Holly looks at the cut. She traces the stitching around the patch, runs her thumb across her name on the inside collar where I had it stamped. When she looks at me I recognize the expression. It's the one she gets right before she clicks the shutter.
"Yes, Rex." She pulls the cut on over her shoulders. Settles it. Tugs the lapels straight. On her terms, like everything she's ever done.
Garrett lifts his glass an inch, and from Nina comes a sound that might be a squeal or even a war cry. Dawson wolf-whistles from the pool table. Sal smiles behind the bar, and I'm not sure I've ever seen that before. Holly grins at me in my colors, and my ribs crack open in a way that has nothing to do with the desperate need to bond and everything to do with the woman wearing my cut like she's owned it her whole life.
Holly locks the Anchor up herself and we climb the stairs to her apartment with the February cold pressing against the windows and the street gone quiet below us.
She stands in the kitchen in my cut over a tank top, pouring bourbon into two glasses. The sight of her in my colors hits me low in the gut. The feral thing in my blood rolls over and purrs.
She passes me a glass. Takes a sip of her own. Sets it on the counter.
"There's one more thing."
My heart kicks.
"Knox claimed Sarah." Her voice drops, direct. "Finn claimed Jess. I know how orcs bond, Rex. I know what the bite means. And you already called me your mate—you don't get to take that back." She steps closer. "I want forever. Give it to me."
I set my glass down because my grip won't hold it.
"It's forever, Holly. It changes you, physically. My heartbeat layered under yours. My emotions in your body. You'll feel everything I feel and I'll feel everything you feel. You'll live longer." I swallow. "There's no taking it back."
She crosses the kitchen and cups my face in both palms. Her thumbs trace the edges of my tusks, the same gesture that cracked the wordmatethrough my skull six months ago.
"I've spent years proving I don't need permanent." Her eyes hold mine. "But I want it. With you. Don't hold back the one thing that means forever."
I pull her against me. My mouth finds the curve of her neck, the hollow where her throat meets her collarbone. The claiming place. I press my lips there and feel her pulse jump against my mouth.
"Tell me yes." The words come out wrecked. "I need to hear you say it."
"Yes, Rex. Do it."
The bite. My teeth pierce her skin and she gasps—a sharp bright intake that tightens her grip in my hair. The bond snaps into place. Everything I've suppressed since October tears through both of us at once, and my knees buckle against hers.
Her heartbeat layers beneath mine. Not a sound but a presence. A second pulse running alongside my own like it belongs there.
Holly grabs my shoulders. "I can feel—Rex, I can feel your heartbeat."
My lips press against the mark, tasting copper and salt andher,and the claiming scar settles into her skin. "That's me. You'll feel it for the rest of your life."
The bond hits me like Finn warned it would. Everything she's hidden floods through at once. The fierce independence she wears like armor. The vulnerability she buries under sarcasm and sharp edges and the camera she puts between herself and the world. And beneath all of it, stillness. Deep and quiet and unshakable. Holly doesn't move. She's the steadiest person I've ever known, and I've spent every mile since that first night running from the one person who could make me stop.
Her emotions crash into me. Love and terror and relief, the same tangled mess I've carried for months, mirrored back, and the doubled weight of it cracks a place behind my ribs I thought would never break.
I kiss her. The bond amplifies everything—her lips against mine, the heat of her body through the tank top and my cut, the taste of bourbon on her tongue. I slide the cut off her and pull the tank top over her head because I need skin so bad my whole body shakes.
Before I touch her breasts I feel them. Her sensation floods me, the cold air tightening her nipples, the ache of wanting my mouth there, my hands follow the signal like they're being guided. I cup her in my palms, thumbs dragging across the peaks, and the sound she makes hits me twice: once through my ears, once through my ribs, a spike of pleasure that drops straight through my gut.
"Fuck," she breathes. She yanks my belt loose and shoves my jeans down my hips. I lift her onto the counter and her legs wrap around my waist, her thighs trembling. I grind my cock against the seam of her shorts and she rocks into me, through the bond I feel what she feels. The pressure of me against her clit, the friction of the denim, the wet heat building between her legs. My cock throbs so hard my vision blurs.
I drag her shorts and underwear down in one pull. My palm slides between her legs. She's soaked, slick and hot, her arousal floods my senses until the kitchen narrows to bourbon, dark cherries and the sharp sweet salt of her on my skin. I push two fingers inside her and curl them deep. Holly's head drops back against the cabinet, her walls clenching around me in tight rhythmic pulses. The bond gives me her side of it. The stretch of my fingers inside her, the fullness, the curl hitting a spot thatsends white light across the backs of her eyelids. I nearly come from her pleasure alone.
"Rex. I need you."
I pull free and line up, notching the head of my cock against her entrance. When I push inside her, slow, the bond splits me open. I feel the stretch from her side. My size, the thickness of me pressing into her, the burn and the fullness and the ache of her body opening around mine. The sensation of my cock gripped in her tight wet heat layers on top of it. Two bodies' worth of feeling in one nervous system. My hands grip the counter edge on either side of her hips and I stop halfway, forehead pressed to hers, breathing hard. I have never been this close to coming from a single thrust.
"Don't stop." Her voice breaks. "I need all of you."
I push the rest of the way in and her gasp tears through my body. I hold there, seated deep, her thighs trembling around my hips, both of us breathing in short ragged pulls while sensation crashes between us like a current with no ground wire. Every nerve ending I own fires from two directions.
