“I wasn’t expecting that.”
“I know.” I turned my head slightly. The movement pulled at the bite, and the sting was immediate and bright. “Don’t make it weird.”
A pause. The fire popped. An ember spiraled up the chimney and vanished.
“You’re wearing my mark,” Braham said.
“I am aware.”
Braham’s brow flickered. “That’s not weird to you?”
I considered this with genuine seriousness. The kind of consideration that required me to look at the timber ceiling and weigh the question against everything I knew about myself, about him, about the thread humming quietly in my chest that felt less like something new and more like something I’d been carrying for longer than I wanted to admit.
“Ask me again,” I said, “when I’m not knotted and exhausted and running on adrenaline and scotch and the aftermath of having a wolf’s teeth in my throat. The answer is probably still no. But let me have the drama of the question.”
Braham’s chest moved over me.
When we finally separated—the knot releasing with a slow, deliberate ease that traveled through every nerve ending I possessed—Braham pulled me in without asking.
One arm was thrown across my chest, his hand flat against my sternum, his body warm and solid against my back. I let him. Which at this point was not a concession. It was just where I wanted to be.
The fire burned low. Outside, the Douglas fir stood dark and still against a cloudy sky, and the occasional rustle of something moving through underbrush carried through the open French doors and faded into the particular quiet of a forest that had seen everything and was not impressed.
I lay in the dark with Braham’s arm across me and the thread humming quietly somewhere in my chest, new and strange and already somehow familiar, thinking about Grace asleep down the hall in her white pine crib.
About the word “legal” and the word “together” and the word “mate,” which I had been arguing with for weeks and which had apparently won.
“I’m going to need a better author bio,” I said to the ceiling.
“What?”
“My current one says I live alone with strong opinions about coffee.” I traced the edge of Braham’s forearm with my fingertips. The muscle was warm under my touch, corded and relaxed in the particular way of something that had expended itself thoroughly and was content to exist. “That’s going to need updating.”
Silence. The kind that suggested Braham was weighing several responses and finding all of them inadequate to the moment.
“Go to sleep, Jai.”
“I’m just saying. Logistically. ‘Lives with a wolf, a baby, and significantly fewer strong opinions than previously advertised.’ That’s going to require its own paragraph.”
“Sleep.”
I did.
Chapter Eighteen
~ Braham ~
I woke before the light. The thread hit first—a second heartbeat humming somewhere beneath my sternum, specific and warm in a way no secondhand account had prepared me for. Not like being told about a color, but like seeing it for the first time.
Jai’s weight was still against my side. One arm thrown across my chest, his palm flat against my sternum above the thread itself, like he’d been holding onto it in his sleep. His breathing came slow and even, a man whose body had decided, against considerable evidence, that it was safe enough to shut down completely.
The sheets were a ruin beneath us. Blood had dried in rusty smears across the linen where his shoulder had leaked through the bandaging, and the bite mark at his throat stood out purple and angry against his skin in the gray half-light filtering through the French doors.
I lay still and took inventory. The thread hummed steadily. Not loud. Not intrusive. Just there, a live current running between us that I could feel in my chest, in my wrists, in the backs of my hands.
I knew without looking that Jai was asleep. Knew without asking that he wasn’t in pain—the thread carried that information cleanly, a quiet absence of distress that registered as its own kind of fact. His bruised ribs would ache when he moved. His torn shoulder would pull. But for now, in the dark, his body had found the off switch and hit it hard.
I got up without waking him. The mattress shifted under my weight and Jai made a small sound, not a word, just a noise, and then settled back into the rhythm he’d been keeping.
