Chapter 9: The Mark

Joren took the others and Nessa back along the creek and did not look round.

Nobody said a word.

I stood in the wet grass with my hair stuck to my shoulders and the cold air on my skin, and I could not move.

The pull had started when I took wolf form, and now it had a name.

"It's you," I said.

"It's you," Rorik said.

His voice shook.

"I thought it was a witch's trick. The dreams, the braid, the way I couldn't kill you. I thought you'd made me want you."

"And now?"

"A witch couldn't make me feel this."

He crossed the grass in two strides and stopped with his chest an inch from mine.

His eyes were black at the center.

"Tell me to go," he said, "and I'll go."

"Eyes on the well, Alpha," I said, and my voice broke on a laugh.

"I have no well here."

"No."

"I'm looking at you."

"Then look," I said, and I put my hands on his chest.

He kissed me.

It was nothing like the kiss in his room.

There was no holding back in it, and no word of his sword or my chains.

His mouth took mine hard, and his hands went to my waist and lifted me against him.

I wrapped my legs around his hips.

I felt him, thick and hard against my belly, and I moaned into his mouth.

He carried me three steps and laid me down in the moss beneath a pine.

The ground was damp and cold under my back, and his body was a furnace over me.

He kissed down my neck, over the white line where the blade had been, and my fingers dug into his hair.

"Rorik."

"Say it again."

"Rorik."

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