Bride of the Wolves

They brought me to the lodge in the back of a black truck, wrists bound in front of me with a leather strap that someone had buckled too tight on purpose. I had stopped pulling against it an hour back. The road went from asphalt to gravel to nothing, just two ruts cut through pine, and the higher we climbed the colder the air got, sliding in through the gap in the door like a hand under my collar.

I had a plan when they took me. I would be calm. I would watch for the moment, the open door, the careless guard, and I would run. That was the woman who got in the truck. By the time the truck stopped, that woman felt like someone I had read about once.

The man who opened the door did not grab me. He waited. He stood in the gray light with snow melting in his dark hair and looked at me the way you look at a thing you already own and are only confirming the condition of. Big through the shoulders, still in a way that other men were never still. When his eyes moved down me I went hot under my clothes, a sick crawling warmth that started low and spread up into my face, and I hated it so much my eyes stung.

“Out,” he said. Not loud. He did not need loud.

My legs obeyed before I decided anything. That was the first betrayal, and it would not be the last.

His name was Cael. I learned it from the others, the way they dropped their eyes when they said it. Inside, the lodge was all dark wood and firelight, warm enough that my skin prickled coming in from the cold. He cut the strap off my wrists with a knife that appeared and vanished so fast I barely registered the blade, and the relief of blood coming back into my hands made me gasp, and he watched me gasp, and something in his mouth changed.

“You ran a long way,” he said. “For someone who belongs here.”

“I don’t belong to you.” My voice came out steadier than I felt. Small victory.

He stepped closer. He smelled like cold air and woodsmoke and underneath that something I had no word for, something that made the back of my throat go tight and my thighs press together without my permission. I stepped back. He followed, unhurried, until the wall stopped me and there was nowhere left.

“Say it again,” he said. “I like watching you lie.”

I opened my mouth and nothing came out. His hand came up and he did not touch me, he just held it near my jaw, close enough that I could feel the heat off his palm, and my whole body leaned the smallest fraction toward it before I caught myself. He saw. Of course he saw. That was the worst part, that there was nothing my body did that he did not catalog.

“There it is,” he murmured.

I want to be clear about who I was before this. I ran a business. I fired men twice his size without my voice shaking. I did not melt. And yet some animal part of me, some part I did not give permission, had already decided this was where it wanted to be, pressed to a wall with this dangerous man breathing me in, and the rest of me was screaming into a room where no one was listening.

He brought his face down to the side of my neck. He did not kiss me. He just breathed there, slow, dragging the air over my skin like he was learning me, and a sound came out of me that I had never made before. Thin. Embarrassing. My nipples drew tight under my shirt and I felt the answering pulse between my legs, a slick heavy throb, and the shame of being wet for the man who took me hit me harder than fear ever had.

“You’re frightened,” he said against my throat. “And you’re soaked through. Both at once.” His mouth curved. I felt it move on my skin. “That’s the truth of you. Not the speeches.”

“Stop.” It came out as a whisper. It came out as the opposite of stop.

His hand finally landed, flat on my stomach, and the heat of it went straight through my shirt. He spread his fingers. He did not move them lower. He just held me there, pinned by one wide palm, and let me feel how easy it would be for him.

A thought cut through me, sharp and unwelcome as a splinter under a nail. I had spent the whole drive memorizing exits and here I was counting the inches between his hand and where I wanted it. I did not recognize the person doing that math. I wanted to claw her out of my own skin.

“Look at me,” Cael said.

I kept my eyes on his collarbone. He waited. He had all the time in the world and he knew I had none, and finally I lifted my gaze and his eyes were not human, not entirely, gold bleeding into the dark of them like firelight on water, and my breath stopped clean in my chest.

“There’s no door you haven’t already tried,” he said. “No road out of here that doesn’t end with my people bringing you back. You can spend years learning that. Or you can let me show you tonight what you already feel.”

“I don’t feel anything.” The lie was so bad it shamed us both.

His hand slid down. Over the button of my jeans, the heel of his palm pressing once, hard, right where I was aching, and my hips jerked up into it like they belonged to him already. The sound I made then was worse than the first one. He pressed again, slow, watching my face come apart, and I grabbed his wrist to stop him and then just held on, my fingers around his wrist not pulling him away, holding him there, and we both looked at my traitor hand doing it.

“Tell me to stop,” he said. “Mean it. I’ll walk out that door.”

I should have. The word was right there. I had used it on men all my life and made it land like a slap. I opened my mouth and what came out, low and cracked and not at all the speech I had planned, was, “Please.”

His eyes went fully gold.

“Please what.” Not a question. A door he was holding open one inch, making me crawl through it myself.

My face burned. The whole length of me burned. “Please,” I said again, and the second time it was a different word entirely, a surrender with no floor under it, and I hated how good it felt to fall.

He moved then. He got both hands under my thighs and lifted me off the floor like I weighed nothing, and my legs went around him on their own, the long hard line of him pressing right where I was open and wet through the denim, and I rocked against it before I could stop, once, helpless, and heard him exhale through his teeth. He carried me. I did not see the room. I saw the ceiling beams swing and then the firelight tilt and then I was on my back on something soft and he was over me, blotting out the light, his hands already at the hem of my shirt.

“I’ve waited,” he said, dragging the fabric up, his knuckles grazing my ribs, my breasts, baring me to the warm air and the cold gold of his stare. “Longer than you’d believe. You have no idea what you smell like to me. What it’s been, watching you fight a thing that’s already done.”

I should have covered myself. My arms stayed where they were, above my head where his look had pinned them, and my back arched up toward his hands like an offering I never agreed to make. His mouth came down on my breast, hot, and his teeth closed just shy of pain, and I cried out and arched higher, and somewhere far underneath the wanting a small cold voice asked me how many promises I had broken to myself in the last sixty seconds and whether I would even miss them.

He worked the button of my jeans open one-handed. I lifted my hips for him. I lifted my hips for him, God help me, I made it easy, and he dragged the denim down my legs and off and put his hand flat against the soaked cotton underneath and pressed his palm against my clit through it and I came apart so fast it frightened me, my thighs clamping around his hand, a broken sound tearing out of my throat that I would have given anything to take back.

“That fast,” he said. Wonder in it, and something darker. “All that fight, and you go off the second I touch you properly.” He hooked a finger in the waistband. “Let’s see what you do with nothing in the way.”

He pulled the last of it down my legs. The air hit me, then his stare did, slow, head to the wet open center of me, and I had never in my life felt so seen and so owned and so wildly, shamefully ready. He lowered himself between my thighs and I felt his breath where I wanted his mouth, and he looked up the length of my bare body at me with those impossible eyes, holding there, making me wait, making me know that whatever happened next I had asked for.

“Say my name,” Cael said, his mouth an inch from where every nerve I had was screaming. “Say it, and I’ll give you what you came up this mountain pretending you didn’t want.”