"Is this what people mean when they say home."
My throat closes.
"Yeah, Mel."
"Okay." Sleepy. Small. "Okay good."
Her breath evens out. Heavy against my chest. Thigh hooked over mine. Her hand on my shoulder, marking the spot. The tooth on the pallet beside us, dark with blood, waiting to become whatever she will make it.
The pack is asleep outside.
The army is coming.
The cottage is gone.
Tomorrow there will be a hundred decisions to make and I will make all of them as the man who just claimed a human woman and locked himself to her by blood and bone and tooth, and I do not care. I am not afraid. I am not tired. I am awake in a way I have not been awake in a long time.
Mine.
Mine.
Different word now. Different weight. The wolf knows. The man knows. She knows.
I find her hair. Stroke it once. Rest my hand at the back of her neck, over the spot where her pulse is. Feel it beating slow against my palm.
I do not sleep for a long time.
When I do, it is with her bite on my shoulder, my bite on hers, my body still locked inside hers, and my tooth on the pallet beside us, slow-drying in the lamp light.
Mine.
Sleep takes me.
Chapter 22
Hands moving. Mortar rocking. The bite on my shoulder pulls when I lean too far forward.
The tooth is on the corner of the worktable. Wrapped in a strip of leather. Two scraps of cord beside it, one knotted wrong and abandoned, one half-tied. I'd worked at it for an hour.
Started the paste instead.
The paste, my hands can do.
"Mel."
I don't look up. Crush. Scrape. Crush.
"You've been at it since dawn."
"Paste doesn't make itself."
"Your cottage burned down yesterday."
"I'm aware. I was there. I saw the ash. Very thorough burning. Whoever did it should be proud."
"Mel."
"I'm making paste, Kestria. The paste is more important than my feelings about a building."
