“My turn,” she says.
She rides me. Slow at first, long, deep rolls that take me to the root and hold me there. I’m drowning in sensation; what I feel and what she feels, the fullness and the stretch and the angle she finds that makes her go tight for a half-second before she moves again, harder. Her pace builds. Her fingers thread through mine on the mattress, pressing my hands down, using them for leverage.
I watch her. The moonlight cutting across her body, the muscle in her thighs, the sway of her breasts, the mate mark on her throat glowing faint silver. She’s the most powerful thing I’ve ever seen. Not because of the magic. Because of the choice. Because this woman walked through hell and came out the other side and is choosing to be here, above me, taking what she wants with a focus that makes the world feel very small and very right.
Her pace shifts. Faster. Harder. Taking me all the way in. The sight of her lips stretched around the gleaming girth of my cock is the sexiest thing I’ve ever fucking seen.
“God!” I growl, heat rising in me till it feels like every cell is burning.
She leans forward, releases my hands, braces her palms on my chest, and the new angle changes everything. Her eyes flash with the wolf inside as she tightens around me, and her breath goes ragged. I feel the orgasm building in her, a rising pressure that mirrors the one building in me.
“Merric—”
“I’m here.”
“I know you are. That’s the point.”
She comes. Head back, spine curved, my name on her lips; not screamed, spoken, with a certainty that makes it sound like a fact of nature. I feel the crest, the break, the flood of heat, and it pulls me over with her. My hips drive up, and she meets me, grinding down. I spill into her with a groan that I muffle against her shoulder because the walls are thin and my son is sleeping twenty feet away and we’ve already traumatized him enough for one lifetime.
She collapses onto my chest. I wrap my arms around her. We breathe.
“Mine,” she says against my collarbone. Soft. Satisfied. Not a question.
“Yours,” I confirm. “The cabin. The bed. The alpha. All of it.”
“What if you’re not alpha forever?”
“Then I’ll be whatever I am, and you’ll still have me.”
She lifts her head. Looks at me. Her eyes are soft in a way I’ve only seen them in these moments… the after, the settling, when the walls she maintains for the rest of the world come down, and it’s just her. Just us.
“Whatever’s coming starts tomorrow,” she says.
“Tomorrow.”
“And tonight?”
“Tonight you’re here. That’s what matters.”
She settles against my chest. Her breathing evens out. Our mate connection hums between us—warm, anchored—and outside the cabin window, Frostbourne sleeps under the mountain sky.
I hold her. I listen.
Tomorrow, the fight. Tonight, this.
Chapter 26
Brenna
Frostbourne watches me intently. Careful. Peripheral. Never quite direct.
I spend the morning exploring the compound. The layout is logical: lodge at the center, residential cabins radiating outward, training ground to the east, storage and mechanical buildings to the south. Countless wolves. So much bigger than Ravenclaw, with the infrastructure to match. Gravel paths connect the buildings, worn smooth by decades of foot traffic. There are window boxes on some of the cabins. Someone’s planted herbs—rosemary and thyme—the scent catching in the morning air. Children’s bikes lean against a porch. A dog is sleeping in a patch of sunlight near the tool shed.
It’s impressive. It’s also a cage, if the people inside it decide you don’t belong.
I pass two women on the path to the lodge. They nod. I nod. The exchange is perfectly civil and perfectly empty; politeenough to avoid conflict, distant enough to avoid commitment. One of them glances at the mate mark on my throat and looks away fast.
At the community garden behind the lodge, a gray-haired man is staking tomato plants. He sees me and straightens. Doesn’t nod. Doesn’t look away either. Just watches, dirt on his hands, until I’ve passed. I feel his eyes on my back for thirty steps.
