of.
The world is not safe. I am not fixed.
But the woman against my chest chose me when choosing me cost her everything. She gave me a name. She gave me her body. She told me to take what I need, and then she let me choose not to take the one thing the wolf wanted most.
And she’s still here.
Her breath is against my skin. Her hand over my heart.
I close my eyes.
The morning will bring the road, and the running, and whatever the Syndicate sends next. But the morning is hours away, and she’s here now, and my wolf is completely quiet for the first time in as long as I can remember.
Because of her.
And the bite can wait until the man who gives it is the man she deserves.