“Do it again,” she whispers.
I frown. “What?”
“The mark. Make it again.” She tips her head, stretching the skin beneath my lips.
“Briar…”
“Do it, Garret.”
I let my teeth extend, press them against the mark, then bite down. Almost too gently.
She shudders against me. “More.”
The wolf steps in, and my teeth sink deep. Hard. Brutal. I fight the urge to tear into her flesh. The need to possess is overwhelming.
“Yes!” she cries out, bucking against me. “God! Yes!”
I watch as she rides out another orgasm that almost takes me along, even though I just emptied myself in her.
Her arms are wrapped tightly around my neck as she finally comes down, breathing hard.
The bond settles. Both directions. Full. Complete. I can feel her heartbeat as clearly as my own. I can feel the warmth in her belly — the baby, our baby — as if my hand were still on her skin. I can feel the edges of her thoughts, not the words but the shapes, and what she’s thinking right now is simple and enormous.
Mate.
“Mate,” she says. Out loud. Against my hair. “You’re my mate, Garrett Forrester.”
The word enters me through the bite mark she just made. Through the blood. Through the bond that’s now a two-way road with no roadblocks and no detours. It settles into me and takes root. And I know — the way I know the land and the sky and the smell of cedar in June — that I will carry this word for the rest of my life.
“Mate,” I say back, against the mark I made. My lips on the place where everything started.
We sit in the wrecked cot. Locked together. Her legs around my waist, my arms around her back, her face in my neck, andmine in hers. Both of us bleeding from the bite we gave each other. Both of us breathing hard.
The knot holds us. The bond holds us.
The cabin is dark. The compound is quiet. Somewhere outside, a bird is singing — three notes, a pause, three notes. The bird doesn’t know what happened in this room. The bird doesn’t care. The bird is doing what birds do. Claiming its ground. Singing its name into the dark.
I hold her. She lets me hold her.
When the knot finally releases and our bodies separate, she doesn’t leave. She stays in my lap with her forehead against mine and her blood on my mouth and mine on hers. The link between us feels… unbreakable.
“The cot held,” she says.
“Barely.”
“We need a real bed.”
“Yeah.”
“A big one.”
“As big as you want.”
She pulls back enough to look at me. Her face in the dark. The gray eyes. Her mouth stained red.
“Take me home, Garrett.”
Four words. The simplest she’s ever said to me. No conditions, no lists, no qualifications. Just the request, and the trust inside it, and the future it opens.