“Slan.” she put her finger gently to her lips and closed her eyes.
“Oh… tek, Ruya.” Saal was sleep, so I guessed slan meant quiet. Daska had gone to the woods to be quiet. I hoped he didn’t mind me disturbing him.
It took me longer to get to the woods than I’d thought, and my leg was aching quite a bit when I finally stepped under the trees. I wandered through the woods, hoping my sense of direction would help me find my way back out if I couldn’t find Daska, but after a while, I found him. A small natural clearing let in the spring sunlight, and in the middle of it lay a giant bear. I swallowed, trying not to get nervous. Cave bears were huge, much bigger than modern bears, and even though I knew it was Daska, the lizard brain in my head still told me I should run away. It may well have been my heart saying that too, I admitted.
"Daska."
He didn’t move.
"Need talk you."
He let out a sigh, but didn’t shift back. The rest of him stayed motionless, a mountain of reddish-brown fur sprawled across the moss and dead leaves, his enormous head resting on paws the size of dinner plates. The sunlight filtered through the canopy in shifting patterns, dappling his fur with gold. Right. This was going to be harder than I'd thought.
"Daska," I tried again. "Please."
His eyes opened. Dark and liquid, framed by that massive skull, they held none of the warmth I was used to seeing. Not anger though. Sadness. My chest ached at the sight of it.
I took a breath. My heart was hammering so hard I was sure he could hear it. Bears had excellent hearing, I knew that much. And if his bear senses were anything like the wolves' shifted senses, he could probably smell my nervousness too. Brilliant. Nothing like approaching an emotional conversation while broadcasting anxiety from every pore.
"Nathan..." I pointed back toward camp. "Nathan no mate."
The bear's ears came forward. Subtle, but I caught it.
I sighed. How did I do this?
I pressed my hand against my chest, trying to find the words for something I'd never even been able to articulate properly in English. The language barrier had never felt so cruel. I had this enormous, devastating thing inside me that needed saying, and I was trying to build it out of two hundred borrowed words and hand gestures. I didn't have the vocabulary to explain fated bonds and rejection and the hollow, echoing emptiness that had lived inside my ribcage for two years.
The bear watched me. Still. Attentive. Those dark eyes tracking every gesture.
"Nathan..." I struggled, grasping for anything that might bridge the gap. "Nathan Ellie, mate. Dar Ama say mate."I touched my chest again, then made the breaking motion. "Nathan say no. Ellie bad. Nathan choose Megan. Break." I mimed something tearing apart, pulling my fists away from each other. "Break Ellie. Here." I pressed both hands over my heart.
The growl that came from Daska was unlike anything I'd heard from him before. Low and thunderous, vibrating through the ground beneath my feet, through the fallen log, through my bones and I gasped at the sound. I pressed on, because stopping now felt impossible. The words were coming out whether I wanted them to or not, a dam finally breaking.
"Here." I pressed my hand harder against my chest. "No work. Nathan take. Ellie..." I trailed off, my vocabulary hitting its wall. I made a gesture I hoped conveyed emptiness, my hands open, palms up, nothing held between them. "Nothing. Long time, nothing."
My voice cracked on the last word and I looked away, blinking furiously. The trees blurred. A bird sang somewhere above us, oblivious and cheerful, and I hated it briefly for being so uncomplicated.
Then the bear moved.
It was slow, deliberate. Daska rose from the forest floor with a ponderous grace that belied his size, muscles shifting beneath that thick reddish-brown fur, and for one wild moment my lizard brain screamed at me again to run. A cave bear standing at full height was a thing of terrible beauty. Taller than any man, broader than a doorway, built for a world where everything was bigger and harder and more dangerous than anything I'd ever known.
But his eyes. His eyes were still Daska's. Dark and liquid and full of something that made my breath catch.
The shift happened faster than I expected. One moment there was a bear, and the next there was a man, and the transition was so seamless it was like watching water change direction. Furbecame skin, mass redistributed, and then Daska was standing in front of me, his reddish-brown hair falling loose around his shoulders, his chest heaving with breaths that came too fast.
He stepped toward me. One step, then another, until he was close enough that I had to tilt my head back to look up at him. The sunlight caught the water still clinging to his skin from the damp moss, and his hair fell in waves around a face that was set with an intensity that stole the air from my lungs. His warm brown eyes moved over my face then he raised his hand and placed it flat against my chest. Right over my heart.
"Daska," he said quietly, and tapped his own chest with his free hand. Then he pressed more firmly against mine, his palm warm and grounding over the frantic hammering of my heart. "Daska no break."
The words were simple. Two hundred words between us, and he'd chosen the only ones that mattered.
My vision swam. I opened my mouth to say something but nothing came out.
His hand left my chest and rose to my hair. His fingers slid into the loose waves at my temple, tucking a strand behind my ear with a tenderness that undid me more completely than any grand declaration could have. The touch was so gentle, so achingly careful, like he was handling something precious and fragile and worth protecting. His fingertips traced the curve of my ear, then drifted down along my jaw, following the line of it, deliberate and unhurried, as though mapping the shape of me was the most important task he'd ever been given.
My breath hitched. I couldn't help it. His thumb brushed across my cheekbone, catching the tear I hadn't realized had fallen. Then it was me moving, me reaching up to wrap my hands around the back of his neck and pulling him down. Me pressing my lips to his. For an awful moment, I thought I might have gone too far, that I might have breached some cultural more I wasunaware of, but then after a moment, his whole body seemed to relax, and then he was kissing me back.
Not carefully. Not the way I'd expected from this man. No, he kissed me like he'd been holding his breath for weeks and had finally been given permission to exhale. One hand cupped the back of my head, fingers threading through my hair, and the other wrapped around my waist and pulled me flush against him with a strength that lifted me onto my toes. My fingers tightened around the nape of his neck, pulling him closer, and he responded by tilting my head back, deepening the kiss with a confidence that left me breathless. There was nothing tentative about the way Daska touched me. Nothing uncertain. He kissed me the way he did everything else, with steady, focused intention, like he'd thought about this and decided exactly how he wanted it to go.
