His hips drive forward, shoving me against the hard surface behind me. My nostrils flare with the sound that wants to come out.
It’s nothing like the den. No room to be loud, no time to be slow. The cold wall at my back and his heat at my front and the whole building a foot of concrete away. He drives into me hard and fast, and every thrust knocks a sound loose that has nowhere to go.
Somewhere above us a locked mechanical floor hums. Somewhere behind the door, fifteen minutes are running out. Marek knows exactly where we are. Anyone with a nose will know later. All of it is real, and all of it makes it sharper. I don’t recognize the woman grinding down to meet a bear in a dead stairwell—except I do. She’s the one who was hiding the whole time. Taking what’s hers.
“Grace.” His face is buried in my neck, and I feel his mouth open against the skin there. Feel his teeth. Not soft. They press in, testing, a blunt threat riding the edge of my pulse, and everything in me goes molten and still at once. My wolf lunges for it. Whatever it is, wherever it comes from, she wants his teethin me, wants it more than the rest of this. I hear myself make a sound against his hand that isn’t fear. It’syes.
He feels it. Of course he feels it. And he wrenches his mouth off my throat like it burned him, drags it up to my jaw, breathing hard and ragged, his whole body locked around the effort of not going back. He’s shaking, and it isn’t the sex.
“Not that,” he grinds out, so low I feel it more than hear it. “Not yet.”
I don’t know what I asked for. I only know he took it away, and my wolf claws after it, and my body’s still climbing without it.
“Close,” I get out against his palm. “I’m so close.”
He doesn’t stop. His hand leaves my mouth and closes on my jaw, tips my face up, and he watches me while he gives me the last of it. That’s what undoes me: his eyes holding mine while his body drives me into the wall. I break apart with my mouth pressed shut, and the cry locked behind my teeth, shaking around him. The clenching takes him with me. He drops his face into my neck and comes, deep, pulsing, and this time his mouth stays open on my skin without the teeth, just his lips and his breath. The growl he strangles in his chest vibrates through both of us.
We stay like that. Him in me, me pinned, both of us breathing hard and trying to do it silently.
The meeting’s weight is still there. I feel it—the story they made of me, the door Viktor shut. And it’s lighter than when I carried it out of that room. Not because anything changed. Because something in me stopped pacing. My wolf has gone quiet for the first time since we left the cave, settled low and warm. She chose this male a long time before I let her. We’re finally on the same page.
Decker lifts his head. His eyes are still dark, still not all the way back to human, and he looks at me the way he looked at me across that slate in the pool chamber.
“You,” he says, as if answering my thoughts. Just that.
“Me, what?” I push his hair back off his forehead. My hand is still trembling.
“You’re everything.” His voice is gravel.
I swallow, taking in the weight of that. It’s so much. I’m not sure what to do with it. “You’re just saying that because the sex is so good.” I keep my tone light. It doesn’t work.
“That’s not what this is, sweetheart.” His lips graze mine, and I breathe out a soft sigh.
“I hate that they’ve put us in separate rooms,” I say. “Your people have terrible rules.”
“They’re not my people.” He eases out of me slow, and holds me steady while my legs remember their job, and then his hands are pulling my jeans up, setting my clothes right. Careful now, where nothing was careful two minutes ago. He tucks himself away and zips up. Straightens my collar. Takes my face in both hands. For a second neither of us moves.
“This doesn’t happen again,” he says. “Like this.”
“Liar.”
His mouth almost gives me the smile. “Not here, then. Not where—”
Footsteps.
On the stairs. Below us, coming up—unhurried, someone climbing with a purpose that has nothing to do with us and everything to do with the door we’re standing behind. Decker moves me behind him with one arm before I’ve finished hearing it. The steps reach the landing below. Stop. A radio crackles, a man’s voice answers it, bored, and the steps turn around and go back down. A door somewhere below swings and clunks shut.
Neither of us has breathed.
Decker’s arm lowers. I come out from behind him, and we look at each other in the dim stairwell light. The air between us is thick with what we just did. His scent and mine, wound together.It’s going to walk out that door with us and down the corridor past Marek and past every shifter nose in this building.
“Fifteen minutes,” I whisper.
“Closer to twenty.”
We straighten what’s left to straighten. He puts his hand on the door and stops and looks back at me once, and the pull under my ribs answers him before I can, and neither of us says the thing that’s now sitting plainly between us.
That this was the first time since the den.
