Page 69 of Warded By His Wolf

“That’s not a complaint?”

“It’s the opposite of a complaint.”

I eased her down and followed, weight braced on my forearms, her body warm and real beneath me. The mark glowed faintly in the low light, and I lowered my mouth to it first. I had learned its geography. It was mine to worship. The sound she made when I traced it was a sound I intended to spend the rest of my life earning.

“Maddox.”

My name in her voice. Not soft. Not uncertain.

I worked my way down her body with the thoroughness of a man who had memorized every place that made her breath catch. The curve of her ribs. The soft skin of her hip. The inside of her thigh, where she trembled.

“I have you,” I said against her skin.

“I know.”

When I finally put my mouth on her, she arched into me with a sound that was gratitude and demand in equal measure. Her hands found my hair, holding me where she needed me, and I gave her everything, every sound, every shudder, every broken syllable of my name.

She came apart under my tongue and I didn’t let her come down. I worked her through it until she was shaking, until her hands were pulling at me with an urgency that matched the one building in my own chest.

“Now,” she said. “Maddox, now.“

I rose over her and she pulled me down, her legs wrapping around me as I slid home. The bond blazed, not desperate. Settled. Like something that had always been true and was only now being said aloud, again, in the language that came before words.

I moved in her slowly at first, watching her face, memorizing every shift of expression. Her eyes were open, watching me back. Present. Choosing.

“Mine,” she said.

The word cost me my composure entirely. The red-gold rose in my vision, the wolf pressing forward with a possessiveness that wasn’t aggression but absolute certainty. She held perfectly steady. She knew exactly what she was looking at, and she was not afraid of any of it.

I drove into her harder, feeling her tighten around me, hearing the sounds she made when I found the places that took her words. Her nails raked down my back and I welcomed the sting: welcomed the mark she was leaving on me the way I had left one on her. Level. Reciprocal. Ours.

“Look at me,” I said.

She did. Her eyes were dark with want and bright with trust. When she came again, my name breaking on her lips, I followed her over the edge with a groan that came from somewhere deeper than sound.

I collapsed beside her and pulled her against my chest, both of us breathing ragged in the quiet room.

“I would choose you again,” I said when I could form words. “Every time. Without the bond. Without the danger. Just you.”

She pressed her mouth to my shoulder, over the place where her nails had marked me. “I know. That’s why I’m staying.”

In the grey pre-dawn quiet, my phone vibrated once on the nightstand: the pattern Gideon used for information that wasn’t urgent but was time-sensitive.

I read it without waking her, my arm still around her waist. Her breathing stayed even. Trusting. The bond carried her sleep as a warm, entirely peaceful frequency.

The message was six lines, and it was two messages wearing one timestamp.

The first was the trace. Signal architecture resolution complete. The routing ends above the relay in structure I cannot attribute, no faction signature, no Council signature, no known-network signature. It is the first time in fourteen years I have written that sentence. The recipient of Miriam’s final message remains unidentified, and I am flagging the file accordingly: open, active, unresolved.

Gideon Cross, unable to resolve an architecture. I lay still with that for a long moment. Somewhere above the faction, above the maps, above everything we had burned, there was a patient buyer whose shape even Gideon couldn’t draw. The file on my mate’s bloodline was sitting on a desk at that altitude.

The second message was worse.

The archive cross-reference Tara ran to locate the grandmother’s signature also returned a third result. Not a deceased relative. Not a historical line. An active signature, currently living, currently un-located, currently unaware. Someone else in Ivy’s bloodline is seeing what she sees. And the network’s collection pattern suggests they are already three moves ahead of where anyone knew to look.

I set the phone face-down and lay still in the dark.

The safe house was quiet around us. My nose knew the tree line was there even with it invisible beyond the window, the way I could feel everything that mattered, present, waiting, full of things that weren’t finished.