“You’ve been stopping since the den,” I get out. “Stop stopping.”
“Grace.” Gravel and want together. “Once it’s done, it’s done—”
“I know what it is.” I press his face closer. “Yours. Do it.”
He drives deep and bites down.
The sting is sharp and clean, and it doesn’t feel like pain, but I scream anyway. It feels like being claimed, like something closing tight around us both. Heat spreads out from his teeth, down my shoulder, through my chest, all the way to where we’re joined, and the wave breaks so hard the room goes white.
My back arches up into him. I hear myself making a sound, long and climbing, more wolf than me. She’s up and pushing into his teeth, answering him.
He comes with his teeth still set in my flesh and my name breaking apart in his chest, buried deep and staying there. His arms shake. I hold his head to my throat with both hands and go down through it with him.
Then it’s quiet.
Quiet like I’ve never been. My wolf lies down inside me, all the way down, loose and finished, and everywhere our skin touches I feel the same thing happening in him. The huge restless thing that’s run under his surface since the day I met him going still at last. His tongue moves over the bite, slow, and the sting eases to a throb, and the throb to a warmth that feels like it’s mine to keep.
“Okay, sweetheart?” he asks against my neck. He’s still shaking.
“Better than.” My hand is loose in his hair now. “You?”
It takes him a moment. “Quiet,” he says. “It’s quiet.”
He pulls the blanket over us, my body tucked against his side, my head settled on his chest where he wants it. His heartbeat is slow and heavy under my ear. The bite throbs in time with it, already part of me, and I don’t care that his stickiness still seeps from me. It’s how the bear likes it.
“Sleep,” I tell him. “You look like a warning poster for caffeine addiction.”
“In a minute.” His hand moves through my hair. “I’m not done looking at you.”
He’s asleep in four.
I feel it happen, his breath going deep, his arm going from holding me to just resting, all that watchfulness finally standing down, because the thing it was watching is right here under his arm. I lie and listen to his heart slow, warm all the way through, and I’m almost gone myself when his hand moves.
It slides down from my ribs, slow and heavy with sleep, and comes to rest low on my belly. Palm flat. Fingers spread.
And it stays.
I look at it in the gray light. It’s nothing. A sleeping hand finds somewhere to lie, that’s all it is. But when I shift to turn further into him, the hand doesn’t slide off the way a sleeping hand should. It comes back. Same place. Same spread. Settled and certain, the way he plants himself in front of a door he means to hold.
The wolf lifts her head, a contentment settling that doesn’t seem to have its source in the bite. Something else. Something…
I put the thought away.
His hand is warm through the blanket, heavy, sure of its spot.
I close my eyes.
Chapter 46
Decker
There are nine people between Grace and the door, and I haven’t monitored them once.
That’s the new thing. The debrief ended an hour ago and nobody left—somebody carried food up from the kitchen, somebody else found the good coffee, and now the briefing room sounds like a gathering instead of a war. Grace sits on the table edge with her boots on a chair, color back in her face, the mark on her neck riding above her collar where she made no effort to hide it. I’m across the room with my back to the door.
My back to the door.
The bear lies easy under my skin and lets me keep it there.
