I spent the morning prepping the place for the mate bond ritual—if you could call it that. Mama Celeste called it the “wedding night for wolves.” I called it the last thing standing between me and a full-blown identity crisis. I set out candle after candle, the kind with real beeswax, not the Target knockoffs. I raided the hidden bar for every bottle with a story and set them up like a barricade at the threshold to the dining room. The air inside grew thick with melted sugar, leather, and something almost holy: the smoke of bourbon-laced incense Mama Celestesent, packed in a jar so dense the glass itself smelled of secrets. I set the stick on a silver tray and let it smoke the way she’d instructed: windows cracked, doors sealed, every light but the candles off.
The house filled with a soft haze, gold-touched and swirling, turning the old family portraits into shadows and making the chandeliers drip honey instead of light. I could feel the effect almost instantly. Every muscle under my skin started to vibrate, a low-frequency hum that pulsed in time with the mate mark on my neck. My thoughts jumped, scattered. My whole body felt like a violin string on the verge of snapping. I poured myself two fingers of barrel-proof, but the alcohol barely landed before the next wave hit.
Mama Celeste said the incense would “enhance the senses, soften the boundaries between you and the wolf.” I hadn’t believed it, but now I felt like every wall in the house was shrinking, the air in every room trying to push me toward the front hall. I paced, checked my phone for the hundredth time, and tried not to think about what would happen if Shivs didn’t show.
He did, of course. Right on time. Always on time when it mattered, as if the wolf in him could sense a deadline better than any CEO I’d ever fired. I heard his bike before I saw him: the low, rolling purr that made the windows tremble. I stood by the front door, hands twisted in the fabric of my dress, a simple thing Mama Celeste had insisted I wear. White cotton, loose enough to fall off with a single tug. It made the mate mark stand out—black and red, a thing of beauty and threat at the same time.
The knock was softer than I expected. I opened the door, and there he was—jacket slung over his shoulder, eyes already gone half-wild. The first thing I noticed was his pupils: blown wide, a wolf’s gaze trying to fit into a man’s skull. The second was the way he sniffed the air before he even looked at me.
“Fuck,” he said. “You trying to kill me?”
I shrugged, but my body betrayed me, shivering at the sound of his voice. “Mama Celeste’s orders. Something about bringing the beast to the surface.”
He stepped over the threshold, and every candle in the hallway seemed to lean toward him, the flames jittering in the draft. His eyes raked over me, not subtle, but not crude either. I felt them on my collarbone, on the mark, on the line of my bare thighs under the dress.
“Jesus,” he said, voice low. “You smell like a crime scene. All blood and sugar and fuck.” He pinched his nose, then laughed, the sound rough and sharp. “I’m going to lose my mind.”
“That’s the point,” I said. “The bond. The ritual. All of it.”
He put his jacket on the stair rail and followed me down the corridor to the dining room. Neither of us spoke, but I heard his footsteps in my ribs.
The table was set for two—real China, the silver inherited from some ancestor who probably killed a man for less. I’d roasted two ribeye, charred and bloody, because that’s how he liked them. There was salad, but it was for show.
He sat, eyes still never leaving my throat. I poured for both of us. The bourbon flashed gold in the glass, and he downed his in one swallow, then refilled without asking.
“I didn’t think you’d actually do the whole ceremony.” He waved his hand at the room, the candles, and me.
“Me neither,” I said. “But after what happened—” I stopped, the words catching. “It felt right.”
He grinned, but the edge was sharper than usual. “It’s good. You look, I mean, fuck, Carrie. You look like I want to eat you alive.”
I blushed, which pissed me off, but I let it ride. “Maybe later. Right now, we eat.”
The meal was a blur of motion and taste. I couldn’t tell if the food was good or if my senses were so fried that salt tasted like a drug. He devoured his steak, fingers white on the cutlery, the wolf in him not even trying to hide. I took slower bites, savoring the way each forkful seemed to heat up the rest of my body. There were moments I forgot what I was doing, lost in the way he chewed, the way his throat flexed when he swallowed. Every so often, I caught him glancing at my hands, or at the spot on my neck where the mate mark throbbed like a second heart.
Finally, I set down my fork and stared at him. “Is this how it’s supposed to feel?” I asked.
He wiped his mouth, then looked at me with something close to awe. “Never did the full ritual before. Most wolves just fuck and call it done. But with you,” he trailed off, searching for the words, “with you, it’s like I’m starving, but also full, and also on fire.”
I nodded, understanding more than I wanted to admit. “I keep thinking about what comes next. What if the change, what if it fucks up everything?”
He reached across the table and took my hand, his fingers huge and rough compared to mine. “If it fucks up everything, then we burn it down and start over. You’re Stillwater. That means more than blood or bourbon or—” He squeezed my hand. “—or even this.”
I felt a wave of relief, followed by a different kind of hunger. I stood, walked around the table, and sat on his lap without a word. His arms wrapped around my waist, locking me in place. The scent of him—gunpowder, leather, and the faintest trace of wild—overwhelmed everything else. I ground against him, feeling his cock harden under the denim. He bit my shoulder, just enough to leave a mark, and I gasped.
“Fuck dinner,” he said, voice guttural.
“Not yet,” I whispered, and slid off his lap, leading him by the hand through the haze and the candlelight. The air grew thicker with every step, the incense now a living thing that filled my lungs and pressed against my skin.
I led him upstairs, the old house creaking under our combined weight. The whole way up, he kept his hand at the small of my back, sometimes letting his fingers dip lower, tracing the line where the dress ended. I shivered, and he growled—a real, animal sound that set my teeth on edge.
I’d spent the afternoon prepping the room: every surface draped in fur, every piece of furniture moved to face the heavy oak sleigh bed in the middle. The air was so loaded with incense that each breath felt like swallowing smoke and maple syrup. A velvet pelt—wolf, not fake—covered the sheets, and I’d pulled every curtain tight to kill the blue of the outside world. In here, it was all gold and shadow and heat. The only sound was the slow drip of melted wax on the nightstand.
He paused in the doorway, nose twitching, eyes gone emerald in the candlelight. I saw the dilation of his pupils, the way the whites vanished behind the black.
“You did this for me?” he said, voice a new animal: soft, bewildered, the threat buried but not gone.
“For us,” I said, and let the dress fall all the way this time. I stepped out of it, bare but for the mate mark painted across my throat and the scars Shivs had left along my thighs and ribs.
