I pulled her tighter against me. My hand stayed on her belly. She was quiet for a long time, her fingers tracing slow patterns on my forearm where it crossed her body, and I let the silence hold because some things didn’t need to be talked through. They needed to be felt.
“Is it always like that?” she asked eventually. Her voice was hoarse.
“No.”
“What’s it usually like?”
“It’ll be different every time.” I pressed my lips to the back of her neck. “Depending on how badly you’ve misbehaved.”
She made a sound that was half-laugh, half-sob. “So the knot thing. That’s wolf stuff?”
“Yes. It keeps my seed inside you. Gives it time to take.”
She was quiet again, processing. I could see the gears turning in her even now, even with my come still pooling between her thighs and her body still trembling with aftershocks.
“You said it completes the bond.”
“Yes.”
“And now I’ll be able to shift.”
“Soon.”
She rolled in my arms until she was facing me, her head on my bicep, her dark eyes searching my face.
“The skinwalker,” she said. “It found me at the motel wearing your face. It knows what you look like, how you sound, how you move. What if next time it shows up I can’t tell the difference in time?”
“There isn’t going to be a next time.” I held her gaze. “I’m going to hunt it down and kill it. Today. I’m going to track it from the motel and I’m going to find whatever hole it crawled into.”
She didn’t flinch. Didn’t argue or try to talk me out of it. She just looked at me with those curious, assessing eyes and nodded once.
“And while you’re gone?”
“You’ll stay here.”
“Silas, no, I can?—”
“That wasn’t a suggestion.” I sat up and she sat up with me, pulling the sheet across her lap. I swung my legs off the bed and retrieved my jeans from the floor, dressing quickly.
Then I pulled out the handcuffs.
They were standard issue, steel, purloined from a police car on the way over here with the intention of using them to make sure my mate didn’t run away again when I was done knotting her today. I held them up, letting the kitchen light catch the metal,and watched Katie’s expression cycle through approximately seven stages of reaction in the space of two seconds.
“You are not serious.”
“I’m completely serious.”
“You’re going to handcuff me to the bed?”
“Given that you’ve run away twice already, and that the most recent time resulted in you fighting a skinwalker alone in a motel room with a desk lamp…” I reached for the iron rail of the headboard. It was solid, bolted to the frame. “Yes, I’m going to handcuff you to the bed.”
“That’s—” She watched me thread the cuff through the rail. “This is insane. You justbred meand now you’re going to chain me up while I wait for your fucking offspring to pop out?”
“Nonsense. The pups I just put in you won’t pop out for about nine months, and I’ll let you out of the cuffs well before that. At least if you’re a good girl.”
Her mouth opened, then closed, then opened again.
I took her right wrist gently and clicked the cuff into place.
