I watched the walls go up, that hard façade of his get built up around him, so I reached out and grabbed his spare hand. Whatever he’d been retreating behind fell away at that, his forehead smoothing, his eyes beginning to glow.
“Yeah, I do,” he said finally, some of that rebelliousness bleeding back in, but this time it was for me, not against me. “I just can’t get enough of her. Her voice, her scent, the feel of her against me. Whatever I have, I fucking want more.” He blanched at that. “Sorry.”
“No, that passion makes you a good candidate for what we will try,” Greta said. “You need to connect emotionally and spiritually for you to share power. Think of how you would do that normally.”
His grin was immediate and full of devilry, a warning growl forming on my lips as he looked me over, slowly, making it clear what he was thinking. But he yanked on my hand, spinning me over and into his arms, both of them pulling away from Greta, and settled me against his chest. My eyes closed, my body softening, my lungs instinctively sucking in deep breaths filled with his scent.
“Very good,” Greta said, and by the sounds of footsteps, she was walking around us. “Your bond is palpable, so strong. You have much to work with. You love Paige?”
He went still at that, so still, his tension leaching into my body until he said the words. “With every breath in my body.”
“And what would you give to your love if she needed it?” she asked.
“Everything, anything.”
“Then you must reach down into yourself, into the part where the man bleeds away to wolf. It’s like reaching for fur, when you’re just about to shift, except you don’t. That is the well of your power, the one you pull from to change forms. Instead of taking your beast’s form, just feel it. Feel that great reservoir of power that you were born with as a shifter. Feel it thrumming inside you, like the thud of your paws on the earth, the wind in your fur. Feel it and give it to her.”
Initially, I thought this sounded like a lot of mystical mumbo jumbo. I felt a prickle of something when she described our pool of power, like there was…something inside me that I’d never really noticed before. Unlike the movies, our shifts were pretty painless things. We were in skin, then we were in fur. Both were completely natural parts of ourselves, and reaching for one was as easy as reaching for my mates. Her words, they forced us to slow down, I could feel it in our combined breaths. His chest rose and fell, and mine went with it, the gaps between breaths growing longer. Our lungs, our heartbeats, I felt the moment they completely synchronised, and then everything stopped.
Greta was saying something, but her voice sounded muffled and so far away. Boom…boom…boom… His heartbeat resonated through my whole body, every cell vibrating with its beat. Then he moved, just to cup the back of my head, to tip my head back. I knew that and was arching up into his hand before he even moved, a pleased growl rumbling through him.
Damn… I heard his wry tone in my skull. This… There was something reverent in his tone, which matched perfectly what was rising between us.
With even the closest relationship, there were boundaries, points of separation, and that was healthy, but this? It was intensely seductive. I felt like I stood up on a clifftop, looking down at the vast ocean of Lorcan. I couldn’t get my mind to encompass it all, everything that rushed up, everything that was him, so I backed off, only to run forward and leap off that edge, executing a perfect swan dive down, down into him.
His hands tightened, a sharp intake of breath telling me he felt it, the moment I dove into him. His lips found mine, inarticulate sounds escaping our throats as we ate at each other’s mouths.
I knew Lorcan was brittle. He was constantly trying to reapply this hard coating to protect himself from the world around him, but under that? I’d caught glimpses of it, hadn’t I? I’d been warned, yet here I was, utterly gutted by what I felt. To continue with the sea metaphor, I floated, was buoyed by him, by his love, and that was dizzying and terrifying in turns.
Human existence was largely driven by fear and desire, sex and death. We wanted, wanted, wanted until we didn’t, and then we ran like hell from that. The constant hustle inside us of desire and need pushed us onwards, while the threat of fear and death nipped at our heels. So what was it like to lose all of that? To have every crack and crevice filled, to have every injury washed away? I couldn’t feel fear or anguish or pain when I was with him. He wouldn’t allow it. Zack had been my rock, propping me up until I stood on my own two feet, but Lorcan
He celebrated me.
I was his girl, that throbbed hard and bright inside him, but with that possessive thought came an avalanche of memories. When I was tired, my eyes getting heavily lidded as I snuggled into someone’s sides, the small exhales I made when falling asleep in our bed. The grace with which I walked, something I did not feel at all. The twist of my hand as I waved them around when I was getting agitated about something, but they were just a confetti of memories that passed quickly.
A version of myself I didn’t recognise stepped out of that, my hands covered in wraps, my hair pulled back into a tight braid, muscle definition I was pretty sure I didn’t actually possess showing as his model of me shifted, tapping her fists together.
I was strong, nigh on invincible, which was daunting, but he found that reassuring, I felt. I could weather all of this—being
