He smiles against my skin. Then he gives me what I want, sliding two fingers deep into me while laving my clit, and I shatter.
Before the aftershocks have finished, he’s hovering over my body, and inside me again. Slower this time. A measured, rolling rhythm that lights me up from the inside. His weight on me, his mouth on mine, his hand cupping the back of my head.
I wrap myself around him and let the rhythm build. We find each other. Move together. His breath against my ear, mine against his throat. The creak of the bed frame. The moonlight moving across the ceiling.
When I come the third time, it takes him with me. He buries his face in my neck and says my name. Just my name, nothing else. Final. Permanent. Mate.
The room settles. The night is silent. He rolls to his side and pulls me against him, my back to his chest, his arm across my waist. We’re both slick with sweat, breathing hard, and every place our skin touches feels electric and calm at the same time.
His lips press against the back of my neck. “You’re mine,” he murmurs.
I close my eyes. His heartbeat against my spine. Solid. Settled.
“Yes,” I say. “I am.”
He pulls me closer. I let him.
We sleep tangled together, and finally… finally, my dreams don’t suffocate me.
Chapter 22
Merric
I wake up to the sound of birdsong and the weight of a woman’s leg thrown across my thigh.
For three seconds, I don’t know where I am. The ceiling is wrong—lower, older, water-stained in the corner. The mattress is softer than my cot. The light comes from the east instead of the south.
Then the rest of it arrives. All of it. The kitchen, the hallway, the wall, the bed. Her name in my mouth and hers in my ear. The sensation of the mate bond locking into place.
Brenna.
She’s sleeping on her stomach with one arm tucked under the pillow, and her face turned toward me. Her hair is a dark mess against the white pillowcase. The sheet has slipped to the small of her back, and in the morning light I can see the terrain of her—the hard muscle, the scars, the ridge of her spine. The new scar along her ribs that I traced with my tongue last night.
She looks younger when she sleeps. Not young—that’s gone, and I wouldn’t want it back. But the armor is down. The assessment, the constant scanning, the suppression of emotions that has become a habit. In sleep, she’s just Brenna. The one I remember underneath the one she built.
I don’t move. Don’t want to wake her. She needs the sleep more than anyone I’ve ever met, and if I can give her another ten minutes of it by lying still and breathing softly, that’s what I’ll do.
I watch her instead. The way her ribs expand with each breath. The faint twitch of her fingers against the pillow—dreaming. The mark on her throat where my mouth was last night. Not a bite. Not quite. The ghost of one. My wolf rumbles with satisfaction at the sight, and I tell him to keep it down.
Her eyes open.
Not the slow, confused surfacing of someone waking naturally. One moment closed, the next open—alert, focused. She’s spent too long sleeping in hostile territory. You don’t unlearn that in a night.
She sees me. The alertness softens by a degree. Not much. Enough.
“You’re staring,” she says. Her voice is rough with sleep.
“I’ve got a lot to stare at.”
“That’s either romantic or creepy. I haven’t decided.”
“Take your time.”
She smiles, then shifts, turning onto her side to face me. The sheet slips further. She doesn’t reach for it. The morning light falls across her shoulder, her breast, the flat plane of her stomach. She lets me look because something changed last night. Permission. She gave me permission to see her, and she hasn’t taken it back.
“How long have you been awake?” she asks.
“Few minutes.”
