16 Sloane
“Say it to me,” he said, and closed the last of the distance.
His mouth crashed down on mine, and my world dissolved into him.
There was no fever this time. No frantic poison burning in my veins. There was no ticking clock, no dying heart, no god on the ridge tracking us through the dark.
There was only Finn.
He tasted like the sweet, dark cider from the mess hall, layered over the biting scent of mountain wind and river stone.
I opened for him instantly, his tongue sweeping into my mouth to meet mine, drinking down the groan that rumbled up from his massive chest. Every nerve in my body lit up, not with the agonizing desperation of the Heat, but with a pure, staggering, conscious want.
Mine to choose, I thought, the realization hitting me with force. I am choosing this.
I hooked my hands into the fabric of his shirt, grabbing fistfuls of the cotton to haul him closer. I wanted his crushing weight. I wanted the frantic, tearing urgency of the fire tower back. I tugged, trying to pull his shirt up over his corded torso, but he caught my wrists.
His grip was a warm, immovable iron manacle. He pulled my hands away from his chest, his thumb stroking my pulse point, and he broke the kiss just enough to let us both breathe.
“No,” Finn murmured. His pale gold eyes were blazing in the dim light of the room, reading the impatience in my body with a devastating clarity. “Not this time, Sloane. We’re not rushing. The fire is out.”
He released my wrists and took a deliberate half-step back. The loss of his body heat made my skin prickle, my nipples instantly tightening beneath the thin fabric of my borrowed shirt.
“I spent forty years wondering what you would look like,” he said, his voice dropping into that gravel-thick register that vibrated directly against my breasts. “I am going to look at you.”
He reached for the hem of my shirt.
The chalk-runner in me—the woman who had spent years undercover, who never let anyone see her without her armor fully strapped on and locked tight—flashed a warning. Exposed.
Safe, my newly awakened wolf snarled back immediately, shouldering the fear aside. He is ours. Let him see.
Finn gripped the hem of my shirt and pulled it upward, agonizingly slow. The cool air of the bedroom kissed my stomach, my ribs, and then my breasts as the fabric cleared my head. He tossed it aside.
I stood before him in only my bra and pants, my chest heaving, the bite mark at my throat pulsing in time with my frantic heartbeat.
Finn didn’t look at my face. He looked at my body like a man who had just walked into a temple he thought had been destroyed centuries ago. His calloused fingers reached out, hovering an inch above my skin, before finally tracing the slope of my shoulder down to the cup of my bra.
“Goddess,” he breathed. The word wasn’t an exclamation. It was a prayer.
He unhooked the front clasp of my bra with a single, practiced flick of his fingers. The heavy swell of my breasts spilled free. My nipples were tight, dark, and aching.
Finn’s jaw set hard, a muscle ticking in his cheek as he tracked the soft rise and fall of my chest.
“Your turn,” I whispered, my voice shaky. “Take it off.”
Finn didn’t break eye contact as he reached for the buttons of his work shirt. He undid them with a maddening precision, peeling the dark fabric off his shoulders and tossing it to the floor.
The breath stalled in my lungs.
His torso was a rugged expanse of thick, corded muscle and pale, jagged burn scars—the map of a man who had spent a lifetime wading into infernos to protect people who didn’t know his name.
But I knew the most recent scars were from the Rig he’d taken apart when the Alchemist had used his new invention.
But it was the ink that held me hostage.
The Ash Tattoos of the Treaty Court, once faint, were now vivid black lines that had spread.
They banded his thick wrists, and now wrapped his throat, and snaked across the sculpted ridges of his collarbones and pecs, absorbing the magic of my Lodestone Oath into the very marrow of the mountain’s oldest law.
I reached out and laid my hands flat on his chest, my fingertips sinking into the coarse auburn hair. His heart hammered a violent rhythm against my palms.
“Beautiful,” I whispered, mapping the edge of a scar over his rib. “You are so beautiful.”
A low, jagged sound tore out of him. He caught my waist, dragging me forward until my bare breasts brushed the hot expanse of his chest. The friction sent a spike of wet, heavy heat straight to my core.
“I need your pants off,” he growled.
He didn’t wait for my compliance. Finn dropped to his knees in front of me, the sheer size of him eclipsing the room even from the floor.
His large hands found the button of my pants.
He slid the denim down my hips, taking my underwear with them, pushing both down my thighs and calves until I stepped free. I was completely naked in the cool air.
He stayed on his knees, his face level with my stomach.
I braced my hands on his broad shoulders as he leaned forward, his stubble-roughened jaw grazing my hip bone. He pressed an open-mouthed kiss to my lower abdomen.
“I worship this,” he said, pressing his lips again, his breath ghosting over my skin. “The things that didn’t break you.”
Then, he turned his face inward, pressing his cheek perfectly flat against the center of my bare stomach.
He went completely still. I looked down at the massive, lethal Alpha of the Treaty Court kneeling at my feet, cradling my flat belly like it was the center of the universe.
A rolling vibration started deep in his chest—a sub-vocal rumble that bypassed my ears and traveled straight up through the soles of my feet into my bones.
Pup, his wolf purred through the bond, the sound thick with a fierce, proprietary possessiveness that made my knees weak. Ours.
A tear broke loose and tracked hot down my cheek. I buried my fingers in his hair, holding him against me.
“They couldn’t take it,” I sobbed, the truth of it cracking my chest wide open. The decades of suppressants, the poison, the terror. It had all failed. “They couldn’t stop us, Finn.”
“Our future,” Finn murmured against my skin. He turned his head and pressed a hot, branding kiss directly over my womb. “The Fifth Line. Not for a war. For us.”
My wolf howled her joy into the bond, a sound so bright and uncontainable it banished the last lingering shadow. I wasn’t a vessel. I wasn’t an undercover asset. I was a mate, and I would soon be a mother.
Finn rose to his feet. He caught the backs of my thighs and lifted me effortlessly into his arms, carrying me the three steps to his bed. He laid me down on the clean sheets, his golden eyes burning over every inch of me as I sprawled completely open and surrendered beneath him.
He stripped off his own pants, kicking them away alongside his heavy boots.
He settled between my spread thighs, his large hands gripping my knees and pushing my legs wider. The cool air washed over my dripping sex, leaving me devastatingly exposed.
Finn leaned over me, bracing his weight on his forearms, trapping me in his cage of muscle and ink, and inhaled deeply.
“Violets,” he growled, closing his eyes, a shiver running down his massive frame. “And chalk. And clove.”
During the Heat, my scent had been buried under the thick, musky sweetness of the fever. Now, he was smelling the true me. The woman without the sickness, without the poison.
“You’re soaked,” he said, his voice ragged as his finger brushed the slick, swollen folds of my entrance. I gasped, my hips instinctively lifting into his touch. “For me. Because you want me. Say it.”
“I want you,” I whimpered. The truth was an absolute agony. “Finn, please. I want you.”
He lowered his head.
The first sweep of his tongue across my clitoris was an agonizingly slow caress that sent a shockwave of pleasure radiating outward from my pelvis to my fingertips. My back arched entirely off the mattress, my hands tangling desperately in his sheets.
Finn groaned against my dripping flesh. He tasted me as though I were the first drop of water in a hundred years.
He lapped at my wetness, his broad hands sliding up to grip my thighs, holding me anchored as he went to work.
His tongue was a relentless, blunt instrument of devastation.
He traced the hood of my clit, flicked the swollen bundle of nerves, and then sucked the tight, aching peak deep into his mouth.
I screamed into the empty room. “Oh goddess, Finn—”
His stubble abraded the sensitive skin of my inner thighs, a friction that grounded me even as the pleasure threatened to rip my consciousness apart.
I thrashed, trying to close my legs to trap the sensation, to push the climbing pressure over the edge, but his grip on my inner thighs was immovable.
He wouldn’t let me squirm away. He made me take every agonizing second of his worship.
I reached down, tangling my fingers in his hair, hopelessly trying to drag his face upward. “Please,” I begged, the pressure spiraling into a blinding, white-hot point of necessity. “Finn, get up here, I need you inside me—”
“No.” He pulled back just half an inch, his lips glistening with my wetness. “I’m going to make you come on my mouth first. You’re going to break wide open because you choose to, Sloane.”
He dove back in, his tongue flattening against my core as he slid two thick fingers deep inside my dripping heat.
The stretch of his fingers, combined with the ruthless, suctioning rhythm of his mouth, shattered me completely.
The climax hit me without warning, a detonation of pure ecstasy that bypassed my brain and hijacked my spine.
I cried out his name, my inner walls locking around his fingers.
Every muscle in my body seized, holding on to the crest of the orgasm as he drank my release like a starving man.
I fell back onto the mattress, my chest heaving, my vision clouded with gold stars.