8 Sloane #3
“And yes, it serves the revolution.” A watery laugh scraped out of my throat.
“Yes, it completes Reed’s quorum. Yes, it gives the Compact its fifth bloodline.
But that’s not why I’m asking. I’m asking because for the first time in my life, I’m in the arms of a man who would burn the whole world down before he’d use me, and I want to build a future with him. ”
“Sloane.” My name in his mouth, wrecked, reverent, a prayer dressed up as a syllable.
Take him, my wolf demanded, fierce and unyielding. Claim him completely. Fill us with his pups.
I leaned in. My lips brushed the corner of his mouth, and the Heat surged through both of us, the bond catching fire along its entire length.
“I am not a weapon. I am a woman who wants you. All of you. Everything you kept locked behind that careful, beautiful discipline for forty years. Give it to me.”
He searched my face. The pale eyes moved over every inch of it—looking for the fault line that would send the whole thing crashing down.
He didn’t find one. Because there wasn’t one. Because I wasn’t performing.
Finally.The refrain rose up through my blood, warm and golden and absolute. Finally, finally, finally.
“Sloane.” He shook his head. A desperate, beautiful kind of denial warred with the hope in his eyes.
“We met yesterday. One day. I want this more than I want my next breath, but how can you be this certain? We’re in the middle of a war zone.
You’re exhausted. You’re in Heat. This shouldn’t be possible. ”
“It’s not just a day.” I smoothed my hands over his shoulders, anchoring him to the stone floor, anchoring him to me.
“The Silver Weaver blessed us, Finn. She didn’t just throw us together by accident.
Not every wolf gets a fated mate, but we did.
It’s why I knew you instantly, even when my brain was screaming at me to run.
It’s why you refused to leave me in that stairwell.
We didn’t meet yesterday. We just finally recognized each other. ”
His throat worked as he swallowed. “It sounds like a fairy tale. And we don’t live in a fairy tale, Sloane. We live in a world where the Order guts women like you on metal tables.”
“Which is exactly why the moon goddess gave us this.” I leaned down, touching my forehead to his. “We need the strength of it. Think about it, Finn. Think about a week ago. When the retreat was broken open. When you were on the radio.”
His breath caught.
“I heard your voice.” The memory sent a shiver down my spine.
“I didn’t know your name. I didn’t know what you looked like.
But my wolf clawed at my ribs, frantic to get to the speaker.
I knew you were mine then. A week ago. A lifetime ago.
The moon goddess wove us together, and I am not walking away from the other half of my soul. ”
He stared at me. The last remnants of his logical armor shattered under the weight of the truth.
He had felt it too. I could see it in the widening of his pupils, the sudden, fierce intake of breath.
The logic didn’t matter anymore. The biology didn’t matter.
Only the myth, made flesh, breathing right here in his arms.
He kissed me.
His mouth moved over mine with a tenderness that made my ribs ache, his hands sliding into my hair, cradling my head like it was the most important thing he would ever hold.
I kissed him back and tasted salt—his tears or mine, impossible to tell, the bond blurring the borders between us until there was no clear line marking where I ended and he began.
When he pulled back, his thumb traced the track of the tear on my cheek.
“Not for the revolution,” he said quietly. “For us.”
“For us,” I agreed.
*\*\*\*/*/*/*
The second time was nothing like the first.
The first time had been a siege. A war of fever and poison and desperation, the bond hauling us both through a gauntlet and detonating at the finish line. It had been necessary. It had been world-ending. It had saved my life.
This was a choice.
He laid me down on his coat, spread open on the stone. He took care to arrange the heavy canvas under my back—smoothing the creases, folding the collar to cushion my head.
The Heat was rising again, a slow, liquid swell that turned my skin hypersensitive and my thoughts languid. The body’s ancient call to its mate, insistent but unhurried, a tide rather than a tsunami.
He settled over me, and I let my thighs fall open around his hips.
The weight of him. Goddess, the weight of him.
The man was an edifice—wide shoulders, thick chest, corded arms braced on either side of my head—and he held every ounce of it off me even now, even with the wolf riding him, propped on his forearms with his muscles shaking from the effort of his own restraint.
I reached up and dragged my fingertips down the center of his chest. Through the coarse hair, over the hard planes of muscle. His stomach contracted sharply under my touch.
“You can put your weight on me.” I said it into the space between his mouth and mine. “I won’t break.”
He grunted, disbelieving.
I hooked my ankle behind his thigh and pulled, and he came down against me, and the full press of his bare skin against mine sent a ripple of pleasure through every nerve I owned.
The heat of him was extraordinary—the deep, banked warmth of a body that had been built to burn.
My wolf stretched inside my chest and made a sound of pure, visceral satisfaction.
Ours to burn with, she purred.
Yes, I sighed into his ear.
His mouth found my throat. The fresh bite mark. He put his lips against it and the bond flared golden, a pulse of connection that ran the entire length of my body and gathered, hot and heavy, between my legs.
“Careful,” I breathed. “That’s—”
“I know what it is.” He smiled against it and dragged his open mouth down from the bite mark to the hollow of my throat, tasting the sweat there, and then lower, his stubble scraping over the upper swell of my breast. “I put it there.”
The possessiveness in his voice—quiet and factual—sent a spike of wet heat directly to my core.
He began to worship my breasts, his mouth, hot and deliberate, closing over my left nipple and pulling with a slow, devastating suction that made my back arch off the coat.
His tongue circled the tight, aching peak, flattened against it, dragged across the sensitive tip until I was gasping his name in fragments.
“Finn—I need—”
“I know.” He moved to the other breast, and his hand slid down my stomach. “I know what you need. The bond, remember? In this life and in the past.”
His fingers traced the line of muscle below my navel, dipped lower, brushed through the slick curls between my thighs. When he finally cupped me—his broad, calloused palm pressing flat against my swollen sex—the sound I made echoed off the stone walls.
“You’re soaking.” The words were a low growl spoken directly into the valley between my breasts. “Already. Before I’ve even—”
“Three-day Heat,” I managed, gasping. “You’re going to have to get used to it.”
He chuffed a laugh and slid two fingers into me.
The stretch was slow, deliberate, his thick fingers parting my slick inner walls with agonizing care.
I clenched around him instantly, my body gripping him with a desperation that made him groan against my sternum.
He worked his fingers in a deep, curling motion that found the exact spot where the pleasure condensed into a bright, sharp point, and my hips bucked off the coat.
“There,” I gasped, grabbing his wrist. Not to stop him. To keep him exactly there. “Right there, don’t you dare move—”
He growled with desire and stayed precisely where I’d locked him. He stroked that spot with the pad of his middle finger while his thumb found my clit, pressing the swollen bud in slow, firm circles that wound the tension at the base of my pelvis tighter with every rotation.
The competing voice came, because it always comes. You’ve known him for less than a day. The Saint is still out there. Reed’s pack is still walking into a trap.
I told the chalk-runner to shut up.
She didn’t. She never shuts up. But my wolf shouldered her aside with a contemptuous ease I’d never experienced before—the newly awakened predator inside me simply refusing to give ground—and the static dissolved into the golden hum of the bond.
Ours to ride, my wolf snarled with pure, possessive lust. Ours to take. We make a family today. Give us his pups.
His fingers drove me over the edge with a devastating efficiency that made my vision white out.
I came around his hand with my thighs clamped tight, my body convulsing, his name on my lips in a broken stream of syllables I couldn’t have assembled into a coherent thought if my life had depended on it.
He held me through it. Held perfectly still, his fingers buried inside me, his thumb gentle on the aftershocks, his mouth pressing soft, reverent kisses to the space between my breasts while I shuddered and gasped and slowly, slowly came back to myself.
“That’s one,” he murmured against my damp skin. The callback to the first time—to his promise to break me until the poison was gone.
“Get up here.” I grabbed the thick muscles of his shoulders and hauled, and he came, his massive body sliding up the length of mine, and the broad, heavy length of his cock dragged against my inner thigh, bare and hot and slick with his own arousal. No barrier. Nothing between his skin and mine.
The knowledge of it—that there was nothing separating us, nothing standing between his body and the future we’d just chosen—hit me with a force that had nothing to do with the Heat.
Finally.
I reached down between us. His cock was thick and heavy in my hand, the skin impossibly hot, the rigid length of him pulsing against my palm. I guided him toward me, but instead of taking him inside, I leaned down.
My tongue traced the broad, slick head.
Finn hissed. His hips bucked off the stone. His hands tangled in my hair.