Page 52

“I know,” I say, but it comes out rough.

He looks back up at me. You can give more when you are ready. I wait angry, but I wait.

A shaky, helpless laugh breaks out of me. “You wait angry?”

His eyes narrow with complete seriousness. Very angry.

I sit beside him because if I keep standing over him with my hand on his skin, I’ll make a decision my brain hasn’t caught up to yet. The couch dips under both of us, and Onyx turns slightly toward me, too big and too still, his knees spread because the human furniture clearly wasn’t built with him in mind.

“You’re ridiculous,” I tell him.

He considers that. You laugh when I am ridiculous. So I’ll keep it.

There he goes again, saying things that should be funny and somehow punching me right in the chest.

I look around the cabin, suddenly seeing it the way he might: small, dead-tree walls, glowing rectangles, cold boxes, too many human objects, all of it built to keep the forest out. Then I look at him sitting on my couch, trying so hard to fit himself into my world without breaking anything.

“You’re doing fine,” I say quietly.

He blinks at me. Inside den?

“Yeah. Inside the den.”

His attention moves over my face, and the bond softens with something almost shy. I’m happy. Thank you… Lucas.

My heart just about leaps out of my chest at his use of my real name. I’ve been ‘Little Ember’ since we met, but this just… hits harder. I lean back against the couch, shoulder brushing his arm. The touch sends another spark through me, but this one I let exist without panicking.

Onyx stays still for half a breath, then relaxes by degrees, his body learning the couch, the room, the sound of the refrigerator, the shape of me beside him. Outside, the forest presses against the windows. Inside, Onyx sits in my cabin because I asked him to.

For the first time since I came back to Sweet Rivers, the place doesn’t feel like a refuge I’m hiding in.

It feels like a threshold we both crossed.

19

Onyx

The floor is better than the bed.

The bed is wrong. Too soft, too high, and too human. With cloth piled over cloth and the scent of sleep trapped inside it until the whole thing feels less like a resting place and more like something made to swallow bodies slowly.

Lucas told me I could use it. He stood in the doorway of this smaller room with red creeping over his throat, one hand rubbing at the back of his neck, and said, “You can sleep in the bed if you wanna. I mean, it’s big enough. Probably. Maybe. Fuck, I don’t know. It’s a bed, Onyx, not a sacred object.”

I had looked at it, then at him, then lowered myself to the floor beside it.

He stared at me for several heartbeats before he said, “Right. Of course. Ancient forest cryptid draws the line at memory foam.”

I did not understand all the words then. I understand enough now.

The bed offends me; that is the important part. The floor holds me properly. Wood beneath my spine, wall at my back, door in sight, window in reach, his breathing above me, and his scent everywhere.

That last thing is the trouble.

My mate’s den is full of him in a way the forest never is. Outside, his scent lives on trails and the places his hands touch. It clings to bark where he leans, to stone where he sits, and to the air after he passes. I follow those traces because every piece of him left behind becomes a small thread leading me back to where he has been.

Inside his den, there are no threads—there is a flood.

Lucas is in the blankets, the pillow, the old shirt thrown over the chair, the boots near the closet, the damp towel hanging from the door, the wooden handle of the knife he sets on the nightstand because he thinks I do not notice him trying to be calm and prepared at the same time.