7 Finn
The shock went up my arm before her skin registered as skin.
It hit the center of my chest like a bullet, and my whole body locked around it.
For one white second I couldn’t have told you my own name.
Then the second passed and there was only her.
Her scent flooding the tower—violets and that thread of clove burning through the top of it—and under my palm the frantic broken hammering of a heart that had no idea how to keep time anymore.
I held on.
Her heart caught the rhythm of mine. Stuttered. Found it. Stuttered again. Steadied a half-beat and lost it.
My voice came out of somewhere I didn’t recognize. “I’m right here. I’ve got you. Feel that? Match me. In. Out. You’re going to match me.”
“I’m—” Her lashes fluttered. The gold under them guttered like a lamp somebody kept blowing on. “I’m trying, I can’t—it won’t hold—”
It wouldn’t.
The bond had thrown her a line, and she’d grabbed it, but the line wasn’t hauling her out fast enough. Her pulse rose to mine and slid back down. Rose and slid.
The radio hissed on the stone by my knee.
Reed was who knew where. Down the mountain somewhere planning to walk into a kill-box because nobody topside knew Severance was another trap.
I could hold her with one hand and key the mic with the other. I could. But the Saint still mucked with transmission.
“Breathe,” I said.
She dragged in a breath that shook the whole way down.
“Sloane.”
“Close the circuit.” She said it like she was calling a play. Lucid. Fierce. Burning alive and choosing, choosing with both hands. “You know what it takes. Don’t make me say it twice, I don’t have the air—mate me. Mark me. Give me my wolf back so we can stand up off this floor and fight.”
Everything in me that was still Treaty Court reared up against it. The mark was forever. The mark was the one thing that couldn’t be taken back. A man did not put his teeth in his fated mate on a stone floor with a god climbing the ridge below after having just met her and no promises made—
“You barely know me.” It came out wrecked. “You don’t even—five minutes ago you told me not to touch you.”
“Five minutes ago I had a choice.” Her thumb pressed hard over my knuckles, grounding me, grounding herself.
“My heart quits in the next few minutes or you close the loop. We both know that. Those are the options on the board.” Her mouth twisted, half a snarl, half something that in a better night might’ve been a grin.
“I’m choosing it, Finn. That’s the part you’ve been so worried about, isn’t it?
I’m choosing. I know I told you to stay away, but—I wanted to meet you for a long time.
So stop looking at me like I’m asking you to hurt me and do it. ”
I looked at the radio one more time.
Reed’s face. The crew. A man building a family out of found strays and me swearing my life into his hands in the soot of a burned ridgeline, and everything the Court ever carved into my bones about the greater good, the many over the one, the law that says you spend yourself for the pack.
Then I looked at her.
And there was no contest. There had never once been a contest. That was the shameful, glorious truth of it—the mountain of duty I’d been dragging behind me for forty years, and she’d burned it flat without lifting a finger.
I reached down and I knocked the radio away from us. “You’re the only law I have left.”
Her breath went out of her all at once.
I got my hands on the buckles of my gear and tore them open.
The heavy canvas coat came off, the fire-resistant shirt beneath it, and the brutal cold of the stone tower hit my bare chest. I didn’t feel it.
I couldn’t have felt anything past the furnace of the woman thrashing on the floor.
She was already fighting the zipper of her own pants with fingers that refused to obey the commands of her brain.
I caught her wrists, pressing her hands down flat against the stone, and took over.
I peeled the stiff jacket off her shoulders, careful of the sliced palm, and then the sweat-soaked undershirt beneath it.
Every inch of skin I bared threw another wave of her scent into the air until the ruined tower smelled of nothing but crushed violets, sharp clove, and the heavy, musky sweetness of pure Heat.
I stripped out of my own pants, kicking the heavy boots away. The cold stone bit into my knees as I settled between her thighs, my heart hammering a violent, erratic rhythm against my ribs.
She is here. She is warm. She is ours. My wolf paced the cage of my ribs, frantic and starving.
Steady, I commanded. We have to be careful.
I lowered myself down over her. I kissed her forehead, her cheek, the corner of her mouth, and then full on the lips.
She gasped against me. I braced my weight on my forearms. Conscious every second of the massive size of my own body, of the unyielding stone at her back, I brought my bare chest down against hers. Slow. Deliberate.
The moment we met full skin to skin, the shockwave went through us both at once.
Her spine bowed up off the floor into me and a jagged, breathless sound tore out of her throat—a sound she’d been holding behind her teeth the entire desperate climb up the mountain.
Mate. Finally. Ours. My wolf’s voice was a roar that drowned out the wind outside.
I know. I’ve got her, I answered the beast, dropping my forehead to the curve of her shoulder and shaking.
The relief was so absolute, so violent, it was almost indistinguishable from grief.
Years and years. I’d carried a cavernous hole in the center of my chest the exact size and shape of a woman I’d never seen.
The entire pack ached with it—every unmated wolf, every empty chair at the long packhouse table.
I’d told myself it was the price of the work. I’d told myself a lot of lies.
Here, the vow surfaced in my blood, frantic and ragged. I’m here. Goddess, I’m here.
“Finn.” Her voice broke on my name. Her good hand came up, her fingers tangling hard into the hair at the nape of my neck.
Her hips shifted under mine, a restless, seeking friction driven by the Heat, reaching for me.
“Don’t go slow to be gentle. I don’t need gentle.
I need—” A sharp gasp ripped through her as I shifted, the heavy root of my arousal dragging against her thigh.
“I need the poison out. Faster. Whatever burns it faster.”
“I know.” I lifted my head. Her wrists had come up between us, and they were glowing.
They threaten her, my wolf snarled. Destroy them.
I frowned at the sight of her wrists. What was this?
Brann, Santos, Levi, Tommy—they’d never described anything like this.
Twin seams of white fire ran up the inside of her forearms. A third seam of light lit the hollow of her throat. All three of them pulsing in a rhythm that wasn’t her heartbeat and—
The Ash Oath.
Somehow. Somehow Sloane had taken the Ash Oath of my bloodline. Now it was fighting her wolf. Two ancient magics locked inside her body, fighting over the exact same square inch of ground as the suppression drugs.
I took both of her wrists. Pinned them to the stone above her head.
“This doesn’t belong to you anymore,” I said, and put my mouth directly against the sigil burning on the inside of her left wrist.
She jolted, bucking up against my chest. “Finn—that’s warded, you can’t just—it’ll burn you—”
“It will obey me.” I dragged my lips up the scalding seam of light and felt it catch. It pulled at me, the massive burden lifting off her skin and reaching frantically for mine, like water finding lower ground. “Ash and stone. It’s what I’m for. I will carry it.”
“It took a whole coven—”
“It will obey my command.” I bit the words directly into her pulse. “Give it to me, Sloane. I will hold the weight so your wolf can come up.”
Take it, my wolf urged. Make room for our mate.
She strained, as if to still resist, and then something in her changed.
The Ash Oath climbed up my arms in a blinding line of white fire, tracing over the corded muscles of my shoulders.
It burned exactly like a brand laid flat against the flesh, and I welcomed it.
I opened my mind up and took every scalding inch of the magic into the ash markings already invisibly inked at my own wrists and throat.
The tattoos deepened. My royal bloodline accepted the crushing burden.
The light drained out of her wrists, and the second it did, her whole body changed under me—the rigid, defensive posture opened, her dormant wolf surging up into the space the Oath had vacated.
She’s waking. Our mate is waking.
Easy, I warned the animal. She’s still burning up.
“I’ve got the Oath. It’s mine now.” I shifted my weight, dragging my chest lower over her body.
Yes, the wolf purred deep in my marrow. She is ours to soothe.
Her back arched off the floor and she made a sound I would have walked into a hundred wildfires to hear again.
“Oh.” It was barely a word. “Oh, that’s—I can feel it, I can feel her, she’s—”
Pale scars on her stomach and ribs came up under my mouth. I traced the tip of my tongue down the longest scar across her ribs, tasting the salt of her sweat.
They hurt her, my wolf snarled, a vicious, protective fury spiking my blood. We kill them.
We will, I promised silently. But right now, we heal her.
She flinched, trying to twist away. “You don’t have to—” Her voice cracked.
There was something in that broken syllable I hadn’t heard from her yet.
The impenetrable armor was coming off her, plate by heavy plate, and under it was a woman who’d been treated as a weapon for so long she physically recoiled at being treated as sacred.
“Finn, you don’t have to worship the ugly parts—”
“There are no ugly parts.” I closed my mouth fully over the soft, heavy swell of her left breast.
Adore her, the wolf commanded. Every inch belongs to us.
She cried out, her hips snapping up off the stone to grind blindly against my stomach.