She set the pace—fast, hard, relentless. Her hands on my chest, nails digging in, using me for leverage. Every time I thrustup, she met me with equal force, her breath hot against my face. The bruise at her neck pulsed, the colors shifting, and I could feel the bond in my skull: a live wire, burning through both of us.
She fucked me until I couldn’t see straight, until the whole world shrank to the slick heat of her and the sound of our bodies slamming together. When I felt the edge coming, I warned her—“Carrie, if you want me to stop, do it now”—but she just grabbed the back of my head and kissed me, my tongue fucking her mouth as hard as she rode my cock.
I felt the wolf rise to claim her forever. I bit her again, just above the bruise, and when she came, she screamed, her whole body shaking around me.
I came too, harder than I ever had, my cock swelling at the base, locking inside her. The knot. The final act.
She screamed but didn’t try to get away. Didn’t try to stop me. The pressure rose from my cock, into my stomach, and up my chest, stopping in my head. The world around me exploded into an artist’s palette of colors. I saw Carrie, I saw me, I saw the future. I saw us running alone in the woods, she, like me, as a wolf, her fur white, the tips shimmering gold. I saw our own pack, additional wolves that had nothing to do with the club or bourbon. I saw us running, feasting, and fucking, howling at the top of a ridge at a moon so red I could have sworn blood dripped from its edges to the Earth.
She collapsed on top of me, shuddering, sweat and tears and spit mixing on our skin. We stayed joined, unable to separate, our pulses thrumming in perfect sync. I felt her heart, her need, her everything, bleeding into me.
“Fuck me,” she said. “Don’t fucking move.”
I didn’t. I had no choice. Neither of us did.
“You fucking rocked my world,” she said. “Tell me that doesn’t happen just once.”
I shook my head. “From here on, it will happen every time. Sometimes more gentle.” I paused long enough for her to take a breath. “Sometimes more violent, depending on what the wolf wants.”
“You’ve changed me,” she said.
“Yeah, and now, you’re like me.”
‘Fuck, Shivs.” She seemed to think for a moment. “I’m going to become a wolf?”
I nodded. “It’s in you now. We’re linked for eternity.”
She rested her head on my chest, and after a while, she rolled off, pulling me with her, still joined, still trembling. She lay on her back, staring at the ceiling, and said, “No more secrets.”
“None,” I promised. And this time, I meant it.
I reached for her hand, laced our fingers together, and held on tight until the sun came up.
That was how it started: not with a fairy tale, or a love story, or even a single, clean break—but with blood and heat and the kind of hunger you can’t ever walk off. I’d marked her. I’d bound her. And she’d done the same to me.
The rest of the world would just have to catch up.
Carrie
The conference room at Stillwater headquarters was all oak and intimidation, windowless and built for bad news. The heavy table ran thirty feet, braced at both ends by hand-carved wildcats that stared you down like they expected a fight. Twelve men and women filled the seats, but you’d think it was a packed jury the way nobody spoke above a whisper, not even the marketing director who usually giggled at her own jokes. I sat at the head, legal pad unopened, the ghost of my father behind my shoulder and the smell of last night’s bourbon clinging to the roots of my hair.
To my right, Celia Monroe had her hands folded like a church lady, but her jaw flexed every time a headline changed. Lila Vargas typed notes on her phone, stopping only to glare at the “toxicity” chart that kept popping up in the corner of the big screen. At my left, Bennet Shore had gone so still he looked embalmed, only his thumb moving in slow circles against the lacquered surface of the table.
The far end of the table belonged to Marcus Ellery. He wore the only true suit in the room, a blue so dark it would have looked black except for the camera lights that caught him dead-on. I’d seen him smile at funerals and at a wedding where he once gave away the wrong bride, but the expression he wore today had no pretense of warmth. When he stood, the room’s hush compressed even further.
“If I could have everyone’s attention,” he said, as if he hadn’t had it for twenty minutes already. “The situation, as you all know, is… challenging.” He let the word hang, one hand in his pocket, the other resting on the open folder in front of him.
A new headline flashed on the TV screen in the room: “STILLWATER CONTAMINATION SICKENS 23—FBI INVESTIGATING SABOTAGE.” Below it, a photo of my father from five years ago, sideburns gone gray and bottle in hand, right before the diagnosis. The sight was a knife to the gut. I kept my face neutral.
“Three states,” Marcus said, eyes on the room but never meeting mine. “Over two hundred thousand bottles in the last quarter, every one a potential liability. This is, by every metric, the worst crisis in our company’s history.”
“Not Prohibition?” I said, voice even. “Not the fire of ‘79?”
He didn’t so much as twitch. “Those events were external. This is an inside job, and our enemies are—at minimum—ten times more sophisticated.” He turned to the glass wall, motioning at a young marketing analyst who nearly tripped over her own blazer. “Rebecca, run the recall slide.”
Rebecca fumbled with the remote, and a map appeared, red circles blooming over half the southeast. The spread was surgical. You could see the trail of each shipment, from barrel to bottle to shelf, all the way to the ER where some poor bastard had gone to shit out his liver. My stomach lurched, but I only gripped the chair harder.
“Now, to the main agenda.” Marcus’s voice had the cadence of a man reading off a verdict. “For the good of the company, I’m submitting a motion to temporarily relieve Ms. Stillwater of her operational duties pending internal review. I recommend an independent crisis manager—one with experience in hostile takeovers and federal investigations—to oversee production and distribution until the FBI concludes its probe.”
