My mouth moves. Another of those smiles I’m learning to enjoy. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Her hand comes up to my face. Her thumb traces the line of my jaw. “And it’s why I know the bite will be worth waiting for.”
Her hips shift. A deliberate rock that sends heat through my entire body and makes my arms shake.
“But right now,” she says, “you’re not done.”
I’m not.
I move again. Slower now. Deeper. Without the frenzy, without the race toward the edge that almost broke me. Her hands are free, and she uses them…on my back, in my hair, on my jaw, holding my face close to hers so every breath is shared.
The power settles between us, low and warm, steady enough that my body stops bracing against it and starts listening.
“God,” she moans. “I can feel you. That buzzing…it’s setting all my nerves on fire.”
“Then burn,” I whisper against her lips. “Burn for me, Sable.”
“Yes! Fuck, yes! Rafael!” She comes with my name on her mouth and her body locked against mine, and the sound of it—my name, in her voice, with the power moving through both of us—breaks something open that I didn’t know was still closed.
I follow her over the edge. My face pressed into the red marks on her throat, shuddering with the force of it. The force crests, then settles into a note that holds inside our shaking bodies. The sound that leaves my chest isn’t the wolf’s snarl or the weapon’s roar. It’s the note I’ve been looking for. The one that comes from the time before it all went wrong.
We lie tangled on the motel bed. Cheap sheets. Damp skin. The bedside lamp still flickering faintly.
Her head is on my chest. My hand is in her hair. The red marks on her throat are vivid against her skin, and I trace them with my thumb.
“I’ll wait,” she says against my collarbone. “As long as it takes. Whatever you need.”
My thumb rests on the unbroken skin where the bite would go.
“You already are,” I say. “What I need.”
Her breathing slows. The power settles to a vibration so quiet it’s almost silence. The motel room is dark around us except for the lamp, and the lamp is steady now, and the only sound is her heart against my ribs.
I’m not cured. The conditioned responses are still in my body. Faith is alive somewhere with her face stitched together and her ice-blue eyes unchanged, and Creed is reporting to whatever Syndicate council decides what happens next, and twenty-four captives are waiting in rooms I know the smell of.
The world is not safe. I am not fixed.
But the woman against my chest chose me when choosing me cost her everything. She gave me a name. She gave me her body. She told me to take what I need, and then she let me choose not to take the one thing the wolf wanted most.
And she’s still here.
Her breath is against my skin. Her hand over my heart.
I close my eyes.
The morning will bring the road, and the running, and whatever the Syndicate sends next. But the morning is hours away, and she’s here now, and my wolf is completely quiet for the first time in as long as I can remember.
Because of her.
And the bite can wait until the man who gives it is the man she deserves.
Chapter 29
Sable
He’s sleeping. Real sleep, deep and loose, his body sprawled on his stomach across the motel bed, one arm thrown over my hip, his face buried in the pillow. His breathing is slow and even and unguarded in a way I’ve never heard from him.
He feels safe enough to sleep.
