“What are you choosing?”
I step forward, close the distance, and put my hands on his chest. The same chest I rested my head against in his bed on Sycamore Road, the same chest Mia buried her face in this morning. His heartbeat is fast under my palms. His wolf is right there, pressing against his skin, warm and urgent and making a sound in his chest that I feel through my fingers.
“I’m choosing you,” I say. “Not because the bond says so. Because you went into a burning building for children you didn’t know. Because you chose the truth over your family. Because when I asked you not to follow me, you followed anyway, and when I told you to stay away, you brought me the evidence to bring down the people who hurt my wolves.” I hold his eyes. “I’m choosing the man who carried Mia out. Not the man who walked families to trucks. That man has to live with what he did. But this man—the one standing in front of me—this is who I’m choosing.”
He doesn’t speak. His hands come up and cover mine, where they rest on his chest. His fingers are rough, warm, shaking slightly. Or maybe mine are. I can’t tell.
He bends his head. Presses his forehead against mine. We stand like that—breathing, touching, bound with an intensity that makes the air in the tack room feel thick and warm.
“Willow.”
“Don’t say you don’t deserve it. I know you don’t. I’m doing it anyway.”
He makes a sound that’s between a laugh and something broken. Then his hands are in my hair, and his mouth is on mine. Kissing me like a man who’s been given something he stopped believing he’d ever have. And I respond like a woman who’s decided that the wanting she’s been fighting is the most honest thing about her.
I pull his shirt over his head. His shoulder is wrapped, and he winces when I lift his arm. I’m careful with it, careful in a way I haven’t been with him before. Not because he’s breakable. Because he’s mine, and the things that are mine I protect.
The thought surprises me. My wolf doesn’t find it surprising at all.
His fingers seek out the buttons of my shirt. He flicks them open, then pushes it off my shoulders. We stand for a while, just staring at each other. I’ve seen him bare before, the wide expanse of taut muscle and skin… but I’ve never trulyseenhim. Now, I take it all in with a sense of… ownership.
He’s mine. Flaws and all. I’ve picked him… my wolf did. And it feels right.
Dipping his head, his mouth goes to my throat, the hollow at the base where my pulse is hammering. His teeth graze the skin, and something electric runs through me… not just arousal, something deeper. The bond, responding. My magic stirs in my chest, warm and liquid, rising toward the place where his mouth meets my skin.
“Here,” I whisper. I touch the junction of my neck and shoulder, the place where a mate bond is sealed. The marking point. “When you’re inside me. Here.”
He lifts his head. Looks at me. His eyes are dark, intent, the wolf fully present behind the human expression. He understands what I’m offering. The finality of it. The permanence.
“Are you certain about this?” he says.
“I told you what I’m choosing. Don’t make me say it twice.”
We strip each other in the dusty tack room, his jeans, my boots, the careful negotiation of his injured shoulder. The saddle blankets stacked on the lower rack are rough wool, and he pulls two down and spreads them on the floor without ceremony. It’s not romantic. It’s a tack room. But when he lowers me onto theblankets and settles between my legs, the weight of him presses against me, and the bond opens wide between us like a door that’s been locked finally swinging free. It’s the most intimate I’ve ever felt with anyone.
He enters me slowly. Watching my face. Reading me with his whole attention, missing nothing. The stretch of him is familiar now, and my body opens for him with an ease that feels like the most natural thing in the world. I have his weight on me and his mouth on my throat and the bond singing between us, and my anger feels like it’s melting away.
“More. I want to feel all of you,” I tell him. Not a whisper. A demand. And he gives me what I ask for, the careful restraint dissolving into something raw and animal, his hips driving deep, the sound of our bodies meeting filling the small room.
I feel the bond building. Not in my chest… everywhere. In my skin, in my blood, in the magic that’s been volatile for days and is now flowing with a direction and purpose it’s never had. The power rises as he moves inside me, rising with the pleasure, rising with the trust, rising toward the moment when the bond seals and everything I am meets everything he is.
“Now,” I say as the pleasure rises. I turn my head. Expose the junction of neck and shoulder. “Now, Conner!”
He comes. And as the orgasm tears through both of us, his teeth find the marking point, and he bites down… not gently, not brutally, but with the precise pressure of a wolf claiming his mate. The pain is sharp and sweet, and it lasts exactly as long as the pleasure, the two sensations fusing into something that defies either word.
I bite him back, and my magic detonates.
Not an explosion. A completion. Everything I am—the thread-sense, the wards, the combat magic Brenna taught me, the power that’s been flaring and retreating for weeks—rises to its full strength and locks into place. The room fills with light. Notvisible to human eyes, maybe, but to wolf senses, to the bond, it’s luminous. I can feel every wolf on the property. Every heartbeat. The world expands in all directions, vivid and precise and more alive than anything I’ve felt before.
He holds me through it. Doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t pull away. His arms tighten around me, and his face is against my neck where the mark is fresh. His breathing is ragged, and his wolf is making a sound I’ve never heard from him… deep, sustained, the vibration of an animal that’s found what it was made for.
The light fades. The power settles. Not diminished… integrated. Part of me now, the way the magic has always been part of me.
We lie on the saddle blankets in the tack room. His arm is across my waist, the good arm, the other one held against his chest. The mark on my neck throbs with my pulse. His breathing has evened out, but he hasn’t let go. I don’t think he’s going to.
“That was—” he starts.
“If you say ‘magical,’ I’ll kill you.”