“It matters.” He’s close now. Three feet. And I can feel him; not the wanting, not the pull, but something stronger. Patience at the end of its tether. “It matters because you’ve been pushing me away… partly because you thought I belonged to someone else. And I need you to hear me say this clearly: I have not touched anyone since you. Never. There has been nobody.”
I shake my head in disbelief.
“Nobody,” he repeats. “Because my wolf chose you, and he never changed his mind, even when I tried to make him.”
I should say something. I should have a response, something measured, something that maintains the careful distance I’ve been engineering since the day I came down that hillside. But my engineering is in ruins, and the woman standing in this kitchen isn’t the operative or the commander or the mother. She’s the girl who loved a boy in a field, just older and tired of running. Running from what she wants. Because there’s really no reason to fight it anymore. He’s back. He’s passed every test, and Sienna is just pack. I don’t have a single goddamn reason except my own stubborn pride.
What am I waiting for?
“I don’t want to talk anymore,” I say because my head is spinning with too much information.
“Good.” He crosses the remaining distance. “The time for talking is done.”
Of course it is. We’ve been navigating each other for days. And I’ve been lying to myself the whole time. I’m done fighting this. Fighting myself. The wolf inside sighs with relief.
He picks me up.
Not gently. His hands find my hips, and he lifts me off the ground. My legs wrap around his waist by instinct, muscle memory from a lifetime ago, my body remembering what my mind spent too many years trying to forget. I lock my ankles behind his back, and his mouth finds mine. The bond detonates.
He carries me through the kitchen. Down the hallway. I’m kissing him like I’m trying to consume him; teeth and tongue and the desperate, graceless hunger of a woman who’s been starving and just realized it. His hands are gripping my thighs hard enough to bruise, and I want the bruises. I want proof that this is real, that his hands are on me, that the sound he makes against my mouth when I bite his lower lip is something that’s actually happening in a world where I’m allowed to have this.
We don’t make it to the stairs.
He presses me against the hallway wall. The impact knocks a picture frame loose, and it crashes to the floor. Neither of us flinches. My back is against the plaster, and his hips are pinned against mine. I can feel him, the ridge of his cock hard, insistent against me. The thin layers of clothing between us feel offensive.
“Off,” I say against his mouth. “Get this off me—”
My shirt goes over my head. His follows. His chest against mine, flesh against flesh, and the heat of him is unreal. Wolf-warm, furnace-warm, the temperature of a man whose blood runs hot and whose body has been waiting for this specific contact for too damn long. His mouth drops to my collarbone, and my head falls back against the wall. When his teeth rasp my nipple, I make a sound I don’t recognize.
He slides a hand down to find the button of my jeans. I’m already reaching for his belt. We’re clumsy with it—fingers tangling, buckle catching, the graceless fumbling of two people who can’t get to each other fast enough. His jeans shove down. Mine get kicked off one leg and hang from the ankle of the other because there isn’t time to be neat about it. There isn’t time for anything.
He hooks one arm under my thigh, pins me higher against the wall, and I reach between us and take his shaft in my hand. The weight of him is so familiar; even after all this time, I know every solid inch of him. I tighten my grip, and the sound he makes is raw. The sound of a man at the end of his control. I know it because I’m right there with him.
“Brenna… If you want me to stop—”
Stop? Is he out of his fucking mind?
“If you stop, I willkillyou.”
I guide him to my entrance, slick and ready, and he pushes into me. The world goes white.
Not my magic. Not the mate bond. Just the obliterating, full-body shock of being filled by someone who fits like a key in alock that’s been rusted shut. I cry out—can’t help it, don’t want to help it—and his forehead drops against my shoulder. He groans, and for three heartbeats, neither of us moves.
Then we move.
He sets a pace that’s just this side of punishing, and I meet him thrust for thrust, my back sliding against the wall, my nails digging into his shoulders. It’s not gentle. It’s not sweet. It’s years of grief and fury and want compressed into the most basic act two people can share. And it’s like heaven.
His hand fists in my hair, pulls my head back, and his mouth finds my throat and bites—not hard enough to break skin, hard enough to mark. A gateway floods open between us, his pleasure and mine feeding back into each other in a loop that spirals upward with every stroke.
I’m not quiet. The woman I became—silent, controlled, invisible—is gone. Every sound I make is an act of reclaiming. My voice in this hallway. My body against this wall. My wolf howling in my chest with a joy so fierce it blurs the line between pleasure and pain.
He shifts the angle. Deeper. My vision blurs out at the edges.
“Look at me,” he says. Ragged. Half wolf.
I look at him. Pale eyes blown dark, inches from mine. His face is stripped of everything—the alpha control, the measured calm, the careful restraint. There is nothing left of Merric Rourke except the man who loves me, and he’s looking at me like I’m the only real thing in his world.
“I’m here,” he says. “I’m not leaving. I’m never—”
