Chapter 21 A Dangerous Admission #2
“I understand,” she said.
Sava left, closing the door behind her.
For several breaths, neither of us spoke. The suite settled around us. The lamp beside the bed threw warm light across Cassie’s skin. Outside, the pack murmured in distant waves. Beneath it all, I could hear Sava just beyond the door, steady as a posted guard.
Cassie’s hand slid from my wrist to my fingers.
I looked down at the touch.
My knuckles were raw. Blood rimmed the edges of my nails where claws had torn free too fast. Some of it was mine. Most of it was not.
“You’re shaking,” she said.
“I’m trying not to.”
“That sounds exhausting.”
“It is.”
“Come here.”
I didn’t move.
Her eyes sharpened, tired as they were. “Ian.”
“You’re hurt.”
“I noticed.”
“I should not be close to you while I’m like this.”
“You were close to me in the course.”
My jaw tightened. “That is the problem.”
“No,” she said, and there it was again, that clear line through panic and pain. “The problem was three Thorne wolves trying to kill me.”
“I caged you beneath me.”
“You guarded me.”
“I didn’t know that at first.”
“I did.”
The words were quiet but they landed in the center of my chest. Cassie shifted, then winced. I was on my feet before I meant to be.
“Don’t,” I said.
“Then come here so I stop trying.”
I stood beside the bed, too large, too bloody, too dangerous for the softness of the room.
She tugged at my hand.
I let her pull me down because refusing her felt worse than obedience. I sat on the edge of the mattress, careful not to jostle her. She looked at my face the way she had in the course, when mud streaked her cheek and fear had nearly swallowed her, and still she had reached for me.
“You came back when I called you,” she said.
“You should never have had to.”
“Probably not. Add it to the list of complaints I’m filing with werewolf management.”
“Cassie.”
Her humor faded. “I need to know you’re still here.”
“I am.”
“I need more than the chair.”
The bond pulled. It was not the fever-hunger from before, not the sharp, punishing drive of the mark in its early days.
This was deeper and more dangerous. It moved with her voice, with the salt of drying tears she had not let fall, with the bruises on her wrists and the courage it took for her to ask anything of me after what she had seen me do.
I bent slowly and pressed my forehead to hers. Her breath caught. My hand went to the mattress beside her hip, bracing my weight away from her. I would not trap her. I would not press where she was torn. I would not let my body forget the difference between shelter and cage.
Cassie lifted her uninjured hand to my jaw, her touch was light, but I shuddered under it.
“There,” she whispered.
“What?”
“That’s you.”
I closed my eyes.
Her thumb traced the edge of my mouth. “The wolf doesn’t look at me like that.”
“How does he look at you?”
“Like the world is a threat and I’m the last living thing in it.”
“He is not entirely wrong.”
“And you?”
I opened my eyes. Her face was close, bruised, pale, alive.
“I look at you and remember the world has something in it I cannot survive losing.”
Her lips parted. The words had come too close to the thing I was not ready to name. Too close to the truth Ronan would smell on me the moment he walked in. Too close to a future I had no right to want when every path the pack understood ended with Cassie dead.
Cassie slid her hand into my hair and pulled me down.
The kiss was not gentle at first because neither of us had enough peace left for gentleness. She made a small sound that went through me. I broke away at once, checking her face, her body, the tightness around her eyes.
“I’m all right,” she said.
“You’re in pain.”
“I’m in a lot of things.”
A laugh almost escaped me. It came out broken.
Her fingers tightened in my hair. “I don’t want the hunt to be the last thing my body remembers tonight.”
I went still.
Cassie held my gaze, and there was nothing unclear in her face now. She was exhausted. Hurt. Frightened down to the bone. She was also present, choosing, angry at the idea that terror got the final claim over her skin.
“I want you,” she said. “Carefully.”
My control strained until I felt every seam of it.
“You do not have to prove anything to me.”
“I’m not proving anything. I am taking something back.”
That was the line. Not the bond. Not the wolf. Not the heat still living between us after the course. Her choice, placed in my hands with all the trust I had almost lost the right to hold.
I kissed her again, slower this time.
It cost me. Good. Let it cost. Let every second teach the wolf that wanting her didn’t mean taking. Let him learn the shape of her breath, the places I could touch, the places I could not. Let him understand that the woman in this bed was not prey, not prize, not proof for a council to argue over.
Cassie’s hand moved down my chest, fingers dragging over torn fabric. “You need to get out of this shirt.”
“There is a doctor outside the door.”
“I assume she knows shirts come off.”
“That was almost your sister’s wedding slogan.”
She blinked. Then she laughed, soft and startled, and the sound took another piece of death out of the room.
I eased back enough to strip off the ruined shirt. Cassie watched me with a look that made my body harden despite blood, fear, and the knowledge that Sava would skin me if I so much as brushed the wrong bruise.
Her gaze dropped to my chest, then lower.
“Well,” she murmured. “That’s very unfair of you.”
I leaned over her, one hand braced beside her shoulder. “You are injured.”
“I’m injured, not blind.”
I kissed the corner of her mouth because I could not help it. “Tell me if anything hurts.”
“Everything hurts. I’ll tell you if it hurts in a way I don’t like.”
My breath left me. There was Cassie. Bruised, bitten, hunted through the dark, and still somehow able to make desire feel like defiance instead of surrender.
I touched her as if she were both precious and powerful, because she was.
I kissed the unmarked side of her throat, the line of her jaw, the soft skin beneath her ear.
Her pulse beat fast against my mouth. The mark answered, dark and warm beneath the bandage, and mine pulled so sharply I had to stop and breathe against her shoulder.
Cassie’s fingers stroked the back of my neck. “Stay with me.”
“I am trying.”
“No. Don’t try to become marble. Stay with me.”
I lifted my head.
Her eyes were bright with pain and want and something I was too afraid to name for both of us.
So I stayed. I let her see the hunger. The fear.
The reverence. I let her feel the tremor in my hands when I slid the blanket down only far enough to touch what she offered.
I avoided the bandaged hip, the bruised ribs, the clawed arm.
I learned the map of her injuries by refusing to let desire blur them.
I kissed the edges of bruises without touching the centers.
I put my mouth to the places where she sighed instead of flinched.
When she reached for me, I let her guide. Her hand on my wrist. Her knee shifting carefully against my side. Her mouth finding mine when the memory of the hunt tried to climb between us.
There was heat, yes. There was the deep, brutal need that had been burning since the moment my wolf scented her in the circle and destroyed every plan laid before me.
There was also her breath against my cheek when she whispered my name, and the way the bond settled when I moved slowly enough for her body to believe me.
When I finally came over her, careful with my weight, she cupped my face in both hands.
“Look at me,” she said.
I did.
“If you disappear into that wolf again, I’m going to be furious.”
A rough sound left me. “That is your threat?”
“Yes. I’m tired, I hurt everywhere, and I have been chased by murder wolves. Fury is what I have available.”
I kissed her palm. “Then I will stay.”
She drew me down. I wanted to bury myself in her until there was nothing left of the hunt, nothing left of the fear, only us.
I lowered my head and spread her legs with a reverence that bordered on prayer.
I didn’t rush. I traced the hollow of her hip with a callused thumb, tasting the salt of her skin.
I wanted to memorize every inch of her. She gasped, her back arching off the mattress, her hands burying in my hair, holding me there.
I needed to consume her pleasure to distract her from the pain.
I wrapped my hand around her thigh, my fingers pressing into the soft flesh to keep her open to me, and I went to work.
I added a finger, curling up to rub against that spot deep inside that made her tremble.
I matched the rhythm of my fingers with the suction of my mouth, driving her wild.
Her hips bucked against my face, her breath coming in short, sharp gasps.
I watched her face, memorizing the way her eyes rolled back, the way her fingers clenched in my hair, the way her body bowed.
“Keep going,” she whispered.
I wanted to make her forget the wolves outside.
I wanted to make her forget the bite. I focused entirely on the taste of her, the heat of her, the sound of her small noises.
I took her higher, faster, her moans turning into whimpers, her back arching until she was pressed against my mouth.
She was so close. I could feel the tension coiling in her thighs, the way her body trembled around my fingers.
She came apart with a cry that was muffled against the sheets, her body shuddering violently, her nails digging into my scalp.
“We need to rest,” I rasped, my voice barely a whisper. “Your shoulder—”
She didn’t let me finish. Her hand tangled in my hair, tugging me down until my forehead rested against hers. Her eyes were dark, burning with a heat that rivaled the sun, and she stared at me with a mix of stubbornness and desperation.
“Shut up, Ian,” she breathed, her grip tightening in my hair. “Just be careful. That’s all I asked.”