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I freeze.
Lucas sees me vanish into that memory. He reaches up and takes my hand, placing it over his beating heart.
“Stay with me,” he says. “I came back to you, Wildheart.”
I bow my head over our joined hands and breathe until I can feel only the heartbeat under my palm. Then his other hand comes to my hair, gentle, patient, and I understand that this is how we survive it. Not by pretending the memory has no teeth, but by putting living proof beside it again and again until the teeth learn they are not the only truth.
His mouth opens under mine, and the taste of him is alive enough that a broken sound claws out of my throat.
His clothes come off slowly—I cannot bring myself to tear anything from him right now. I lift the fabric over his head with both hands, smoothing my palms down his arms afterward, checking without meaning to, counting what death tried to steal.
The dark rope marks have faded under Aestrata’s work but have not vanished. I brush my mouth over one wrist, then the other, and Lucas’s breath catches above me. Grief rises in him, then tenderness, then need. He does not pull away. I kiss the inside of his wrist again because I am not ready to forgive the world for putting marks there.
I kiss him harder, not rough yet, but deeper, needing his mouth open, needing his breath against mine, needing the living heat of him to answer the place inside me where his absence still screams.
He kisses me back with the same ache. His arms wrap around my shoulders and pull me down until my weight rests over him. I hold most of it away, but he makes an unhappy sound through the bond and drags me closer.
His body opens under me with a heat that startles both of us. The change Aestrata made in him answers me on its own, with the sweet scent of his slick gathering between his thighs. It seems the forest itself has taught his body how to welcome mine. The bond flares with Lucas’s shock, then embarrassment, then a wave of want so deep it steals my breath.
I pull back enough to look at him. His face is flushed beneath the ember-marks, his mouth swollen, eyes bright with tears and arousal. His throat mark glows faintly beneath my shadow, warmer now, braided with the new rootfire in him.
He knows what I have discovered. A tremor runs through him, and slick spills warmer where my hips press close, his altered body making him ready without my fingers, without coaxing, without the old fear of stretch coming first.
Awe moves through me so hard it becomes another tear.
Lucas’s expression changes immediately. “Hey. Don’t look at me like that.”
“I saw you dead,” I say, because the words will not stay buried. “Now your body opens for me. Now it lives so much it makes a path.”
His hand slides down between us, not to hide himself, but to touch my wrist and guide my palm lower. I follow because he asks without words. My fingers reach where he is wet for me, and he gasps. He is soft in some places and newly different in others, human skin over Cervari change, his body keeping both truths without apology. I stroke carefully through the wetness, and his hips lift into my hand.
The movement breaks something open in my chest.
He is alive enough to want.
Alive enough to ache.
Alive enough to be impatient beneath me, his fingers digging into my back, his body slicking my hand with each slow touch.
I bend and kiss the new markings at his side, the place that had been torn open, the place where death entered and failed to keep him. Lucas shudders, though not from pain. Through the bond, I feel the strange sensitivity there, not wounded now, but charged, as if Aestrata’s rootfire remembers being called into his flesh.
I kiss it again, and his body arches beneath mine. His breath breaks apart, and the slick against my hand grows hotter.
I could worship him for hours. I want to. I want to touch every changed line, learn every new response, press my mouth to the proof of his survival until the memory of his blood loosens its jaw from my throat. I need slow. My grief needs time to kneel beside his living body and understand that breath continues.
But Lucas needs something else. I feel it building before he says a word. Tenderness warms him, yes, and love holds him open to me, but beneath both, a rougher want starts to pace.
Death has handled him, an old power remade him, and forces neither of us can fully name carried him back from the edge.
He does not want to be touched like glass forever—he wants to feel strength answer strength. He wants my love with teeth in it. He wants the proof that I know he is not only rescued, not only wounded, not only the body I almost lost.
He wants to be taken as the mate who came back changed and still chose my hands.
His legs tighten around my hips. “I need to feel you,” he says. “Not like I’m breakable. Not like you’re scared of me disappearing if you move wrong.”
My hand tightens in the furs beside him, and he feels my fear answer. “I died and I felt pieces of it too. But I’m here now. I’m not asking you to forget it. I’m asking you to remember I survived.”
A tear drops from my jaw to his chest. He looks down at it, then back to me.
