10 Avaline #2
“Then tell me what the fuck I’m supposed to do!
” The roar tore out of his throat, cracked and shredded with a grief so profound it shook the room to absolute silence.
“Tell me! If I put her in a truck, her soul tears in half and she dies! If I mate her to save her, my own fire cooks her alive and she dies! And if we lay here while the bridge keeps breaking in the Dreamscape, the Order’s strike team breaches that door and puts us both down! ”
“I have Founding fire in my blood,” he rasped, his forehead burying hard into the hollow of my neck, his heavy shoulders shaking. “I have the power of the mountain in my hands. And every single thing I can do kills her.”
The agony of an Alpha who would tear the world apart with his bare hands, completely paralyzed by his own love, was a terrible, sacred thing to feel against my back.
I had to pull him out of the fire before he burned himself down to ash.
I forced my left arm to move, reaching across my own ribs to where his massive, scarred arm locked around my torso.
I slid my cold fingers down the burning plane of his forearm, reaching up to touch the tight, sculpted slabs of his chest pressed to my shoulder blade, and down across the hard ridges of his abs tucked flush behind my spine.
The sheer heat radiating off his bare skin seared the numbness from my fingertips.
My hand traveled lower beneath the heavy blankets, drifting over the tight V of his pelvic bone where his hips bracketed mine, stopping a bare millimeter above the scorching, velvet root of his heavy erection.
My breath hitched.
In a flash, a different kind of hunger tore through my defenses.
I imagined curling my fingers around the thick, velvet heat of him, feeling the pulse beneath his skin.
I imagined sinking down between his thighs, drawing that scorching length past my lips, tasting salt and pure Alpha fire until he lost his mind and fisted my hair.
Imagined the friction of his heavy chest crushing mine as he then raised himself over me and entered, his hips driving hard and relentless into my core, claiming every inch of my body until nothing else existed.
My hand trembled. With every ounce of discipline I possessed, I dragged my palm away before I touched his cock, pressing my hand flat against his hip instead.
In his distress, Reed gathered me closer under the wool blankets, his massive body wrapping completely around mine from behind.
We were both naked, slick with melted frost and fevered sweat, and as he shifted his hips to shield me from the room, the swollen, heavy crown of his erection nudged directly against the wet, aching cleft of my entrance.
The contact was an electric shockwave straight to my marrow.
My core thrummed with a heavy, wet ache, my hips pressing back instinctively against the hard ridge of his thighs.
But a part of me still recoiled. Don’t you dare forgive him, the still water whispered.
Don’t let the heat erase the time you spent locked in a box while he breathed free air.
I clamped my jaw, trying to force the desire down.
Even with Brann, Nadia, and Maren standing three feet from the edge of the bed, my body betrayed me. I arched my spine—just a fraction of an inch, a tiny, desperate tilt of my pelvis—just enough to feel the velvet tip of his cock push against the wet lips of my entrance.
All it would take was one more breath. One backward thrust of my hips. He would slide in, and the world would end.
Reed let out a low, strangled groan against my ear, a sound of pure, unadulterated torture.
His entire muscular frame locked into rigid iron behind me.
Every tendon in his neck corded, his fists clenching the wool blanket until the weave ripped, fighting with every shred of Alpha discipline he owned not to drive his hips forward and claim me right there in front of his crew.
“Avaline...” he choked out, his breath scorching the curve of my cheek, raw and ragged with helpless frustration.
“Goddess help me, I don’t know how to stop it.
I pour all the fire I have into the bridge, but it’s like trying to dam an ocean with a handful of sand.
The poison just keeps rising from below...
like there’s an endless pump feeding the deep from somewhere beneath the world. ”
The words hit my mind like a struck match.
An endless pump feeding the deep.
My breath caught in my throat. The frost in my thoughts shattered, every piece of Maren’s warning, the three deep channels boiling beneath the black glass, and years of a silent Scribe’s memory locking together in a blinding flash of clarity.
“Reed,” I gasped, my fingers gripping his forearm with sudden, desperate strength. “Reed, that’s it!”
Reed went completely still behind me, his chest hitching. “What?”
At the foot of the bed, Brann blinked, exchanging a bewildered glance with Nadia, while Maren frowned over her spectacles, her salt-dusted fingers pausing in midair.
“That’s what?” Brann asked, his brow furrowing in confusion. “Ma’am, you’re barely conscious—”
“The river,” I said, the words cutting clear through the dim room as the Scribe took full command. “We’ve been trying to fight the flood in the spirit, but the poison isn’t coming from the Loom. Reed, you just said it—it’s being fed from beneath the world!”
I turned my face slightly, pressing my cheek back against the rough stubble of Reed’s jaw so he could hear every syllable.
“Listen to me, Reed. Why did the bridge break both times? Think! It wasn’t your fire failing, and it wasn’t my weaving.
When we looked down, what did we see? Three deep channels surging in unison.
Maren, you told us on the plane: the ancient law of spirit and stone.
What they brew in the waking world feeds the toxic tide in the spirit-realm.
The Order built three poisoned fonts across this valley.
We cannot hold the bridge from within the Dreamscape while the waking fonts are still drowning the span! ”
Reed lay rigid behind me, his chin resting against my temple as his brilliant mind caught the spark and clicked the pieces into place. “The three booster feeds Kenji flagged on the telemetry...”
We don’t need to mate to hold the bridge,” I said. “We need the river drained at the source. And we drain it by blowing the three reservoirs of aurum latens in the real world that’s feeding the river in the Dreamscape.”
“No,” Reed growled softly into my ear, protective terror flaring back up. “If the pack leaves to hit three targets, we’re left alone in this bunker. If they breach while you and I are down in the Dreamscape—”
I turned my chin further, looking into the edge of his eyes over my shoulder.
“You destroy the fonts, their tracking nets go dark, their siege stalls, and the poison river drains at the exact same second. That is our only window. We hold the obsidian bridge. The pack blows the reservoirs. I walk across to my wolf. And all the other dormant shifters the Order has poisoned get a chance to find their wolves again too.”