When I shifted, it happened without a decision.
One moment wolf, the next moment man, naked and kneeling in the dirt with my arms wrapped around her waist and my face pressed against her stomach. The tattoos on my arms stood outagainst her borrowed jacket and the morning cold bit at my bare skin but I didn’t move.
Mira didn’t flinch. Didn’t pull back. Her fingers found my hair, human hair now, curly and tangled from the shift, and she carded through it with the same gentle patience she’d used on my wolf.
“I’ve got you,” she said.
My shoulders shook. The release of holding myself rigid for days, the muscles finally unlocking, the jaw unclenching.
I buried my face deeper and breathed her in. The bond frequency between us wasn’t the roaring inferno it became during claiming or the desperate surge of reunion. It was low, steady, constant. A heartbeat beneath a heartbeat.
We stayed that way. I don’t know how long. Long enough for the sun to shift through the canopy and the stream to change its song twice.
When I finally lifted my head, she was watching in a way that made my chest ache in an entirely different way.
“I missed you,” she said. Just that. Sincere enough to bruise.
“I was right here.”
“No. You weren’t.” Her thumb traced my cheekbone. “The quiet version of you scares me more than anything Thiago could do.”
The honesty of it hit center mass. I turned my face into her palm and pressed my lips against it.
“I’m sorry I pushed you away,” she added. “Before. When everything fell apart. I should have...”
“Hey.” I caught her hand. Held it. “You were protecting yourself. I understand that better now than I did then.”
Her jaw trembled for a fraction of a second before she controlled it.
I stood. The cool air reminded me aggressively that I was naked, and the awareness hit us both at the same time. Mira’s gaze tracked down my chest, over the tattoos, caught itself at my hip bones, and snapped back up to my face with a speed that made her blush to her ears.
“You could put clothes on.”
“I could. But you blushing is doing wonders for my emotional recovery.”
“I’m not blushing. It’s cold.”
“It’s not cold. You’re staring at my tattoos.”
“I am not.”
“Love, your eyes were at my waistline three seconds ago.”
The blush deepened. She stood from the log and jabbed a finger at my chest. “Put. Clothes. On.”
Her fingertip landed on the tattoo below my collarbone. She didn’t pull back. Her finger traced the line of ink down toward my sternum, casual, almost absent, and the touch sent a currentstraight through my body that was not absent at all. My cock stirred and I had zero clothing to hide that fact.
Mira noticed. Her eyes went wide, then deliberately, infuriatingly, she smirked.
“Emotional recovery, huh?”
“That’s a different kind of recovery.”
She patted my chest twice, turned on her heel, and walked toward the stream with a sway in her hips that was absolutely intentional. I watched her go with my blood rerouting south and a grin splitting my face.
“There he is,” she called over her shoulder. “Welcome back.”
I pulled on the spare clothes stashed by the stream, the ones Solomon insisted we keep at every waypoint because “operational preparedness” was his love language.
