7 Finn #3
“Good.” She dragged my mouth down to hers and kissed me like she was trying to suck the oxygen straight out of my lungs. Against my bruised lips, she panted, “Now. It’s close, I can feel her, she’s right at the surface, now—”
The wolf inside me surged violently up my spine.
The claiming instinct. The ancient, possessive yearning I’d kept on a leash for my entire life.
For the first time in forty years, I let the animal come completely off the chain.
My jaw ached with the sheer, crushing force of the instinct.
I felt the pulse of the mating gland at the side of her throat like a magnetic lodestar, and everything in my biology bent toward it.
“I’m here,” I snarled directly into her skin, the vow vibrating through her collarbone. “Say it once more. Tell me the waiting is done, Sloane. Be here in my hands.”
“Finally.” She turned her head. She bared the long, pale line of her throat for me—a deliberate, breathtaking offering from a warrior. Her own mouth found the ash-marked ridge of my shoulder. “Take it.”
The orgasm started to break around me. Her inner walls clamped down like a vise and shattered, the first spasming wave of her climax milking the entire length of my cock.
Mark, the wolf demanded, a primitive, primal law.
At the exact instant her body detonated, I drove my hips home to the absolute hilt, opened my jaw, and sank my teeth directly into her throat.
She screamed my name, and sank her teeth into my shoulder. She bit down, breaking my skin at the exact moment I broke hers.
The loop closed.
The power came up through the stone floor, ripped through both of us, and blew the dark tower completely full of blinding white light.
It was the oldest magic of our kind—the sacred forge-fire the Goddess had gifted the first mates to make two souls indestructible.
The magic roared through the newly forged bond, hitting the poison in her veins and burning it out.
Ours forever, the beast roared in triumph, a sound of absolute, unshakeable permanence.
My own climax tore through me on the tail of hers so hard my vision went entirely black at the edges.
I roared into the curve of her throat, emptying myself deep inside her tight heat in hot, pulsing surges.
She cried out around the flesh of my shoulder, her body convulsing wildly beneath me.
The two bleeding wounds sealed the circuit, and the circuit carried everything in both directions at once—her lingering fear, my forty years of starving hunger, the entire collective ache of every empty chair at my pack’s table.
All of it dumped into one massive channel and instantly shorted out in a flood of pure, undeniable gold.
When I finally found the strength to lift my head, her eyes were open.
Gold. But not the fevered, dying gold from before.
Not the guttering lamp fighting the wind.
It was a steady, brilliant, bottomless gold.
A light lit from a source that would never go out again.
And her wolf looked up at me out of those eyes for the first time in her entire life, completely and utterly uncaged.
Mate, her wolf whispered through the bond, clear and strong and perfectly whole.
Mate, my wolf answered.
The fever was banked.
That was the first thing, the impossible thing, the thing I kept checking for like a man patting his pockets—her skin cooled and not a body eating itself alive.
Her heart under my chest beat clean and strong and even, a good hard rhythm, the rhythm of something built to run down mountains.
She’d gone loose in my arms in a way I don’t think her body had ever allowed itself, boneless, spent, her cheek against my chest and her breath evening out.
I gathered her in. I got us both turned so my back took the cold stone and she was on top of me, out of the grit, and I pulled my ruined coat over her shoulders and ran my hand down the length of her bare spine, again, again, and pressed my mouth to the crown of her head.
“Thank you,” I said. Barely voice at all.
I felt her not understand it—a small furrow, a question she was too wrecked to ask, thank you for what, I’m the one who—
She’d figure it out someday, maybe. That I’d spent forty years arriving too late, and tonight, for once, for her, I hadn’t. That the hole was closed. That I would carry her Ash Oath to the grave and count it the lightest thing I’d ever held.
My shoulder throbbed where she’d marked me and I wouldn’t have traded that wound for anything. She’s real. She’s finally here. She’s real.
I let myself have it. Ten seconds of the purest thing I’d ever felt, my mate safe on my chest and the whole ruined world held off past the bolted, warded door.
Then, over the top of her head, in the corner where I’d kicked it—
The radio.
And past the glass of the lookout the sky over the eastern ridge had begun, very faintly, to go the color of ash before light.
Dawn was coming.
And somewhere below, blind, unwarned, walking toward a kill-box built to swallow them whole, Reed and the crew were already moving.
I closed my eyes and held my sleeping mate against the wreck of the only choice could have made.