Chapter 31
Chapter Thirty-One
Anne
The next evening, Kain and I are both discharged. I fuss the whole way from the medical center to the car, the whole drive home, and the whole walk up to my apartment.
Kain says nothing. He lets me hold his arm on the stairs even though he is walking perfectly well, and when I keep glancing sideways at him to check his color and the steadiness of his breathing, he endures it with what I can only describe as patient amusement.
“I’m not going to collapse on the stairs,” he says.
“There was a blade sticking out of your heart thirty-six hours ago.”
“And now, there isn’t.”
“That is not the reassurance you think it is.”
A smile dances on his lips, and he lets me take his arm again.
Inside, I steer him to the couch and make him sit. Then, I go into the kitchen to make tea I’m not sure either of us wants because I need something to do with my hands.
I hear him changing positions on the cushions, getting comfortable, and the ordinariness of the sound hits me in a strange way.
I stand at the counter with the kettle in my hand and look at him. He’s here. In my apartment.
The lamp is on, and the light catches the line of his jaw, the breadth of his shoulders, the way he’s resting with his head tilted back and his eyes half-closed.
He is alive.
The full weight of the past two days lands on me all at once, and I have to close my eyes and lean against the counter.
Tears come without warning. I try to blink them back, but they spill down my cheeks anyway. I stand here holding the kettle and completely fail to stop them.
In the next room, Kain’s head pops up. I feel it through the bond: his awareness of me sharpens the second my first tear falls, his concern arriving in my consciousness before he has even turned to look at me.
The bond is a two-way window, and it is open. Neither of us can hide a thing from the other.
“Baby”—his voice is low, tender—“what’s wrong?”
I hear him start to get up, but he can’t hide the slight catch in his breath from the effort. I set the kettle down and hurry to meet him before he can start crossing the room toward me.
“Come here,” he says, lowering himself back onto the couch and opening his arms.
I go to him willingly and sit on his lap, my face against his throat. His arms encircle me, one hand coming up to the back of my head and holding me there.
“Tell me,” he murmurs into my hair.
“I was so scared,” I say. My voice comes out small and wrecked in a way I didn’t plan and don’t try to correct. “I really thought I’d never see you again.”
His embrace tightens around me. “I’m here,” he says, his voice quiet and certain. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“You better not.” I pull back just enough to look at him, and I punch him lightly in the chest. “You don’t get to leave again. Do you understand me? Not ever.”
“I understand.”
“I mean it.”
“I know you do.” His hand comes around to my face and brushes the tears from my cheek. His eyes are focused on mine. “I’m here for good, Anne. I promise you.”
I feel it through the bond as he says it—not just the words, but the full weight of his intent behind them, the absolute sincerity of them carrying through the connection between us in a way that no amount of spoken assurance could match. He means it. All the way down.
I exhale. “And no more lies.”
“No more lies.” Immediate. No wavering at all. “Never again.”
I search his face. The bond echoes back what I find there: he is open and certain and completely unguarded. I nod.
We sit quietly for a moment, his hand still cradling my face, my hands holding on to his shirt. The apartment is warm and tranquil around us, the city a low, distant murmur outside the windows.
“There is one thing I want,” Kain says.
“What?”
“A bonding ceremony.” His thumb traces the line of my cheekbone. “Something formal. In front of the pack. I want everyone to know you’re mine and I’m yours.”
Warmth floods me, a happiness that I once thought was never going to be mine. “Yes,” I tell him. “I want that, too.”
“Next month?”
I think of the guards who died at the mansion. The ones in wolf form struck down in the grounds. The ones inside, overwhelmed before they could shift. Faces I only knew in passing. I will learn their names properly now, too late.
“Not next month,” I say quietly. “There’s going to be a funeral. A mass one, to honor everyone we lost in the attack. That comes first.”
Kain is still for a moment before he nods. “The month after.”
“The month after,” I agree.
He looks at me. I watch as his expression shifts, marveling at the quiet intensity of a man who has a great many things he wants to say and is choosing this one: “I love you.”
The words land in my chest, heavy and warm and entirely certain. “I love you,” I say back.
Then, he kisses me. It starts out softly.
Just his mouth on mine, unhurried, one hand still cupping my face.
I kiss him back with the same gentleness, my palms sliding up his chest to his shoulders, and for a moment, that’s all there is—just this, just us, just the fact that we are both here and breathing and alive.
He says it again against my lips. “I love you.”
“I love you,” I breathe back, but the words come out differently this time—urgent, desperate, ten years of grief and distance and longing compressed into three syllables.
His hand moves from my face to my hair, fingers curling, and the kiss deepens.
He stands, lifting me with him, and I wrap my legs around his waist and hold on. He carries me to the bedroom with more steadiness than a man recovering from a stab wound to the heart has any right to, and I press my mouth to his jaw, his throat, the curve of his shoulder.
“You should be resting,” I manage to murmur.
“Later,” he says.
He lowers me onto the bed and follows me down, his weight settling over me carefully and affectionately. His eyes find mine in the low light, and he looks at me the way he did out on that grass—like I am the one thing worth surviving for.
He kisses me deeply, his hands moving to the hem of my shirt.
He takes his time, his hands sliding up my sides as he lifts it over my head, fingers warm against my skin.
His eyes move over me, and what I see in them is not urgency—not yet—but something more deliberate than that.
Like he is making a point of looking. Like after everything, he wants to take stock of what he has.
I reach for his shirt in return, and he lets me unbutton it and push it off his shoulders. The old scars are there, the same ones I’ve pressed my lips to. I spread my hands over his chest and feel his heartbeat, steady and strong beneath my palms.
He’s alive. He’s alive, he’s here, and he’s mine.
He leans down and kisses my collarbone. My shoulder. The curve of my neck just below his mark—and I feel the bond flare at the contact, warmth blooming through it, his sensations and mine looping back on each other until I can’t fully separate them.
I arch into him.
His mouth moves lower, kissing down the center of my chest, taking his time with each breath of attention. When his lips close around my nipple, I gasp, my hands flying to his hair. He takes his time there, too; he is slow, thorough, drawing soft sounds from me that I don’t try to hold back.
“Kain…”
He hums against my skin, the vibration of it running through me, and moves lower. His hands pull my jeans over my hips, down my legs, and off. He settles between my thighs and looks up at me, his eyes dark and patient.
“I love you,” he says, and then his mouth finds me.
I cry out. My head falls back against the pillow, and my fingers tighten in his hair.
He is unhurried and deliberate and completely, devastatingly thorough.
He reads me by instinct, by attention, by the bond carrying back what works and what works better.
Pleasure builds in long, deep waves that leave me trembling.
“Kain, please…”
He brings me over the edge gradually, holding me there as my back bows off the mattress and his name leaves my mouth in pieces.
When I come back down, he is kissing his way back up my body. I reach for him, pull him up to my mouth, and kiss him deeply. I can taste myself on his lips, and it makes heat flood through me all over again.
“I need you,” I say against his mouth. “Now. Please.”
He reaches between us, positioning himself, and when he enters me, it is slowly—a long, steady push that I feel everywhere. He stills when he’s fully seated, and my breath goes out of me in a rush.
The bond is wide open between us. I can feel him—his love, his relief, the profound and overwhelming gratitude of a man who came very close to losing this and knows exactly what it is worth. All of it doubles back against my own feelings, amplifying everything until my eyes fill with happy tears.
“Hey,” he says softly, looking down at me.
“I’m okay,” I manage. “I just—I feel you. Through the bond. I feel everything you’re feeling.”
“Good,” he says. “I want you to feel it. Every bit of it.”
He begins to move, and it is nothing like our last time together. That night was all urgency and grief and barely contained desperation, both of us reaching for something we couldn’t name with hands that didn’t quite trust what they were holding.
This is different. This is knowing exactly what it is and choosing it anyway. This is the two of us with every card on the table and nothing between us but honesty and the bond and the long overdue fact that we’re home.
He moves inside me with such intention that it makes my chest ache as much as the rest of me. His hands are everywhere—my hips, my waist, my face—touching me like he cannot get enough. His mouth finds my throat, my jaw, the corner of my lips.
“I love you,” I tell him.
“I love you.” He pulls back and drives home, making me gasp. “I love you,” he says again and again, each one punctuated, each one true.
I wrap my legs around his hips. The bond carries his pleasure to me and mine back to him, and the feedback is staggering. I can’t tell where I end and he begins. I can’t separate my sensations from his, and I don’t want to.
“Don’t stop,” I breathe. “Don’t ever stop.”
“Never,” he says, and I feel his sincerity in that word the way I felt it in his promise—no caveats, no conditions. Just him.
The pleasure builds and crests, and I go over with his name on my lips and his body covering mine and his hands holding me like he will never let go.
His release follows mine, and I feel it in the groan against my throat, in how his entire body shudders, and in the warmth of his release inside me.
Through the bond, I know exactly what it does to him, all of it, and my eyes spill over again because there is no other response to being loved this much.
We stay tangled together in the quiet afterward. My head on his chest, his arm around my shoulders. His heartbeat is steady under my ear. I count the rhythm of it for a while just because I can.
“The month after next,” I say eventually, my voice hoarse.
“The month after next,” he agrees, sounding exhausted and sated.
I press my lips to the new scar on his chest and feel him exhale slowly.
“I love you,” I say against his skin.
His hand moves in my hair. “I love you, too.” A pause, warm and unhurried. “Get some sleep, Anne.”
I close my eyes. Outside, the city carries on. In this room, there is nothing but the two of us, the bond between us, and the simple, staggering fact that we made it here.