Page 76 of Monster Queen Rising

"Seven," Daron says, delighted, like his brother just won him money.

Then it slows, because Harek moves over me and the whole room lets its breath out with him.

"Breathe," he says. "I've got time."

"You don't have to —"

"I want to take a while." Plain, the way he says everything. "Let me."

So I let him.

He pushes in deep and even and it isn't a peak to climb so much as a place to lie down. The green comes up luminous under the skin at his wrists and lights mine where he's holding me.

And the three-note purr starts in his chest — the same three he ran through a wall at me in the dark before I'd ever seen his face — and I feel them everywhere we touch. In my throat. Under my ribs. Where he's moving in me.

He builds it long. More tide than crash. Talking low against my ear the whole time —there, like that, I have you, stay with me— until it rolls up through both of us at once and I come on a long unraveling breath, and he goes with it, and the mark at the side of my throat goes warm instead of bright.

Warm. Like his hand laid over a wound.

"That one didn't have a number," I tell him.

"No," Harek agrees, pleased. "That one was just yours."

Fen is last.

He's been at the foot the whole time with his hand on my ankle, watching the field climb, holding himself out of it. I've felt him there. Patient. Banked.

Now he comes up over me — the dark lines rising at his throat, the shimmer waking at his wrists, the canines coming partway,all of it up and all of it steered, the way only I ever get to see it come.

He doesn't make a joke.

He looks at me and says, "Jen."

"Yes."

He pushes in all the way and goes still.

The patch at my sternum sears against him.

Then he moves, and his eyes never leave mine, and the claws come out at the tips and stay off my skin even now, even with all of him risen, the way they always have.

I get my hand against the side of his face and he turns into it without slowing.

And I feel the whole field lean toward us. All of them. The pack folding its attention around the last bond like it knows this is the one that closes the circle.

Then he gets his arm under me and turns me over.

I know what he's doing before he does it.

I go up onto my forearms with my hair falling off my neck, and every mark on my body is showing — Thaw's at my shoulder, Crull's at my wrist, Harek's at the side of my throat, Daron's and Dean's at the base of it — and Fen comes down over my back and puts his mouth on the one bare place left on me.

The back of my neck.

Nobody's ever marked it.

"Fen —"

He bites.