I began to rise from my seat. “I saw there was some in the fridge earlier. I can get?—”
Ravik tensed, and Boone warned, “If you still don’t want anyone touching you, I suggest sitting back down so Vik doesn’t have tobody check you when you try to go for that fridge." His voice was half-amused, half-gravely serious.
I sat back down.
Only then did Ravik’s expression relax. He finally took his eyes off of me to turn around and put two slices of multigrain bread in a toaster sitting on the back counter.
Which left me to sit in awkward silence with the man—the polar bear—I’d clung to last night.
He was back in the black shirt he’d been wearing this morning. It clung to his heavy muscles, and I couldn’t help but trail my eyes down his heavily veined forearms—only to stop. My heart stuttered when I saw that he no longer had just the one weird mark on his left arm that I’d noticed before. Now there was another bite mark on his right arm. And it looked fresh.
“Were you hurt?” I asked. My pulse spiked with fear on his behalf. “Did some animal bite you?”
Ravik stilled after pulling the hummus out of the refrigerator, and Boone rubbed a hand over the back of his thick neck.
“Yeah, guess you could say that.” Boone tilted his head to the side. “Got bit by an animal that went by the name ofRavik, but don’t worry…”
His mouth hitched into half a smile. “He had my full consent.”
Boone seemed to think this was funny, but I was truly alarmed.
“Why—why would he do that?” Before Boone could answer, I turned to Ravik to demand, “Why would you bite him like that?”
“Because it is our way.” Ravik came back to the counter with the hummus and toasted bread on a saucer, which he put down to show me both his forearms.
He had two bites, too. One faded, and one that looked particularly gnarly—like a large animal had bit him, then done it again.
I could only shake my head. “I don’t understand.”
“When three males decide to form a maul, we seal that decision with what’s called a maul bite,” Ravik spoke in a quiet near-monotone that was, nevertheless, laced with steel. “This ritual bite binds us together in both heart and mind.”
Boone once again raised his hand to the back of his neck. “You asked me last night why I told Zion about what all you’d been through. I know it must have felt like a betrayal, but this is what I meant when I said I couldn’t not share. When three males become a maul, that means we don’t just share a female, we share our thoughts and feelings.”
“What?” My eyes dropped back down to the original mark on Boone’s left arm. The bite, I noticed, no longer looked like a mottled scar. More like a henna tattoo of a bite that almost appeared to pulse—like it was somehow alive.
“The bond bite allows us to communicate without the need to talk,” Ravik explained as he put together my sandwich. “Zion would’ve told you about that this morning, if you had stuck around.”
“This is exactly why I didn’t stick around!” I flared my eyes at him, then at Boone. “So, you’re bears, you mate in threes, and now you’re telling me you can also read each other’s minds? Through a bond bite—like, some kind of a hive mind?”
“Like three shifters who are bonded,” Ravik corrected in that quiet steel monotone. “We are three individuals bonded to each other and one mate.”
He set a plate with the turkey sandwich down in front of me. “You will understand when you bond with us.”
He held my gaze as he said this. His dark stare was so intense, it should have been creepy.
I mean, itwascreepy to be stared down like that. It definitely was…
But for some reason, instead of discomfort, a weird, foreign thrill shot through me, made me squirm, even as I reminded him, “I’m not bonding with you. I’m not your mate. Like I said earlier, you need to get that notion out of your head.”
Ravik’s nose flared in that strange way again, and the spotlight of his eyes suddenly came off of me.
This time to switchblade to Boone.
They were talking, I realized. Silently. Through that bond bite thingy.
Not quite sure what to do, I awkwardly ate my sandwich in the extended, yet somehow very noisy silence.
As soon as I was done, Ravik snatched away my plate. He turned his back on me like washing the singular dish was some sort of essential mission.
