Page 63

His brow pulls together. “That sounds…”

Terrible? I ask, the faintest thread of dry warmth moving through the bond because I feel his first thought before he says it.

His mouth trembles, caught between a laugh and something far more fragile. “Yeah. Kind of terrible.”

I kiss his cheek. I don’t mean your ending as in your death. Not while the breath remains in me. I say at once, leaning closer as his fingers press harder over my chest. It means the places where others stopped loving you end with me. The waiting ends. The wound where she left you ends. The part of you that learned to brace before a hand lets go ends here, because I take that hurt into my keeping. I do not erase it. I do not pretend it never cut you. I carry its end, so it no longer has to carry you.

His face changes so completely that I fear I may have said the wrong thing, even as his body still holds mine, hot and trembling and open beneath me. His mouth parts, no sound leaving at first as his eyes fill fully now. The first tear slips sideways into his hair, and he makes a sound so wounded that the predator in me goes silent.

All hunger bends around it. All old instinct kneels to the greater thing rising in my chest. My mate cries beneath me, and there is no shame, no weakness, no ugliness. Only pain as it leaves a place where it has been trapped too long.

My thumb moves over his skin, gathering the salt against my claw-blunted fingertip. I bring it to my mouth without thinking, tasting grief and relief and Lucas in one small drop.

He makes a sound then—not only pleasure, and not only pain. It is the sound of a man who has held a door shut with his whole body for too many years and finally feels someone stronger lean against it from the other side.

“Fuck,” he whispers, and the word breaks apart. His hand leaves my chest only to grab the back of my neck, dragging me down until his forehead hits mine hard enough to ache. “Onyx.”

I wrap my arms beneath him and hold. His body shakes around mine, and every tremor travels through the bond into me. I feel the part of him that hates crying. I feel the part that wants to apologize for it. I crush that part beneath my answer before it can form.

No shame, I say, and the command in it is old enough that the den itself seems to listen. Not here. Not with me.

He turns his face, trying to hide against my shoulder, and I allow only enough hiding for mercy. I keep one hand in his hair and one over his heart. I keep him close enough that every breath he takes moves through my chest, too.

“You can’t say things like that,” he says, voice muffled against my skin.

I already did.

“You’re a nightmare.”

Yes.

Another broken laugh escapes him, and another tear follows. I kiss the corner of his eye before it can fall far, and the taste of it makes the creature in me soften so suddenly that the shift recedes for one impossible second. My jaw eases. My claws dull. The antlers stop pushing against the inside of my skull.

Lucas’s grief does what my restraint could not. It calls the guardian forward more than the predator.

I press my mouth to his forehead, then his cheek, then the corner of his mouth. Each kiss is slower than my body wants, but truer. He needs my hunger, yes. I feel that need in him. But he also needs proof that hunger is not the only thing I have. He needs to know I can want to devour and still choose to shelter. So, I shelter him with my body.

I let the bond wrap around him until his shaking eases, degree by degree. I let him feel my breath. My pulse. The ache in me. The truth that I am not disgusted by his tears, not burdened by them, not looking for a door out because he has become inconveniently human beneath me.

When he finally pulls back enough to look at me, his lashes are wet, and his face is flushed with embarrassment he has no reason to carry. He tries to scowl, because he is stubborn and wounded and beautiful in ways he does not understand.

“I’m blamin’ the fever for this,” he mutters.

I brush my thumb beneath his eye. You may blame whatever helps your pride limp away alive.

His mouth twists. “Asshole.”

Beloved, I correct.

His fingers slide deeper into my hair, pulling me down, guiding my mouth back toward his throat. The place waits beneath his pulse, warm and alive and chosen. His tears have not stopped completely, but they are quieter now, woven through the heat instead of drowning beneath it.

“You have to ask,” he whispers. “Don’t you?”

Pride fills me so suddenly I can hardly breathe.

My mate, half undone in my nest, still remembers the law of his own body. Still demands the threshold be named. Still gives me the gift of his choice with eyes wet, voice shaking, and spine unbroken beneath me.

Yes, I answer, and the bond bows around the word.