The forest was quiet around us. Birdsong filtered through the canopy, and somewhere nearby a stream burbled over rocks. The late afternoon light slanted golden through the trees, painting everything in shades of amber and honey. It was peaceful. Perfect. A stolen moment of calm after the storm of our joining.
"The beacon," he said eventually, his voice hoarse from screaming. "You need to activate it."
"Not yet." I pressed my lips to the fresh claiming mark, feeling it pulse with new blood, with the chemical signature that would forever bind us together. "Let me hold you a little longer first."
He relaxed against me, his body going soft in my arms, all the tension of the past year finally releasing. I could feel him even with his eyes closed. The exhaustion, the relief, the cautious bloom of hope. He was marveling at this connection between us, this new awareness of another person's emotions humming in his chest.
"I can feel you," he whispered. "I can feel what you're feeling."
"I know. I can feel you too."
"Is it always like this?"
"I don't know." I pressed my face against his hair, breathing in his scent, now mingled irreversibly with my own."I've never bonded anyone before. But I suspect it gets stronger with time."
He was quiet for a moment, processing that. Then his hand found mine and squeezed.
"Good," he said. "I want to feel you. I want to know you're there, even when you're not beside me."
I pulled him closer and didn't trust myself to speak.
When I finally reached for the beacon clipped to my belt and pressed the button, the sun had moved across the sky and the shadows had lengthened around us. Dalvin dozed against my chest, his breathing slow and even, his hand curled around mine where it rested on his stomach.
Fifty yards away, behind a dense wall of rhododendron, Mercer was still unconscious. I could smell the blood from his broken nose, could hear the occasional shift of his body as he breathed. He would wake eventually. Would report his failure to Vernon. Would set in motion whatever retaliation the senator planned.
I didn't care. Let Vernon come. Let him send an army.
Dalvin was mine now. Bonded. Claimed. Protected by law and biology and the absolute certainty that I would die before I let anyone take him from me again.
The extraction team arrived thirty minutes later. They found us in the clearing, still tangled together, my jacket draped over Dalvin's bare shoulders and my arms wrapped around him. Professional to a fault, they asked no questions, offered blankets and water and a stretcher that Dalvin refused, insisting he could walk.
He leaned on me the whole way back to the facility. I supported his weight without complaint, without hesitation, without any thought except the warm pulse of the bond in my chest and the knowledge that after all this time, I had finally found my way home.
***
Chapter 9
Dalvin
I woke to the feeling of being safe.
It took me a long moment to understand what I was experiencing. The sensation was so foreign, so completely outside my frame of reference, that my brain struggled to categorize it. Warmth in my chest that had nothing to do with temperature. A quiet hum of connection, steady and present, anchoring me to something outside myself.
The bond. Min-ho's bond.
I lay still with my eyes closed, cataloguing the feeling. It was nothing like Vernon's claim had been. Vernon's bond had been a cold hand wrapped around my throat, always present, always threatening, a constant reminder that I was owned. Even in his calmest moments, the connection had carried an undercurrent of danger, an oily slick of control that made my skin crawl.
This was different. This was standing in a patch of sunlight after years in the dark. The first breath of spring air after a long winter. Safety, pure and simple, radiating through the bond from a man who wanted nothing from me except my happiness.
I opened my eyes.
The room was beautiful. Vaulted ceilings with exposed timber beams, a massive stone fireplace crackling with low flames, windows that stretched floor to ceiling and framed aview of mountains draped in afternoon gold. The bed beneath me was obscenely soft, layered with white linens and a down comforter that cost more than six months of the rent I'd been scraping together while running.
Trial period suite. The thought surfaced through the fog in my brain. This was where newly bonded pairs spent the seventy-two hours while the alpha decided whether to accept or reject the claim.
Reject. The word sent a spike of fear through my chest before the bond soothed it away. I knew without being told that rejection wasn’t a possibility he was considering. The certainty of it radiated off him like heat from a furnace.
I turned my head on the pillow and found him.
