She’s too young

Rose's POV

“Tell me about the cabin again,” I murmured, nuzzling into the claiming bite on his throat. The mark was still tender, still humming with shared magic. “The one in the northern passes. The one you built with your own hands. I need to hear it tonight—need to picture a place where no one whispers behind our backs.”

His chest rumbled with quiet pride, the sound vibrating through my back like a lullaby only I could hear. “Wood I felled myself during a winter leave, every log notched by axe and wolf claw. Wide porch overlooking the river where the salmon run so thick in spring the water looks like liquid silver under moonlight. Summers, the meadow behind it fills with fireflies—thousands of them dancing like living stars. Room for a litter—pups with your wild russet curls and my stubborn streak. They’ll learn the old rites under open sky, not these cursed stone halls that try to cage what the moon made free. No hiding their scents. No academy rules telling them who they can love or how loudly their bonds can sing.”

His palm pressed firmer against my stomach, as if he could already feel the future taking root. “I can see them already, Rose. Little alphas and omegas running barefoot through the tall grass, shifting for the first time without fear or suppressants or ethics boards breathing down their necks. And you—standing on that porch in one of my old flannel shirts, sleeves rolled up, wind tangling your hair, watching them with that fierce light in your eyes that first caught me in lecture hall 7A. That’s the future I’m fighting for. Not tenure. Not lectures. Not the medals they pinned on me after the northern campaigns. You. Us. A home where sovereign bonds aren’t scandals—they’re celebrated.”

Tears pricked my eyes, slipping free to trace salty paths down my cheeks. “What if the board doesn’t care about the Accord? What if Marcus convinces them it was coercion? He’s been telling anyone who’ll listen that I was ‘confused’ by your authority. That an omega from a mid-tier pack couldn’t possibly choose a war-hero professor without being manipulated. Lila overheard him in the training yard this afternoon—said he was rallying his pack brothers, pacing the gravel path like a general mustering troops, talking about ‘protecting’ me from you. ‘She’s too young, too impressionable,’ he kept saying. Possessive little prick. He wants what he can’t have, and it’s making him dangerous. I felt his jealousy spike through the bond when he passed me in the corridor earlier—hot, ugly, like acid on snow.”

Jason’s arm tightened around me, possessiveness flaring hot through the bond—not the wild rage of a lesser alpha, but a deep, unyielding certainty that wrapped around my fear like iron bands around ancient oak. “Let him try. Elara’s raven arrived while you were in tactics class—her blood-sealed statement is already with the headmistress, glowing like forge-fire. Hargrove intercepted three more anonymous complaints this evening and buried them under ‘routine scent maintenance.’ Thorne updated the tutoring logs to cover every minute we’ve spent together, backdated with his own seal. And if politics still tries to bite us…” He kissed the shell of my ear, breath warm and steady. “Then we leave tonight. I have a bag packed in the bottom drawer—clothes, maps, enough coin to get us north without questions. Travel papers under neutral pack names, forged by an old contact from the border skirmishes. We ride before dawn if we must. The border lands don’t answer to this academy. They answer to the old magic. To us. To wolves who choose each other without committees voting on it.”

I twisted in his arms to face him, searching those silver eyes that had haunted every lecture, every sleepless night since the first day of term. The bond let me feel the depth of him—the scars from frozen passes, the quiet nights he’d spent alone before I crashed into his world like a comet. “You’d really give it all up? Your position, your reputation, the northern campaigns you bled for—just for me? A student who walked into your office shaking and left it claimed?”

“For you?” He cupped my face, thumb brushing my lower lip with a tenderness that cracked something open inside my chest. “Little one, I’d burn the entire academy to ash if it meant keeping you safe and claimed and mine. But I won’t have to. Because you claimed me back. You chose this—us—when you could have run. That courage? That fire in your russet wolf that refuses to dim even when the whole world whispers ‘inappropriate’? It’s what makes us sovereign. Equals. Unbreakable. I waited years for someone who would look at me—not the war hero, not the professor—and see the man underneath. You did that the moment you bit me and whispered ‘I’ll ruin you’ like it was a vow.”

I kissed him then—slow, deep, tasting the salt of sweat and the faint copper of our reopened marks. When we broke apart, I rested my forehead against his, breathing him in. “I’m still terrified. Every time I walk across campus I feel eyes on me. Whispers following like shadows. Clara cornered me after dinner, hissed that I was ‘ruining the reputation of every omega who works hard to prove we’re more than our scents.’ Called me a ‘bond-chaser’ loud enough for half the hall to hear. But then I feel you through the bond—steady, certain, like gravity itself—and the fear shrinks. You make me brave, Jason. You make me want to fight instead of hide. To stand in that ethics chamber tomorrow and say, ‘I chose him. I marked him. And if that breaks your rules, then your rules were never worthy of the old magic.’”

His smile was slow and devastating, the kind that had once made my knees weak in the middle of a crowded lecture. “That’s my mate. Tomorrow morning we walk into the ethics chamber together. Hand in hand. No more secrets. No more herbal masks dulling what the bond forged. We present the Accord, the documents, the blood seals. We let them see the bond for what it is—old magic, mutual, adult, consensual. If Marcus wants to testify, let him. Let everyone hear how his jealousy sounds when it’s dragged into the light: a spoiled pup snarling because an omega chose steel over silver spoons. And when the headmistress bangs her gavel and provisionally recognizes us…” He rolled us so I straddled his hips, his half-hard length nestled against my slick folds again—teasing, possessive, but not demanding. “Then we celebrate right here. Properly. Until you can’t walk straight and the whole wing knows exactly who you belong to—and who belongs to you.”

I rocked against him instinctively, a fresh wave of warmth coating him. “Careful, Professor. Keep talking like that and we’ll never make it to the hearing. The board will be waiting while we’re still locked together on this couch.”

He gripped my hips, guiding me to slide along his length without taking him inside yet—slow, deliberate, a promise rather than a rush. “Good. Let them wait. Let Marcus pace outside the chamber like the pup he is, nostrils flaring, scenting the air and realizing every breath he takes is filled with the proof that you’re mine. That I’m yours. I want him to smell me on you tomorrow—pine and iron woven into rose and honey so deeply no tonic could ever separate us. Want the entire academy to know an omega chose her alpha and marked him for the world to see. No more hiding behind suppressants. No more pretending the pull is academic. Just us. Sovereign. Equals in every way that matters.”

I leaned down, licking along the claiming bite on his throat, savoring the way he shuddered beneath me, the bond flaring with shared heat. “Then mark me again tonight. One more time before dawn. So when I walk into that chamber tomorrow, every alpha in the room feels exactly who I belong to—and knows they’ll never have even a fraction of what we share.”

His eyes flashed silver fire, the wolf inside him rising close to the surface. In one smooth motion he flipped us, pinning me beneath him again, his body caging mine with protective strength. “As my lady commands.”

He slid home slowly this time—inch by thick inch—until the base of his knot kissed my folds once more. The stretch was still perfect, still overwhelming in the way that made the world narrow to just us. I wrapped my legs around him, heels digging into his back, and whispered against his lips, “Together.”

“Together,” he echoed, beginning those deep, rolling thrusts that rebuilt the fire between us. “Always. Through hearings and whispers and jealous pups who will never understand. Through whatever storm the board throws at us. Through exile if it comes to that. We ride north and build the life they tried to deny us.”