Chapter 203: BOTH OF THEM

AMARIS

I knew it was going to be a full moon night when Nia brought me chamomile instead of my usual tea at seven o’clock, set the cup down with the authority of a doctor administering medication, and issued her instructions.

“Stay in tonight, Luna.”

Then she walked out. No explanation. No waiting for an answer. A cup of flowers in hot water and a closed door, which in Nia language counts as a full safety briefing.

I drank the chamomile at the window and watched the sky change. The light over the training yard had gone strange and heavy, and the birds had stopped, and even the wind seemed to be holding still and listening for something.

My wolf stirred.

She has been stirring more lately. A pull in my chest when Ryker walks into a room, arriving half a second before he does, my own private early warning system. A warmth that climbs my ribs when Rowan’s hand finds my face. Nothing loud. Nothing like the dream in my first week here, when she screamed the word mate into my bones until I woke up shaking. This was a banked fire. Coals under ash, still holding heat.

I was on my second cup when my door opened.

Ryker came in first. Rowan two steps behind him.

Both of them. Together. I set my cup down very carefully, because my hands had decided to be unreliable, and I noted for future examination that this did not feel strange to me, and that the not-feeling-strange was probably the strangest thing in the room.

Ryker’s eyes found me. Rowan’s eyes found me. Then they found each other, and a whole conversation happened in it, a question and an answer traded in about two seconds of held eye contact, and I caught none of the words because they have a language that predates me by twenty-six years. Whatever the answer was, it ended with both of them still standing in my room and the air pulling tight as a drawn bow.

Then Ryker crossed the floor.

His hand came up to my jaw, tilting my face, and his mouth came down on mine with no preamble and none of the circling we usually do. Three weeks of walls broke against my teeth. I fisted both hands in his shirt and gave it straight back to him, and behind him I heard Rowan turn the lock, and the small click of it ran down my spine like a struck match.

Ryker walked me backward without breaking the kiss. The backs of my legs found the bed. Rowan’s fingers arrived at the laces down the back of my dress and worked them loose one by one, patient, precise, taking the dress apart the way he takes apart a problem, and his mouth pressed to the nape of my neck as the fabric loosened, and I made a sound I intend to deny in court.

The dress dropped.

Ryker’s mouth went to my throat, teeth grazing, dragging a line of heat down to my collarbone that he intended to leave evidence of. Rowan’s lips traveled my shoulder and down my spine, unhurried, thorough, learning me vertebra by vertebra. Four hands moved over me and not one of them hesitated, and I stood between them in the silver coming through the curtains and shook.

“Bed,” Ryker ordered against my ear, rough.

“Bossy,” I breathed.

“Full moon.” His eyes had gone dark with a gold rim burning at the edge of the iris. “You get the polite version at quarter moons.”

Rowan laughed. Low, against my shoulder, the rarest sound this house produces. Then he lifted me clean off my feet and laid me on the bed with the care of a man setting down something he had already decided to keep.

Rowan came to me first.

He settled between my thighs and started at the inside of my knee, his mouth moving up by slow inches while his hands pinned my hips still, and by the time he reached the center of me my fingers were in his hair and my head was pressed back into the pillow and I had stopped retaining information about the ceiling. He worked me the way he reads a map, patiently, completely, and every time my back arched and my breath broke toward the edge he slowed and held me just short of it, and above me Ryker knelt watching my face come apart, his thumb dragging slow across my lower lip.

“There she is,” he murmured. “The unmanaged version.”

I shattered with Rowan’s name in my mouth and Ryker’s hand fisted in my hair.

They traded like a tide turning. Ryker moved over me while the aftershocks still ran through my thighs, hooked my knee at his hip, and pushed into me in one long stroke that emptied my lungs on a cry. He set a rhythm with the moon in it, deep and certain and claiming, and my body rose to meet every drive of it while Rowan stretched along my side, his mouth closing hot over my breast, his fingers lacing through mine and pinning our joined hands above my head, his voice low at my ear narrating exactly what I looked like undone, and between the two of them I burned straight down to the wick.

Every other night we had ever had, somebody in the room was keeping score. Whose hands. Whose name. Whose claim. Tonight nobody counted anything. Rowan’s grip on my hand, Ryker buried inside me, the moon striping all three of us silver through the curtains, and not one of us pretending, for the first time, that we were anything other than exactly this.

And midway through it, it happened.

I was not looking for it. I was thoroughly occupied. Ryker was deep inside me and Rowan’s mouth was on my throat and my body was climbing again, and then underneath all of that heat, in a place lower than muscle and older than skin, something turned over and answered them.

My wolf.

Not the screaming arrival from the dream. She rolled over once in the dark the way a sleeping animal rolls toward a fire, opened one eye, took in the two of them and the moon and me, and let out a single low hum through my blood that made both men’s rhythm stutter at the same instant.

Then she settled and went still.

I went very still too.

Ryker felt it before I spoke a word. He stopped, pulled back, searched my face, and even the moon version of him held completely motionless for me, every muscle locked, waiting on my answer. “You alright?”

“Yes,” I whispered.

More than alright. She was in there. She had been awake for one full second, and in that second I had felt her feel them, and she had hummed.

The moon stood all the way up now, fat and full through the curtains.

I pulled Ryker back down to me. Rowan’s hand slid to my waist from the other side and anchored there, and I let go of every question I was saving for later and gave myself back to the night.

She was there.

My wolf was there.