Page 28 of Untamed

He opens one eye, then the other when I tell him we need to talk about the bond. I ask for human form because this is a conversation I want his words for. Orion grumbles low in his chest but shifts his weight off my legs. I don’t mistake annoyance for refusal.

The shift moves through him slowly, fur receding as his body narrows back into a human frame that still barely fits the den. By the time it finishes, his hands are braced in the blankets and every old scar is visible again. He kneels in the middle of the blankets when it’s over, breathing harder than he was a minute ago. Human Orion never looks smaller to me. More exposed, maybe, but not smaller.

He drags my black hoodie over his head and pushes his curls out of his face. “Coffee?”

“Please.” Orion pushes his curls out of his eyes again and gets to his feet. He keeps my hoodie on when he heads toward the kitchen.

There was a time when getting a word from Orion meant waiting through pain, sedation, or distrust. Now he’s standing in my hoodie asking for coffee as though this kitchen was always going to contain both of us. Graves will look at him standing here with coffee in his hand and write stabilized on a fucking form.

By the time I follow him downstairs, he has also put on the dark jeans I bought weeks ago. He hooks two fingers beneath the waistband when he catches me looking. “Still too tight.”

I nod toward the waistband he keeps tugging at. “You can change.” I leave the choice there instead of reaching for the jeans or telling him what would be easier.

“I know.” He leaves them on and reaches for the coffee. “How long before Graves comes back?”

The question strips the softness from the morning. I set my mug down. “Not long. The temporary bond is almost gone, and he’ll use that to push for a permanent one.”

Orion rubs his thumb across the fading bite. I keep going before the Council’s deadline can become the reason for anything between us. “If you don’t want a permanent bond with me, we find another way. I can stall, lie, fight them over it, whatever buys us room. I don’t know how far that gets us, but I’m not putting my teeth in your neck because somebody wrote it into a protocol.”

His hand closes around the marked finger, then drops. For a while the coffee maker is the only sound in the kitchen. When he finally speaks, one hand rises to the ruined mark on his left shoulder.

“The last Alpha took this side. He never asked. He held me down and did it.”

My hands curl against the counter, and I keep them there. My nails bite into my palms while Orion stands close enough that his scent fills every breath. I don’t reach for him yet.

“That bond never felt like mine.” Orion steps closer on his own and turns his head, exposing the clean right side of his neck. “I don’t want that side touched again. If we do this, I want you here.”

Every Alpha instinct I have wakes at once, my mouth already aching with the need to mark the clean side of his neck and pull him close enough that nobody else ever gets teeth near him again. I grip the counter instead.

“I need to hear exactly what you’re choosing.”

His brows pull together. “I want a permanent bond with you. I want the bite on the right side, and I want it to be mine because I chose it instead of something Graves arranged.” He takes my wrist and pulls one hand away from the counter until my palm rests at the back of his neck. “Is that clear enough?”

“Yes. That’s what I want.” I keep my palm at the back of his neck without closing my fingers around it. The pulse under my hand stays fast and steady while I wait.

I still don’t bite. “You know the mark shouldn’t set from the bite alone. A permanent bond needs sex to take.”

“I know how bonding works.” His annoyance sharpens through the fading connection. “I’m asking you to bite me anyway.”

There is no hesitation in him when he bares the clean side of his neck farther. “Do it.”

I bend toward his neck and pause with my mouth against his skin. Orion’s hand tightens around my wrist, but he doesn’t pull me away, and his pulse beats against my lips while I breathe him in. His scent is so strong there that my Alpha instincts surge against my restraint. I open my mouth over the place he chose and bite.

Orion jerks against me with a broken sound, fingers knotting in my shirt as blood fills my mouth. I expect the same temporary pull as containment. The permanent mark shouldn’t catch until sex and a knot complete it. Instead the bond tears open the instant I taste him.

The connection hits so violently my knees give, heat ripping down my spine while Orion’s scent floods every breath I take. My hand clamps around the back of Orion’s neck, but the force isn’t coming from my Alpha instincts. It is coming from him.

Something enormous presses through the bond with Orion, and the sensation is so foreign I stop breathing. For one impossible second I know what packed earth feels like beneath four paws. I feel the pull of muscle beneath heavy fur, the instinct to put my body between Orion and anything that comes near him, the absolute certainty that protecting him is as necessary as breathing. None of it replaces Orion. He’s still there beneath my hands, shocked and gripping my shirt, but now I can feel the animal part of him with the same impossible clarity.

Then Orion’s voice lands inside my head so clearly that I nearly let go. Arlo? I answer without thinking. I’m here.

His hands fist in my shirt as shock floods the bond. You can hear me? I tighten my hold on him. Yes.

He pulls back far enough to stare at me. The shock on his face mirrors what is pounding through my own body. “That’s fucking weird.”

I laugh, but it dies when Orion shifts away and the bond pulls tight between us. He feels it too; his hand catches my shirt again almost immediately. The animal part of him moves warm and restless through the connection while he stares at me like neither of us knows what to do with this yet.

I keep one hand at his neck. “Do you want to finish the bond?”