I push away from Ty and grin up at him.
“My liege,” I say, and I let everyone hear me, because the run will be ours—but the pack has earned the right to hear me claim Ty, too. To acknowledge the moon, and Ty. To signal that I am finally embracing my fate. “There’s a full moon tonight. You might have noticed.”
I feel everything in Ty still. His dark eyes are so intense I can feel them inside and out. They gleam—but he doesn’t smile.
We’re years past that.
“If I were you, baby, I would run,” he warns me. “Take a head start. See if it helps you.”
That’s all the warning he’s going to give me. I know that in every humming inch of my body.
I shift like lightning, and then I run.
And as I run, I hear the wolves howling my name. I head for the sleek, steep sides of the crater and I barrel my way up.
The moon is almost there. I can feel her everywhere, urging me on.
I run.
I feel it—we all feel it—when the Wolf Moon hits her greatest height. It’s that loud, wild song that heats my blood and spurs me on, and this time, for the first time since I was very young, I let it carry me.
I let the howls of my pack light me up and make me faster.
And everything changes because I’m part of it. It sings in me and I am the song, and Ty is already behind me. He’sright there.
We streak out of the crater and I cut to the left and race along the rim, scenting him not three paces behind me.
He and I are one. Together, we make a glorious harmony.
I want to do this song of ours justice. I take to the mountains and he chases me there. He loses ground when I cut beneath a fallen tree. He catches up again when I lose my grip on some rocks, but I make my fall an attack—taking him out at the knees and then switching direction while he’s still on his back.
I’ve never run this hard or this fast.
It’s like running to the moon herself.Forher.
I can feel him at my heels. I can hear the way he sounds out the glory of this, so loud that every wolf, all over Southern Oregon, can hear.
I howl back.
Somewhere in between Crater Lake and Mount McLoughlin, I try to turn a tight little corner in the Sky Lakes Wilderness, then slip.
That’s the end of it.
And the beginning of everything else.
I discover, as he takes me down at last, that what I always thought of as a submission is anything but.
I do my part. He does his. Together we make one bright and burning song beneath the moon.
We sing out, into the trees. Ty surges deep inside of me. I take him in deep.
We fuck ourselves free and we come and come and come.
This goes on so long that I can’t tell the difference between the two of us.
When I know myself again, when I’m conscious that there’s some separation between him and me however little I want it, he’s deep inside me. I can still feel his cock, thick and engorged, and we wait there for it to subside.
Tonight, he takes his snout and he pushes my head back, exposing my throat. He rolls us so we’re both lying with our bellies toward the sky. Then he lets a howl out to the moon that seems to shake every part of me.
