My fangs extend. We bite at the same time.
His teeth break skin and mine break his, and the pain is distant, secondary, buried under the wave of pleasure that blurs my vision. And I feel everything—his heartbeat, his breath, the exact sensation of being inside me. For three seconds, we are not two people. We are one creature with two hearts and one bond, and the taste of each other’s blood on our tongues.
The orgasm hits us simultaneously. There’s no his and mine; just a single surge that rolls through us and explodes in both bodies at once. I cry out against his throat and feel his cheek rasp against mine. His hips drive forward, and my muscles spasm around his thick length.
I feel it happen. The connection between us—already sealed, already permanent—thickens. Burns itself into a layer of us that wasn’t there before. The mate marks on our throats aren’t silvered anymore. They’re red. Raw. They will mark us for the rest of our lives in a way that is visible, unmistakable, indelible.
He lifts his mouth from my throat. His lips are stained with my blood. I imagine mine look the same.
“That was—” He stops. Breathes. “What was that?”
“Blood-bite.” My voice is ruined. My whole body is ruined. “The real one. Not just the sealing. The scarring.”
“I didn’t plan—”
“Neither did I. Our wolves decided.”
He rolls over. Pulls me against him. His hand comes up to my throat, fingers hovering over the new mark without touching it. I can feel the heat of it: swollen, tender, already changing from wound to scar. The shape of his teeth in my skin. The shape of my teeth in his.
“Will it—?” He stops again. I feel him searching for the right question. “Can they suppress it again? The drug. If they come back—”
“No.” I’m certain of this the way I’m certain of gravity. “They’d have to kill one of us. And even then, I’m not sure it would go quietly.”
He’s silent for a long time. His arm tightens around me. His heartbeat is slowing, coming down from the high, settling into the new frequency between us; deeper, more resonant, a bass note that I will feel for the rest of my life.
“Good,” he says.
I press my face into his chest. The mark throbs on my throat. His throbs against my forehead. Two wounds that are choosing to become permanent.
“Good,” I agree.
We sleep. And I know this thing between us is something that no drug, no distance, no years will ever silence again.
Chapter 32
Brenna
Two days after they tried to take my son, we sit down to figure out how to destroy the man who sent them.
The air in the lodge back-room carries the tension of people who’ve stopped debating whether there’s a problem and started planning what to do about it. Merric sits at the head of the table, and I sit to his left because that’s where I belong.
Rook is against the wall with his tablet, scrolling through the evidence files he’s spent hours organizing, and Jonas stands at the window, watching the compound with the vigilance of a man who’s learned the hard way that attacks come when you’re looking the other direction.
And Edda Beaumont sits across from me.
That’s the development I didn’t expect. She arrived five minutes after we did, set a leather folder on the table, and sat down without being invited.
When Merric looked at her, she said, “If you’re planning a response to what happened, I should be in the room. I spent thirty years trusting the wrong people. I’d like to start trusting the right ones.”
Nobody argued. Edda admitting she was wrong is rare enough to qualify as a natural phenomenon. You don’t question it. You just make room.
The communication device sits in the center of the table. The Syndicate device recovered from the extraction team leader. Rook spent twelve hours delving through it, leaving him red-eyed and short-tempered, which for Rook means he answered questions in four words instead of six.
“The routing is clear,” Rook says. He projects the message logs onto a screen on the wall. Lines of text, timestamps, relay coordinates. “Operational communications ran through a relay station in Darkwood territory. The station uses infrastructure that’s registered to the Darkwood pack council. Bern’s council. His communications network, his encryption protocols, his hardware.”
“Which he’ll claim was compromised,” I say. “Hacked. Used without his knowledge.”
“He can claim that.” Rook pulls up a second screen. “But the encryption key is council-level access. Not something you hack from outside. Someone with Bern’s authority—or Bern himself—generated that key and distributed it to the Syndicate operatives.”
