CHAPTER 26 - THE SAME

I wake up to his heartbeat in my chest before I remember why it’s there.

The double-pulse is quieter in daylight – not the drumming twin rhythm from last night but a soft, persistent echo that sits behind my own heartbeat like a shadow, and I lie still in his bed with his arm heavy across my ribs and his chest against my back and try to figure out where I end and the new signal begins.

He’s human again.

The body pressed against mine is the regular version – still too big, still running warmer than anyone else I’ve ever touched, but the proportions are back to normal and the hands resting against my stomach are tipped with fingernails instead of claws.

I trace the tattoo on his forearm where it’s draped across my body, following the black lines from his wrist up to his elbow where they disappear into the muscle of his bicep, and I can feel scars underneath the ink – raised white lines that the tattoos were designed to cover, and I file that away for a conversation he’s not ready to have and I’m not ready to ask for.

He shifts behind me and the press of him against my lower back tells me he’s awake, or at least part of him is, because he’s hard and the length of him slots between my thighs from behind like his body found the position in his sleep and decided to stay there.

His arm tightens across my ribs and slides upward until his forearm is resting against my throat and his hips roll forward in a slow, half-asleep grind that pushes him between my thighs where I’m still wet from last night and swollen enough that the friction of him sliding against my folds makes my breath stutter.

“Don’t move,” he murmurs against the back of my neck, and his voice is thick with sleep and rougher than usual and the vibration of it against my spine makes my eyes close on instinct.

His hand slides down from my waist and lifts my top leg just enough to change the angle, and he pushes inside me from behind in one slow stroke that fills me so gradually I feel every inch entering separately, and a low sound leaves my mouth that’s barely more than a breath.

He doesn’t fuck me. He MOVES inside me – slow, deep rolls of his hips that press him against every wall I have and then pull back just enough that I feel the drag, and the lazy rhythm is so different from anything he’s done before that my body doesn’t know how to respond except to melt backward into his chest and let him set the pace.

His forearm stays against my throat and I can feel my pulse beating against his skin and his pulse beating against mine, and the two heartbeats syncing up from last night haven’t stopped – they’re matching now, beat for beat, and the sensation of being penetrated in rhythm with a shared heartbeat does something to the pleasure that makes it feel less like sex and more like being absorbed.

A growl starts in his chest – not the feral sound from last night but something softer, a vibration that rolls through his ribcage and into my spine and down through my pelvis where it meets the slow movement of him inside me and amplifies it like a tuning fork held against wet skin.

The vibration from his chest and the pressure from his cock hit the same frequency and my entire lower body clenches around him and I cum before I’m fully awake, this rolling, lazy orgasm that doesn’t spike but SPREADS, moving outward from my center through my thighs and up my spine in a warm wave that makes my toes point and my fingers curl around his forearm and my back arch against his chest.

He follows a few strokes later, pressing deep and holding there while I feel him pulse inside me in a rhythm that matches the shared heartbeat in my chest, and his mouth is open against the bite mark on my shoulder and the warmth of his breath against the wound sends a secondary wave through me that makes my inner walls flutter around him one last time before everything goes still.

We lie there for a while, still connected, and his arm hasn’t moved from my throat and his heartbeat is slow against my spine and the morning light is coming through his window and I can hear birds outside and everything feels impossible and inevitable at the same time.

“Tell me about the rest,” I say, because last night he told me WHAT he is but not the world around it, and I need to understand the shape of the thing I’ve walked into before it closes around me completely.

He talks with his chin resting on my shoulder and his body still inside mine, and the intimacy of receiving information this way – his voice in my ear, his chest against my back, his cock softening slowly while he explains the mechanics of a world I didn’t know existed – makes the impossible facts feel strangely domestic.

He tells me about Black Fang MC. The pack underneath the club. His uncle Viktor, the Alpha, which is a title that carries weight in a way I can hear in the tension that enters Knox’s voice when he says the name.

He tells me about The Veil – the law that says wolves stay hidden, always, and that the punishment for exposure is execution. For the wolf AND the human who found out.

The weight of that settles into my stomach like ice. “You’re saying I’m in danger because you told me.”

His arm tightens against my throat by a fraction. “I’m saying nothing touches you. Ever. I don’t care what The Veil says, I don’t care what Viktor says. You’re mine and anything that threatens what’s mine stops existing. That’s not a philosophy, that’s a schedule.”

I absorb that with the calm of someone who has spent the last two weeks having her reality disassembled by the man currently spooning her, and then I ask the question that’s been sitting in the back of my throat since the golden eyes and the growl through Dominic’s office door.

“Your father. He’s the same thing?”

Knox is quiet for a second, and the arm across my throat shifts like an unconscious reflex. “Dominic has been hiding his wolf for over twenty years. He’s better at it than anyone I’ve ever met. But yeah. He’s the same.”

The growl behind the office door. The amber flecks in his eyes during the jaw-grab. The cologne that clings to skin like a territorial marker. Everything clicks into place with the quiet precision of a lock engaging, and the picture that forms is so much larger and more dangerous than I understood, because I’m not just sleeping with a werewolf – I’m living in a house with two of them, and my mother is about to marry one of them, and both of them want me in ways that exist outside the boundaries of anything I have a name for.

My phone buzzes on Knox’s nightstand and the screen lights up with a name I haven’t thought about in days.

Theo: Haven’t seen you in days. You okay? I’m worried.