17 Reed
The mountain water hit my pants like liquid iron.
I didn’t care about the boots. I didn’t care about the soaked canvas or the pipes rattling beneath the floorboards. I dropped into the clawfoot tub, water surging over the rusted enamel rim, and I hauled Avaline’s overheated body straight against my chest.
She collapsed into me with a ragged sob.
Her chest pressed flush to my front, her soaking wet tank top offering zero barrier against the volcanic heat of my skin. She was shivering violently—beneath her ribs the suppressed Heat burned with the fury of a crown fire trapped in a canyon.
“I’ve got you,” I rasped into the wet curve of her neck, locking one arm over her back and sliding my other hand down to anchor her shivering thighs. “Breathe into me, Ava. Let my blood take the burn.”
Drink the fever, my wolf urged, his spirit pressed tight against mine as we submerged into the cold water. Take the fire from her flesh.
I forced the magma in my veins to open wide to anchor her Heat, but the violent tremors didn’t ease.
The water around us was thick with the scent of her—sweet clove, wild honeysuckle.
She turned in my lap, twisting until her bare knees straddled my thighs, her soaked cotton panties pressing directly against the heavy, aching ridge of my cock.
Take her now, my wolf howled, surging forward, claws out. She sits on our lap—
“Reed,” she whispered, her hands coming up to grip my face. Her palms were burning hot against my stubbled jaw, her gold-ringed pupils so wide they looked like pools of liquid obsidian. “Please. Look at what you’re doing to me.”
“I’m looking, sweetheart,” I groaned, the sound tearing out of my chest like jagged shale.
I stared down into her face, searching the fever-flushed skin, searching the desperate, trembling line of her mouth. She wasn’t just aroused—she was drowning. The unconsummated Heat was boiling through her blood, stripping away every wall of her conscious mind.
Just an hour ago, she had been the master strategist. She had stood tall, laying out the architecture of High Arbiter Gault’s corruption, commanding the quorum of six bloodlines, insisting that we hold our mating for the First Altar at the Caldera Summit.
She had been the one who warned me that consummating too early would trap the magic, flare the Beacon, and doom every dormant left in the cages.
Now, looking into her eyes, I couldn’t find the Scribe.
Her White Wolf was in the driver’s seat, raging, demanding blood, seed, and fangs without a single thought for tomorrow.
She was out of her mind with fever.
“Avaline, listen to my voice,” I rasped, my hands gripping her wet waist, fighting the urge to drag her hips down harder against mine. “Look at me. Where are we supposed to finish this?”
“Here,” she wept, her pelvis rocking frantically into the heavy, aching ridge of my cock. The friction through our soaked clothes was blistering agony. “With you. In the water. Right now.”
“No,” I ground out, my teeth clenching so hard my jaw muscles trembled.
“The Caldera. The deep bedrock. We need the mountain’s roots to rewrite the Compact.
If I bite you here in this tub—if we take each other on this farm.
The High Arbiter will know the exact second we link and the dormants in those cages—”
Forget the cages, my obsidian wolf roared, throwing his colossal weight against my ribcage, clawing at my throat.
Every predatory instinct in my marrow screamed to obey the beast. I wanted to believe her.
Goddess, I wanted nothing more in this life than to believe she meant it—to throw away the radio, throw away the maps, tear the drenched tank top from her chest, and sink my fangs into her neck until the room drowned in our bond.
I wanted to stop holding the line and just be the man who loved her.
“Avaline,” I pleaded, searching the feverish dark of her eyes for a single spark of the woman who had drawn the battle lines. “You’re delirious. Your brain is cooking—”
“Then why won’t you take me?” Tears tracked through the water droplets on her flushed cheeks.
She ground her hips down into mine, a frantic, rolling pressure that sent shockwaves of blinding heat straight to the base of my skull.
“Is it because I’m broken? Because I spent twenty years frozen while you stayed whole? ”
The question tore through my chest with the force of an iron wedge.
“Don’t you dare say that,” I growled, my fingers digging into the wet curves of her waist. “Don’t you ever say that, Avaline.”
“Then what is it?” Her voice broke, a raw, bleeding plea that shattered the quiet of the washroom. “Am I just a mission to you, Reed? Am I just the last fire you have to put out so you can finally forgive yourself?”
“You’re my entire fucking world!” I roared.
The sound slammed off the wet tiles, vibrating through the cast iron of the tub.
I grabbed her face in both hands, my calloused thumbs wiping the hot tears from her cheekbones, forcing her to look straight into the agony and worship in my eyes.
“You think I’m holding back because of duty?
” My voice dropped into a ragged, broken rasp that shook the pipes.
“I’m holding back because if I touch you the way I want to touch you, I will never let you go.
I spent years eating ash, Ava. Every fireline I dug, every burn scar I took on my back, every time I walked into a wall of flame—it wasn’t duty.
It was penance. Because the only thing I was ever supposed to protect was you, and I failed before our lives even started. ”
Her breath hitched, her lips parting as the raw truth of my words hit her through the haze of the fever.
“I don’t want your penance, Reed,” she whispered, her golden eyes suddenly blazing through the dark. “I want you.”
She surged forward and captured my mouth.
The kiss was a detonation.
Her lips were soft, wet, and burning with decades of delayed hunger. She parted her mouth with a desperate moan, her tongue tangling with mine, tasting like sweet clove and the salt of her tears.
The last wall of my control crumbled to dust.
I hauled her hips tight against mine, lifting her out of the water so her heaving chest crushed against my soaked shirt.
I kissed her with everything I had—deep, bruising, open-mouthed strokes that claimed every inch of her mouth.
My right hand moved under the water, sliding up the slick, fevered curve of her inner thigh, my fingers finding the edge of her drenched panties and slipping underneath.
The contact of my bare skin against her swollen, dripping heat made her scream into my mouth.
She arched violently in my arms, her pelvis bucking into my fingers as I stroked the sensitive bundle of nerves at her center.
“Reed!” Her nails tore through the shoulders of my undershirt. But as my fangs dropped, grazing the sweet, pulsing hollow right above her collarbone, a violent shudder wracked her frame.
Her eyes snapped wide, the Scribe discipline—cutting through the haze of the Heat just as my teeth found her skin.
“No!” She shoved her wet hands against my chest, throwing her weight backward. “No, Reed! Stop!”
I froze, the magma in my blood roaring in protest, my wolf snarling at the sudden, violent rejection. “Ava—”
“The Beacon!” she gasped, her body seizing. She scrambled backward in the tub, water sloshing over the cast-iron rim. “We can’t. We can’t. You’re right. We—”
“You’re dying, Avaline!” I roared, watching the fever immediately spike back up, her skin flushing a dangerous, mottled red.
“It has to be the Caldera,” she wept, her voice weak and reedy as the biological backlash of the denied mating hit her system. Her eyes rolled back, a terrifying, breathy rattle shaking her lungs. “We have to end it at the root...”
She slumped sideways against the porcelain.
“Avaline!” I caught her before her head hit the rim. Her skin was literally burning my hands, her pulse an erratic, terrifying flutter against her throat.
“Maren!” I bellowed, my Alpha roar rattling the thick timber door of the cabin. “Nadia! Get in here, now!”
The door banged open. The two witches spilled into the steam-filled washroom. Maren took one look at Avaline’s skin and swore viciously.
“Her organs are starting to cook,” Nadia snapped, dropping a medical kit onto the wet tiles. “Her body is in full biological meltdown. If she doesn’t take the bite right now, she won’t survive the hour.”
“She refused me!” I growled, clutching Avaline’s convulsing body against my chest, terror clawing my throat to ribbons. “She’s terrified it will trigger the Conclave’s Beacon and bring the Order down on the pack!”
“She’s right. It will,” Maren said quietly. The witch stepped closer, her eyes tracking the spikes of magical pressure coming off Avaline. “The magic would strike the wards like a hammer.”
“Then what the fuck do I do?” I roared, the sound tearing out of my chest.
Nadia shook head, frantic. “I don’t know. I—”
That spiked the terror even higher. Nadia didn’t panic.
Maren met my eyes, her gaze steady. “Nadia. The Dreamscape.”
Nadia looked up, seeming to catch Maren’s meaning instantly. “Could that work? Wolves don’t usually enter the Dreamscape while awake but we already know Reed and Avaline are different. But would it be enough?”
Maren stepped to the edge of the tub. “You have to vent the pressure. You can go into the Dreamscape and she’ll be there—”
“What are you talking about?” I roared.
“What happens there isn’t the same as here,” Nadia said.
My breath caught. My mind—the wildland Hotshot who had fought fire with fire for a decade—seized the escape route. “We cross the threshold and we consummate in the Dreamscape.”
Nadia placed a cool hand on Avaline’s burning forehead. “You burn the fuel in the spirit realm. It might vent the biological pressure of her Heat enough in this world for her body to survive the next few hours.”