The cereal is stale. I eat every bite.
Chapter 31
Brenna
Cameron goes to bed at ten. He hugs me—brief, tight, the hug a boy gives when he’s too tired to pretend he doesn’t need it—and closes his door. I hear the mattress springs creak. Then silence.
The cabin settles around us. Outside, the compound is still. Doubled patrols move through the darkness. Jonas’s voice on the radio, low, confirming positions.
Merric locks up the cabin. Comes back to the kitchen, stands across from me, and says nothing, because there’s nothing to say that the mate bond isn’t already saying. I can feel him: the exhaustion, the fury he’s been banking, and underneath both, something raw and unfinished. The need to touch me and know that I’m real. That the hours of chemical silence are over and won’t come back.
“Come here,” I say.
He crosses the kitchen in two strides. His hands find my face, and he holds me there, not kissing, not moving. Just holding. His palms warm against my cheeks, his thumbs tracing the line of my jaw, his forehead pressed to mine. I breathe in deeply and feel it. The desperate, subdued frequency of two people who came within hours of losing each other and are now standing safe in a kitchen with their son sleeping in the next room and their hearts beating and their bodies whole.
“I felt you go dark,” he says. His voice is rough. Barely held together. “I didn’t know if you were alive.”
“I’m alive.”
“I know. I need—”
“I know what you need.”
I take his hand and lead him to the bedroom.
We close the door. No lock. There’s only one person in this cabin who might open it, and Cameron knows better. The moonlight comes through the window in a cold silver bar that falls across the bed, and I’m suddenly aware of everything: the chemicals still metabolizing in my blood, the ache in my neck where the dart hit, the way my magic is twisting unevenly in my chest. I’m not whole yet.
But I’m here. And he’s here. And the magic they tried to kill is alive and reaching for him.
I pull my shirt over my head. His eyes drop to my body, and I see him register the bruise on my shoulder where the operative gripped me, the injection site on my neck already purpling dark. His mouth tightens. His hands flex at his sides.
“Don’t,” I say. “Don’t be careful with me. Not tonight.”
Something shifts in him. The restraint drops; not into wildness but into honesty. The face of a man who has spent hours being the alpha, being the one who holds everything together, and is finally in a room where he can stop.
He strips off his shirt. I see the cut on his cheekbone, the bruises across his ribs from the south gate fight, the scratches on his forearms from running through timber at full sprint. We’re a matched set. Two bodies that took damage for each other and are standing upright through stubbornness alone.
He comes to me. His mouth finds mine, and the kiss is slow, almost careful, despite what I said. Not because he’s being gentle but because he’s savoring. Confirming with his lips and his tongue and his hands that every part of me is here and warm and breathing.
I pull him down onto the bed. We go slow, and I hate it, and I need it. His hands travel the length of me—ribs, hip, thigh—learning me again, even though he learned me three days ago, because three days ago I was whole and yesterday I was nearly taken from him. The difference matters. His mouth follows his hands. He presses his lips to the bruise on my shoulder, and the tenderness of the gesture after everything we’ve survived today nearly undoes me.
“Merric.” My voice comes out thin. “I need you. Now. I need to feel that we’re joined.”
With infinite care, he settles between my thighs and pushes into me, and I bite back a sob as he fills me up. Like he’s reclaiming territory the drug stole, burning through the residual suppression with a heat that isn’t magic and isn’t physical but is somehow both. I gasp, and he groans, and for a moment we’re both overwhelmed by the sheer force of the connection snapping back into place.
This isn’t sex. This is something else. Something that feels like necessity. Every thrust binds us closer. Every sound he makes against my throat, every sound I make against his shoulder, is the bond rewriting itself in real time. Deeper. Stronger. Carving itself into us at a level that no drug can reach.
I feel it building; not just the orgasm, but something underneath. A pull. An instinct older than language, older than wolf or witch or any name we’ve given to what we are. My wolf knows it. His wolf knows it. The animal part of us that doesn’t think, that only feels, wants, and claims.
My mouth finds his throat. The mate mark—the one from three nights ago, silvered and healed—is warm under my lips. My lips graze it, and he shudders. I feel his mouth on my throat in the same place, and the symmetry of it is perfect. Two wolves, mouth to throat, moving together, bound by fate.
“Brenna—”
“Yes.”
“I need to—”
“I know. Do it. I’m doing it too.”
