The bond is wide open between us. I can feel him—his love, his relief, the profound and overwhelming gratitude of a man who came very close to losing this and knows exactly what it is worth. All of it doubles back against my own feelings, amplifying everything until my eyes fill with happy tears.
“Hey,” he says softly, looking down at me.
“I’m okay,” I manage. “I just—I feel you. Through the bond. I feel everything you’re feeling.”
“Good,” he says. “I want you to feel it. Every bit of it.”
He begins to move, and it is nothing like our last time together. That night was all urgency and grief and barely contained desperation, both of us reaching for something we couldn’t name with hands that didn’t quite trust what they were holding.
This is different. This is knowing exactly what it is and choosing it anyway. This is the two of us with every card on the table and nothing between us but honesty and the bond and the long overdue fact that we’re home.
He moves inside me with such intention that it makes my chest ache as much as the rest of me. His hands are everywhere—my hips, my waist, my face—touching me like he cannot get enough. His mouth finds my throat, my jaw, the corner of my lips.
“I love you,” I tell him.
“I love you.” He pulls back and drives home, making me gasp. “I love you,” he says again and again, each one punctuated, each one true.
I wrap my legs around his hips. The bond carries his pleasure to me and mine back to him, and the feedback is staggering. I can’t tell where I end and he begins. I can’t separate my sensations from his, and I don’t want to.
“Don’t stop,” I breathe. “Don’t ever stop.”
“Never,” he says, and I feel his sincerity in that word the way I felt it in his promise—no caveats, no conditions. Just him.
The pleasure builds and crests, and I go over with his name on my lips and his body covering mine and his hands holding me like he will never let go. His release follows mine, and I feel it in the groan against my throat, in how his entire body shudders, and in the warmth of his release inside me. Through the bond, I know exactly what it does to him, all of it, and my eyes spill over again because there is no other response to being loved this much.
We stay tangled together in the quiet afterward. My head on his chest, his arm around my shoulders. His heartbeat is steady under my ear. I count the rhythm of it for a while just because I can.
“The month after next,” I say eventually, my voice hoarse.
“The month after next,” he agrees, sounding exhausted and sated.
I press my lips to the new scar on his chest and feel him exhale slowly.
“I love you,” I say against his skin.
His hand moves in my hair. “I love you, too.” A pause, warm and unhurried. “Get some sleep, Anne.”
I close my eyes. Outside, the city carries on. In this room, there is nothing but the two of us, the bond between us, and the simple, staggering fact that we made it here.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Anne
Kain takes me to a restaurant on the east side of the human district that I have never been to. It’s small and warm and tucked between a bookshop and a florist, the kind of place that has candles on the tables and a handwritten menu and no reason to be in a hurry.
He holds the door open. I walk in ahead of him, and he puts his hand on the small of my back as we follow the host to our table. The touch is so easy, so unselfconscious, that I have to look away and compose myself before I sit down.
This is what it is supposed to feel like. I forgot.
We order. He gets whatever he gets, which I barely register because I’m watching his face while he talks to the waiter—the way he smiles when he thanks the man, the way his eyes come back to me immediately after, as if he’s checking that I’m still here. I’ve noticed that this is something he does without thinking about it.
Through the bond, I can feel his contentment. It’s like a quiet room with all the windows open. No edge to it. No shadow.
“You’re staring,” he says once the waiter is gone.
“I’m allowed to stare. You’re my mate.”
The word sits in the air between us, and we both feel it—the newness of saying it plainly, out loud, as a simple fact rather than a complicated issue.
