He released me, looking up at me. “Ellie… safe?”
He was checking I felt safe with him. The concern in his voice almost brought me to tears and I nodded quickly. He looked back down, trailing his fingers down to the drawstring at the top of my deerskin leggings. I gasped as he slipped them underneath, and he looked back up.
“Safe?”
“Safe,” I whispered. He smiled, then slid his hand down further. The first brush of his touch against the slick heat between my thighs made my whole body jolt. He explored me slowly. Maddeningly slowly. His fingers traced the shape of me, as he found the places that made me gasp and lingered there, circling, pressing, retreating, then returning with a slightlydifferent angle, a slightly different pressure, noticing every response.
He watched my face. That was the thing that undid me most—the way he kept his eyes on mine, reading every flicker of expression, adjusting his touch based on what he found there. When his fingertips slid upward and found the spot that made me cry out, he didn't rush. He circled it slowly, barely there, learning the pressure that made my breath hitch and the angle that made my thighs tremble.
"Here?" he murmured.
"Yes," I breathed. "There. Right there."
His fingers circled again, slow and deliberate, and my hips lifted off the furs of their own accord, chasing the contact. He pressed me gently back down with his free hand spread warm across my hip, holding me steady while he worked me.
I was falling apart. Slowly, beautifully, like ice breaking up in spring—the first cracks spreading outward from somewhere deep inside me, somewhere I'd thought was frozen solid. His fingers moved in tight, unhurried circles, and I felt the tension building low in my belly, coiling tighter with every pass of his fingertips.
Something shifted in his expression. The careful restraint cracked, just a fraction, and I caught a glimpse of what was underneath—hunger, raw and barely leashed, held in check by nothing but his own iron will. His jaw tightened. His breathing had changed, I realised. Deeper. Rougher. He wasn't unaffected. He was just choosing, with every ounce of discipline he had, to put me first.
"Daska—" His name came out ragged, barely recognisable.
"I have you," he murmured, and the simple certainty of it, the quiet promise in those three words, made something inside me break wide open. His fingers slid lower, pressing into me, and I arched off the furs with a gasp. One finger first, thick and careful,easing into me, then a second. Daska's breath caught. I felt it—the stutter of his chest against my hip where he'd leaned in close, the way his hand stilled for just a heartbeat before he moved again, curling his fingers and making me moan his name."Look at me," he said softly.
I opened eyes I didn't remember closing. His face was above mine, close enough that I could see the individual flecks of amber in his dark irises, the way the firelight caught the copper threads in his beard. His expression was fierce and tender in equal measure, and the raw want in his eyes made my belly clench around his fingers.
"See you," he murmured. "All of you. Beautiful."
My breath hitched. The coil inside me wound tighter, tighter, his fingers moving with that devastating steadiness, never speeding up, never chasing it, just maintaining exactly the right pressure in exactly the right place. My thighs were trembling. I could feel it, the fine tremor running through the muscles, completely beyond my control, and I didn't care. I didn't care about anything except the slow, relentless movement of his hand and the way he was looking at me like I was the centre of the entire world.
"Daska," I whispered, and it came out broken, pleading, a sound I barely recognised as my own voice. "I can't—I'm going to—"
"Yes," he said. Just that. Justyes, like it was the simplest thing, like there was nothing more natural than this, than me falling apart under his hands in the firelit warmth of his cave. His thumb found that spot again, pressing in a slow, firm circle, and his fingers curled inside me, and the coil that had been winding tighter and tighter finally snapped.
It hit me like a wave. Not the sharp, quick kind that crested and broke, but the deep, rolling kind that started somewhere at the base of my spine and moved through me in slow,devastating pulses. My back arched off the furs. My hand flew to his wrist, not to stop him but to anchor myself, fingers closing hard around the thick bones as the pleasure rolled through me in wave after wave. I heard myself cry out—his name, I think, though it might have been nothing, might have been just sound, raw and unformed. Just the sound a body makes when it remembers what it's for.
Daska held me through it. His fingers slowed but didn't stop, drawing out every last tremor, every aftershock, his other hand warm and grounding against my hip. He murmured something I couldn't parse—soft words in his language, low and rhythmic, almost like a song—and I realised distantly that my face was wet.
I was crying. Not the ugly, gasping kind. The quiet kind, the kind that leaked out of me without permission, tears sliding sideways into my hair and across my temples while my body still hummed with the aftershocks. I wasn't sad. I wasn't afraid. It was just—too much. Too much feeling after too long without any, like a door thrown open in a house that had been sealed shut for years, and everything rushing in at once.
Daska didn't flinch. Didn't pull away or ask what was wrong or look at me with that particular brand of male panic that meantoh God, she's crying, what did I do. He just eased his hand free, gentle and slow, and gathered me against him. His arms came around me, one beneath my shoulders, the other curved around my waist, and he pulled me into his chest and held me there.
I pressed my face against the warm skin of his throat and let myself cry. Quietly. The kind of tears that washed things clean rather than the kind that tore you apart. His hand moved in slow passes up and down my spine, and his chin rested against the top of my head, and he didn't say a word. Just held me and breathed, his heartbeat steady and sure against my cheek, and let me feel everything I needed to feel without making me explain any of it. Somehow that was the kindest thing anyonehad ever done for me, and I found myself thinking that I was in serious danger of falling in love with this man. This incredible man that I couldn’t keep. I honestly didn’t know how I was going to be able to walk away.
CHAPTER 19
RIVIK
The valley went quiet first. That was always the tell.
I'd learned it from my father before I could hold a spear. When the birds stop singing and the deer lift their heads, something with teeth is coming. The ptarmigan had gone silent in the scrub grass. The small herd of ibex that had been grazing the lower slopes all afternoon had frozen mid-step, ears swivelled toward the eastern ridge, and then bolted as one, white rumps flashing as they disappeared into the treeline.I was checking the snares on the eastern ridge when Torvak's howl split the air. Not a hunting call. Not a greeting. The long, rising note that meantthreat approaching, many, come now. I'd heard it twice in my life. Once when the Greywash pack had tested our borders. Once when my father died.
My wolf spirit surged forward before the howl finished, and I was running before I'd made the conscious decision to move. The shift came mid-stride—bones cracking and reforming, skin splitting into fur, the world tilting as my centre of gravitydropped and my senses exploded outward in every direction. Scent hit me first. Pine resin. Frozen earth. Woodsmoke from camp. And underneath it all, threading through the cold air like poison in water—wolves. Dozens of them. Their scent was sharp and musky, laced with the particular territorial aggression of males on the hunt, and it was coming from the west.
Broken Ridge.
I was already halfway back to the camp when Ryke reached me.
He came at a dead run, his wolf barely contained beneath the surface, eyes bright gold. He didn't need to speak. The expression on his face told me everything, confirmed the thing I'd been dreading for weeks, the thing that had kept me awake at night staring at the roof of my shelter while the bond hummed uselessly in my chest.
