Page 60 of Wretched Thorns

It went through him like the first warm day after a hard winter, the kind of thing a body has no defenses against because it has spent so long bracing for the opposite. She was here. Not a memory of her, not the thinned far signal he had been pressing at for days until his chest ached with it, but her, the weight and warmth and particular frequency of her, close enough that the onyx thread had gone from a wire to a river. He had to lock his jaw against the sound that wanted to rip out of him. A wolf who thinks his mate might die does not get to make that sound in front of her. He turned it into a breath and let the breath be enough.

“It’s a world between worlds,” Callum replied. “What happens here can be as real as any other plane of existence.”

“How are we here?”

“Anyone can enter the realm of dreams,” Eli answered. “And pretty much everyone does. But we’re in the grove, and that gives us a little more power here.” He reached out and touched her cheek. “This is more substantial than what I’ve experienced before. I don’t know if it’s the bond or just you.”

Serena placed her hand over Eli’s. “Does it matter? I just need to feel something that isn’t him.”

Callum heard everything under the words. He always did; it was just who he was. She was holding herself together with both hands, and her hands were tired. The exhaustion came down the dark glossy thread in a long gray wash, and under the exhaustion was the part she was holding back, that for days the only hands on her body had been a thief’s, that she had been touched the way a meal is touched, and that she had come here, across whatever distance the grove folded down to nothing, to be touched as a person instead.

He could give her that. He understood, in the slow, certain way he understood most things, that this was not about wanting, or not only. It was about giving her back something Marcus had spent three years taking: the plain animal knowledge that her choice, her consent, still meant something, that a hand on her could be a question instead of a tax. So he did not reach for her like a man starving, though the wolf in him was. He reached for her the way you reach for something you mean to keep safe, and he let her watch him make that decision.

***

Then Callum had her mouth.

Serena turned toward him immediately, one hand sliding into the hair at the back of his neck as he kissed her slow enough to let her breathe through it.

Slow enough to let her choose it.

She kissed him back hard on the second pass, mouth opening against his, tongue finding his, the sound she made low and unsteady, somewhere between relief and need.

Callum held her carefully through all of it. One hand at the back of her neck. The other spread wide against her spine. Letting her set the pace and following wherever she pulled him.

Jasper’s mouth settled against her throat and stayed there for a second too long, breath hot against her pulse like he was trying to remember how to not bite. His mouth pressed to her pulse and held there, restraint radiating off him so hard it almost felt violent. One hand buried in her hair while the other slid over her breast, rough enough to drag another sound out of her against Callum’s mouth.

Eli stayed close behind her, one hand steady at her waist while he spoke quietly into her ear.

“Here,” he murmured as his hand slid along her hip.

Serena nodded immediately.

“Here.”

His fingers moved higher against the inside of her thigh.

Another nod. Another breathless yes against Callum’s shoulder.

Eli’s control broke first in his voice. Just a little. Enough that Serena felt it.

His hand slid between her thighs, and the breath that left him against her ear wasn’t entirely steady anymore.

Of the three of them, Eli was the one who lived furthest back from his own body, the one who narrated a thing while it happened to him so he could analyze the moment and not simply be inside it. Callum had watched his brother do it their whole lives. He watched the habit fail him now. Whatever Eli had built to keep the wanting at arm’s length, she burned straight through it, and the part of Eli that always stood off to one side taking notes came down off its perch and into his hands, and his hands were not steady, and the silver thread that was always so precise had gone ragged with how much he wanted her. Callum had never once seen Eli want anything past the point of his own control. He was seeing it now.

Jasper’s thumb found her at the same moment Eli’s fingers did, and Serena’s whole body arched between them.

The chord lit up instantly. A cacophony of fireworks, more explosive than the grand finale at the festival.

Callum felt the surge hit his chest a split second before Serena came apart against him, fingers tangled hard in Jasper’s hair, mouth open against Callum’s throat.

She had not made a sound like that in days, he would have bet his life on it. Not a sound torn out of her by a thief in the dark, but a sound she released freely without thought. He held her through it with his hand spread wide on her spine and understood that he was, in a way he would never be able to explain, watching her take herself back. One sound at a time. One yes at a time. The shadows that lived in her now had nothing to do with this part. This part was only her, remembering that she was allowed.

***

Callum’s jaw locked.

He pulled back before his teeth could touch skin.