Page 35 of Roar of the Wild

The distance between us was four feet of firelit dark, and I crossed it.

I didn't decide to; there was no deciding left in me. I crossed the space between us and dropped to my knees in front of him and took his ruined face in both my hands, and I felt him go rigid with shock under my touch, felt the breath stop in his chest.

"You should have told me," I said, my thumbs against his cheekbones, my forehead coming down to rest against his. "You stubborn, honourable idiot of a man. You should have told me six months ago and let me decide what I could carry. But I understand why you didn't, and I can't be angry at a man for loving me too carefully, not anymore, not when I know what it cost you."

"Ellie." My name came out of him wrecked, his hands coming up to close around my wrists, not pulling me away, just holding on like I might be a thing he was dreaming. "You don't have to—"

"Stop telling me what I don't have to do." I pulled back just far enough to look at him, at those amber eyes gone desperate in the firelight. "You've spent six months deciding what I can and can't handle. Stop doing that to me. Let me decide something for once." I felt the truth of it rise up in me, the thing I'd been running from on the steppe, the thing Daska had already given me leave to reach for and I'd been too frightened to take. "I want this, and I want you. God help me, I've wanted you for longer than I've let myself know, and I've been calling it other things because wanting more than one man felt like proof I was the greedy, broken thing they always said I was. Well, I'm done with that. Daska gave me his blessing. Tau's known from the start. And you've just told me you'd bleed for half a year to keep me free, so the only person left standing in my way is me, and I'm done letting her win."

The last of my careful control went, and I kissed him.

There was nothing patient in it, nothing like Daska's slow reverence, that measured checking, that gentle unhurried care. Six months of Rivik's silence and one afternoon of his heartbeatunder my hand and two years of my own frozen wanting all broke loose at once. He made a sound against my mouth like a man dying and coming back to life in the same breath. Then his hands were in my hair, mine were fisting in the front of his hide, and the kiss turned starving.

"Safe?" he managed, dragging his mouth from mine, because even now, even wild with it, he'd ask, and the word was so unmistakably borrowed from Daska, from the bear who'd taught all of us what asking looked like, that I laughed against his lips even as I pulled him closer.

"Safe, God, yes," I said against his lips. "Don't you dare stop now."

He made good on that. He pulled me into his lap, deliberate of his wounded ribs and not cautious of anything else. The urgency in him was a different country entirely from the tenderness I'd known, Rivik kissed like he hunted, focused and relentless and wholly present, his hands mapping me like a man who'd been starving for the shape of me for half a year and meant to learn all of it at once. He got the ties of my outer hide loose and pushed it from my shoulders and put his mouth to my throat, my collarbone, the swell of my breast. I arched into him with my hands buried in his hair and made sounds I didn't recognise as my own.

"Tell me," he said against my skin, his voice shaking. "Tell me you feel even a fraction of what I've, tell me I'm not alone in this, Ellie, tell me that."

"You're not alone." I pulled his face back up to mine so he'd see it, so he'd know I meant it past any doubt. "You haven't been alone since the day you decided to suffer for me. I just didn't know it yet."

Whatever he'd been holding himself together with gave way. He laid me back on the furs by the fire, stripped the rest of the hide from me with hands that shook, and looked down atme bared in the firelight like a man who couldn't believe the goddess had let him have this after all. He closed his mouth over my nipple and sucked hard. When I cried out and bucked under him he growled low against my skin and did it again, his hand already sliding down between my thighs.

"You're wet for me," he said, wonder and hunger tangled rough in his voice, two thick fingers pushing into me while his thumb found my clit. "Six months I've dreamed this and I didn't dare, I didn't let myself—"

"Then stop not letting yourself." I rocked down onto his hand, greedy, past shame, past every measured wall. "I'm done waiting too. I want you inside me, Rivik. Now."

He worked me with his fingers until I was gasping, until I was clenching around them and near the edge. Then he pulled his hand free and freed himself from his own hide and notched the head of his cock against me. He held there one shaking heartbeat, his forehead dropping to mine.

"Look at me," he said, wrecked, even now. His amber eyes searched mine. "Still what you want?"

"Everything I want. Fuck me, Rivik. Don't hold back, not tonight, not with me."

He drove into me on one long stroke, and the sound that tore out of him was half a howl, six months of held-back hunger breaking loose all at once. He filled me thick and deep, and there was nothing patient in any of it, he fucked me hard against the furs, his hips snapping into mine, one hand fisted in my hair and the other gripping my thigh to hook my leg higher around him, opening me to take all of him. I met every stroke, my nails raking down his back, my heels digging into him to pull him deeper, and the fire cracked beside us and the whole starved wildfire of him poured into me at once.

"Mine," he said against my throat, ragged, helpless, the word torn out of somewhere he'd kept locked for half a year. "Say it. Tell me you're… goddess, Ellie, tell me—"

"Yours." I gasped it into his mouth, and meant it, and felt him shudder at the word like it had gone straight through him. "I'm yours, and you're mine, you stubborn beautiful idiot, harder..."

He gave me harder. He got a hand between us and found my clit and worked it in time with his driving hips. I came apart under him with his name breaking out of me and my whole body clenching tight around his cock. He followed me over a few strokes later, buried deep, spilling hot inside me with his face pressed into my hair and my name broken against my skin, and I held the great trembling wolf of him through it while the wildfire burned down to embers between us.

If Daska had taught me that love could be safe, Rivik taught me that night that it could be a wildfire, that being wanted this much, this fiercely, by a man who'd proved he'd sooner die than cage me, was its own kind of safety. He murmured into my skin, half-broken wolf-words shading into the pidgin we'd built together, and under all of it my name, over and over, like a prayer he'd given up hope of being answered. And I gave myself over to it completely, to him, to the wildfire, to the astonishing fact of being loved by a man who'd loved me in silence for half a year and never once asked for anything back.

Afterward we lay tangled in the furs with the fire burned low, his arm heavy across me, his heartbeat slowing under my ear where it had raced for me on the steppe that afternoon. And that was when I felt it.

It started as warmth. A small point of heat in the centre of my chest, in the scarred hollow place where Nathan's bond had been torn away, the place that had been nothing but cold ache for two years. It bloomed there, faint as a struck spark, like an ember catching in tinder that had been too long wet to burn.I went utterly still, hardly daring to breathe, because I was a carrier, because bonds reaching for me had always gone silent, and because no bond of my own had stirred in my chest since the night the Savoy tore mine away, I'd believed none ever would again.

But I felt this.

Faint, barely half-formed, but unmistakably real, a thread of warmth running from my chest to the sleeping man beside me, tentative as a first held breath, and there all the same. It was a bond, beginning in me, in me, the carrier, the woman every bond had reached for in silence, who'd been so sure she'd never carry one of her own again.

I lay very still in the dark with Rivik's heartbeat under my ear and this impossible new warmth blooming in my chest, and I was flooded with something so enormous I didn't have a name for it, terror shot through with wonder, and a joy so vast it hurt. Because if I could feel this, faint as it was, then everything I'd believed about myself since the Savoy was wrong. And because it wasn't only Rivik, was it; there was Daska, who I'd already given my heart to. There was Tau, waiting patient at his fire. There was whatever this was, this heart that was apparently big enough to hold all of them and not break.

Too much,the old voice whispered, the one that sounded like Nathan.It’s far too much. No woman gets to have this. It'll be taken from you.

But the ember in my chest glowed on, faint yet stubborn, and for the first time in two years I told that voice to be quiet. I lay in the arms of a man who'd bled six months in silence for me, and let myself, astonished past all my fear, begin to believe I might get to keep this after all.