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In this shape. Are you sure?

He presses his forehead harder against my skull. “Wildheart, I have been sure for weeks. I’m just done politely sufferin’ about it.”

I brush the side of my skull against his temple, the closest thing this mouth can make to a kiss. He shivers and leans into it. You understand what saying this does to me?

His breath shudders over the skull. “I’m startin’ to.”

I may become smug.

That surprises a laugh out of him, bright and rough and alive. “May?”

Already.

“Yeah, I figured.”

I let the bond open enough for him to feel my pleasure, my stunned awe, my want held leashed but no longer hidden like shame. He inhales sharply, but he does not retreat.

You fluster beautifully, I tell him.

“There it is,” he mutters, trying to glare while still flushed nearly to his ears. “Put me on the spot and enjoy the show.”

Yes.

I close my eyes for one breath and let the forest hold us. Then Lucas rises onto his toes and presses his mouth to the lower edge of my skull, a kiss where others would see only nightmare. The want that moves through me is enormous.

So is the gratitude.

Little Ember, I send, voice low through the bond. If you keep saying what you missed, I will need to take you back to my den.

His pulse jumps, but his smile does not falter.

“Good,” he says, bold and shaking and mine by every choice that matters. “But I was hopin’ you’d be more primal and take me right here in your forest.”

38

Lucas

The second the words leave my mouth, the entire world seems to stop breathing.

Onyx goes still in front of me, and I mean still in a way that makes the trees around us feel restless by comparison. The bond doesn’t go quiet. It goes deep—so deep I feel my stomach drop out. His skull stays against my forehead, cool bone to overheated skin, and for a moment, I only hear the rough pull of my breathing and the low creak of his antlers shifting through the branches above us.

I should be careful.

I should be thinking about how much he’s been through, how much we both have. How his evil bastard of a brother kept him from me and left the bond feeling cold and empty for so long that I stopped sleeping more than a few hours at a time.

I should be practical because I’m a ranger and a grown man and not the sort of person who looks at a seven-foot cryptid in the middle of the woods and thinks, “Yes, right now, against the nearest tree, please.”

But the truth is, I’ve been careful for months.

I’ve been careful with fear. Careful with grief. Careful with the bond when it went thin and distant. Careful with hope, because hope got mean after the first few weeks and started biting every time I let myself believe he would come back.

I ate. I worked. I answered Parker’s questions with enough sarcasm to keep him from noticing too much. I visited my sister. I checked trails that didn’t matter and filled out reports I barely remembered writing. I functioned because that’s what people do when the world rips their heart out but leaves their hands intact.

Now Onyx is here—here, alive—and he’s looking at me like I just put my hand on the leash of every old instinct in him and snapped it in half.

His huge, clawed hand closes around the back of my neck, careful enough not to cut, rough enough that my breath leaves me in a hard rush. He drags me closer until my chest hits the coarse fur and ridged slate of him, until I have to tip my head all the way back to keep looking up at the skull face hovering over me.

His lantern chain rattles once against his antler, though the flame stays dark, and that tiny metallic sound makes my whole body tighten because it feels like a warning bell that only I’m stupid enough to run toward.