10 Avaline
Three steps.
I was three steps from the other side of the river.
Three steps from where my white wolf waited in the silver mist of the Loom, her dark eyes reflecting mine across the silence.
I could feel the phantom heat of her breath.
I could feel the silver fur vibrating against the astral air, the amputated limb of my soul reaching to be made whole again.
Under my bare feet, the glowing obsidian bridge was solid.
Then the world shattered.
Before I could throw myself forward, before my hands could touch the far bank, the bridge exploded into a million burning embers, falling away into the boiling pearl-white poison of the river below.
The shockwave launched me into the bruised astral sky.
I fell through the void, weightless, screaming a name that had no sound. Across the chasm, my white wolf reared on her hind legs, pawing at the empty air, throwing her head back in a frantic, soundless howl as the silver pastures of the Loom dissolved into blinding mist.
Reed!
The Dreamscape ripped apart like a torn sail—
And my eyes snapped open on frost.
The transition was a brutal, bone-jarring crash back. The silence of the Dreamscape vanished, replaced by the suffocating reality of the bedroom: the smell of elder-ash, the frantic ticking of the heater, and the ceiling shuddering under a concussive thud that sent dust sifting through the dark.
Frost caked my eyelashes. I felt the fine rime of it crack when I blinked, my own shallow breath freezing into mist against my lips.
I was completely naked beneath the blankets, and every single inch of my backside was pressed flush against the massive, scorching furnace of Reed’s bare body.
The heat of him boiled against my skin, melting the surface frost on my flesh until my thighs, my stomach, and the small of my back were slick and glistening with moisture.
But beneath the heat of his skin lay something infinitely more dangerous to my sanity: his thick, rigid erection, throbbing with a relentless pulse against the top curve of my bare buttocks and the dip of my lower spine.
The contact sent an electric, blinding shockwave of pure desire straight down into my pelvis.
My core clenched, pulling tight around a sudden, agonizingly slick ache that flooded between my thighs. In a flash, my mind betrayed me entirely.
I pictured what it would feel like to let go.
To let his huge, calloused hands grip my hips and roll me onto my back.
To feel his heavy, muscled thighs part mine, his rough fingers tracing the wet cleft of my center before he drove that thick, scorching cock all the way inside me—burying himself to the hilt, stretching me full, pinning me against the mattress until the bed groaned and twenty years of loneliness were incinerated in a single, devastating flood of his seed.
The desire was an inferno. It made my nipples harden into tight, aching points against the cold air, my hips twitching with an involuntary need to grind backward against the hard length of him.
No. The cold, calculating voice rose from the bottom of my mind, throwing up a wall of ice against the heat. Stop it. You hate him.
I had told him that. Just hours ago, with my veins turning to slush, I had looked him in the face and told him I hadn’t forgiven him. I had used my hatred like armor, sharpening every day of my captivity into a blade to keep myself from breaking.
Yet as his huge chest heaved against my shoulder blades, his arms locked around my ribs with a protective desperation so absolute it felt holy, the lie tasted like ash on my tongue.
I didn’t hate him. I had never hated him.
The word was just the only name I had known how to give to twenty years of starving for the only man who could ever make me whole.
A metallic shriek shattered the air.
Somewhere close, the deadbolt on the door sheared off its steel housing with a sound like a snapped wrist. The heavy wooden door blew inward on a cloud of splinters, and shapes filled the threshold.
Two in the doorway. One armed with warding, not steel—the doctor. One high, sidearm up, sweeping—Brann.
“Reed.” Brann’s voice came out stripped to bone, filling the shattered doorway like a bulkhead. “Get up. Get her up. We’ve been made.”
Behind me, Reed’s chest went from stone to pure volcanic fury. The rumble started deep under my spine, a violent, subvocal bedrock snarl that shook the mattress springs and vibrated through the floorboards.
“Get the fuck out of my doorway, Brann!” Reed roared, the sheer, concussive force of his Alpha command rattling the loose dust from the ceiling rafters. “Nobody touches her! Nobody moves her an inch!”
Brann stepped into the room, his jaw clenched, his sidearm lowered but ready. “The Order lost our transponder, but they’re sweeping the ridge in force. We don’t have the firepower to hold a siege in this bunker. Staying here is suicide!”
“I don’t give a damn about their trackers!
” Reed bared his teeth, his massive arms wrapping tighter around my shivering ribs, hauling my frozen body deeper into the searing furnace of his chest. “Clear this room! Clear the hall, seal the blast doors, and let me take her back down! I’ll lay the obsidian again.
I’ll pour every drop of Founding fire I have into the bedrock, burn those spectral hounds out of the canyon, and pull her wolf across with my bare hands! ”
Nadia pushed past Brann, her warded jar throwing an eerie green glow over her sharp face. “Core temp is crashing, Reed! Look at her lips! We wrap her in thermal blankets, wedge her between two of you in the rig, and drive!”
“Drive where, Nadia?” Maren snapped, pushing into the room with the bowl in her hands. “Down the mountain road with the Order’s strike team sweeping the tree line? You put a hypothermic dormant wolf in a bouncing truck and her spiritual anchor shatters before you hit the blacktop.”
Nadia turned on her, her eyes flashing. “If we stay in this bunker, Maren, her core drops. My diagnostics are showing vascular crystallizing! I don’t care how many hearth-charms you’ve buried under the floorboards, biological shutdown doesn’t wait for your chalk to dry.”
“It isn’t a charm, you foolish girl, it’s a salt-lock,” Maren snapped back, setting the bowl on the nightstand with a sharp clatter.
She grabbed a handful of coarse gray salt and drew a quick, circular sigil over my sternum.
“Her core is dropping because the astral dam is draining her soul. Move her body while her soul is tethered to the Dreamscape and you pull her in two.”
“She’s already in two!” Nadia argued, stepping right into Maren’s space, pressing her fingers against my icy carotid pulse. “Look at the reading cloth—the cold isn’t coming from outside, it’s coming from her marrow. If Reed doesn’t maintain maximum surface heat while we transport—”
“Reed,” I rasped, the words tearing like jagged glass in my throat.
The room went silent.
I forced my arm to move, dragging the flat of my cold palm across the burning slab of his forearm where it locked around my ribs.
Reed went rigid behind me, his breath hitching in a terrifying mixture of grief, rage, and raw panic.
“We tried, Reed,” I whispered, tilting my head back against the hard curve of his shoulder until my temple pressed to his collarbone. “The bridge won’t hold. Doing the same thing again in the Dreamscape will only break you, and I still won’t reach the bank.”
Reed’s jaw worked, his chest heaving against my back as his Founding fire flared in desperate, anguished waves.
“Then we finish the bond,” Reed said, the words ripping out of his throat, raw and breathless into my hair. “Right now. On this bed—”
“Reed!” Brann barked.
“I mean it!” Reed snarled, his grip tightening around my waist from behind, his hips pressing forward under the blankets until the hard, scorching length of his erection was pinned flush against the dip of my lower back.
“My magic isn’t fully activated! That’s why the obsidian fractured under the beasts, that’s why the bridge couldn’t hold against the surge.
If I claim you—if we seal the bond—my Founding blood fully ignites.
My power becomes unbreakable. Just like Brann.
Just like Santos. I can build an indestructible road across that whole damn river! Let me mate you, Avaline!”
Beneath the blankets, every nerve in my body screamed yes.
The sheer, raw command in his voice struck my pelvis like a lightning bolt.
My core clenched in a spasm of desire, my hips twitching with an overwhelming hunger to arch backward, to part my legs across the mattress, to feel his massive, calloused hands wrench my hips around and drive that thick cock all the way inside me.
I wanted him to stretch me open, to fill me to the absolute brim, and pump his hot seed into me until the freezing loneliness was burned to ash in a single, devastating explosion of pleasure.
I wanted him so badly it tasted like blood in my mouth.
Nadia’s breath hitched in sheer horror from the foot of the bed. “Are you out of your mind, Reed? You’ll cook her organs from the inside out before her beast can even wake!”
“You’ll incinerate her marrow to cinders!” Maren barked, slamming her fist against the nightstand.
The reminder struck us both like an iron sledge.
The volcanic fury draining out of him was replaced by a hollow, devastating crash of absolute despair. His chest caved inward against my spine, his massive hands trembling where they gripped the sheets.
Reed let out a broken groan, his forehead dropping heavily against the curve of my neck, his huge frame shuddering with the agony of restraint. The heavy throb of his cock pressed against my buttocks was an excruciating promise of what we were denying ourselves.