Willa woke me the way Willa did everything: without warning, without mercy, and with her teeth.
I surfaced from sleep to the feeling of her mouth on my neck — on the scent-mark, the bruise she'd left the night before — tongue and teeth working the tender spot, and my body responded before my brain had finished booting up. I was hard, instantly, embarrassingly, and she made a pleased sound against my skin.
"Morning," she said.
"Is that a greeting or a threat?" I croaked.
"Yes." She sat up, straddling my hips under the blanket, gloriously naked in the gray dawn light leaking through the tavern window, and stretched like a cat — no, like a wolf, all long lines and unselfconscious muscle. My room at The Gilded Tankard had never felt smaller. "Today we finish it. The claiming. Outside, under the sky, the pack way."
"It's barely dawn. The town—"
"Not in town. The high meadow. Past the treeline, above the Ashen Vale road. No one goes there. The grass is tall, the sky is wide, and the only witnesses will be hawks." Her grin turned wicked. "Unless you are afraid of hawks."
I looked at her — at the bite marks on my wrist, still vivid, at the bruise on my neck that Diane had stared at over breakfast with her mouth in a thin line and said nothing about — and I thought about Paula's formal oath and Diane's kitchen-table tenderness and how both of them had, in their own ways, been *indoors*. Civilized. This was something else. This was the wild thing, and the wild thing wanted sky.
"Pack a lunch," I said.
She laughed, loud and delighted, and bit my shoulder.
The high meadow was a forty-minute walk, and Willa spent it in a state of barely contained energy that expressed itself as: racing ahead, doubling back, sniffing the wind, and at one point tackling me into a patch of clover "to check the ground," which resulted in ten minutes of breathless, half-dressed wrestling that left us both flushed and her ears doing the sideways flop.
"You fight like a clerk," she informed me, pinning my wrists.
"I *am* a clerk."
"A clerk who is about to be thoroughly claimed in a field." She kissed me — quick, hard, teeth — and sprang up. "Come on. Almost there."
The meadow itself was worth the walk. A vast bowl of waist-high grass and wildflowers, ringed by pines, open to a sky so blue it looked Photoshopped. A single ancient oak stood at the center like a landmark, and beneath it, spread on the grass, was a bedroll and a pack — Willa had come up at dawn to prepare, because of course she had.
"You planned this," I said.
"I hunt. Planning is hunting." She was already stripping — vest off, wraps off, trousers off, standing naked in the morning sun with her hands on her hips, utterly unashamed, her tail wagging slow and low. "Your turn. All of it. The sky doesn't do half-measures."
I undressed. The breeze on bare skin, the sun, the sheer *scale* of the sky above us — it stripped something out of me too, something clerk-shaped. Willa watched me, and her nostrils flared, and the low sound she made was pure approval.
"Lie down," she said.
I lay back on the bedroll. The grass tickled my shoulders. A hawk cried somewhere overhead. And Willa stood over me for a moment, silhouetted, and then she dropped — not onto me, but beside me, rolling into my side, her mouth finding mine, her body pressing along the full length of me, skin on skin in the open air, and it was *electric*. Every nerve ending felt turned up. The sun on my chest, her warmth along my side, the grass under my back.
Her hand slid down my stomach, wrapped around me — already hard, achingly so — and stroked, slow and deliberate, while her tongue mapped my jaw, my throat, the scent-mark, making me shudder.
"Say it," she murmured.
"Say what?"
"That you're mine. Out loud. The sky should hear it." This story is hosted at g.com.
I turned my head and looked at her — really looked, the amber eyes, the silver-tipped ears, the scar, the wild beautiful face of her — and said it, clear and loud enough for the hawks: "I'm yours, Willa. Claimed. Marked. Yours."
She growled, low and triumphant, and swung a leg over me, straddling my chest — and then she moved *up*, and I understood, and my hands went to her hips as she lowered herself onto my face.
Oh, *gods*.
She was wet already, slick and swollen, and the taste of her — wild, musky, sweet — flooded my mouth as I buried my face in her. She ground down shamelessly, her thighs trembling around my head, her fingers knotting in my hair, and I licked and sucked with everything I had, finding the hard bead of her clit with my tongue and working it in slow circles while she writhed above me, her cries going higher and more broken.
"Ethan — *fuck* — like that — don't stop —"
I didn't stop. I held her hips and devoured her, tongue thrusting deep, then circling back to her clit, and her whole body went rigid, her back arching, and she came with a howl that scattered birds from the pines — a real, full-throated wolfkin howl of pleasure that echoed off the treeline — her thighs clamping around my ears, her juices flooding my mouth, and I drank it all down, triumphant.
She collapsed sideways into the grass, panting, laughing breathlessly. "The hawks heard *that*," she gasped.
"Good. Let them be jealous."
She rolled back on top of me before I'd caught my breath, kissing me deep — tasting herself on my tongue, groaning at it — and her hand found me again, hard as iron, and guided me to her entrance. She sank down slowly this time, savoring it, her eyes locked on mine, and the feeling of her — hot, tight, still pulsing from her climax — sliding down around me under the open sky was so overwhelming I had to grip the bedroll to stay sane.
"Look at me," she whispered. "Don't close your eyes. I want to see you see me."
So I watched her ride me under that enormous blue sky — the sun gilding her skin, her breasts bouncing, her ears flat back, her scar stark in the daylight — and I thought: *this* is what the Temple of Grace calls ugly. This is what they threw away. And they were wrong about everything, and I was the only one who knew, and it felt like the best-kept secret in the world.
She leaned forward, bracing her hands on my chest, her claws pricking, and rode me harder, faster, her rhythm breaking as her second peak built. Her breath came in short growls now, her head thrown back, the long line of her throat bared to the sky. I met her thrust for thrust, driving up, one hand on her hip, the other sliding between us to find her clit, rubbing in tight circles — and she shattered, crying out, her inner walls rippling around me in long, milking waves that pulled a groan out of me I couldn't have suppressed if I'd tried.
"Gods, Willa—"
"Not done," she panted, wild-eyed, grinning. "Flip me. Take me from behind. Like the pack. *Please*."
I flipped her — rolled her onto hands and knees in the grass, the bedroll forgotten — and took her like that, kneeling behind her, driving into her from behind while she arched her back and howled softly with every stroke. The position let me go deeper, and she took it, demanded it, pushing back against me, her tail lashing. I reached around and cupped her breast, thumb rolling her nipple, and she moaned, low and guttural.
"Harder," she panted. "Claim me, Ethan. *Mark* me."
I drove into her, hard and deep, the slap of skin loud in the meadow, and bent over her back to sink my teeth into the juncture of her neck and shoulder — not breaking skin, just the hard press of human teeth, my answering mark — and she *screamed*, her body convulsing around me, her third climax ripping through her, and the clench of her dragged me over the edge with her. I came with a groan, burying myself to the hilt, pulsing inside her, my teeth still on her neck, my arms locked around her waist — holding her, claiming her back.
We collapsed sideways into the grass together, tangled, spent, still joined, laughing breathlessly. Wildflowers nodded over us. The hawk cried again, closer this time, as if applauding.
Willa turned her head and licked my jaw. "My mark on you," she said, touching my wrist, my neck. "Your mark on me." She touched the red imprint of my teeth on her shoulder, and her expression went soft in a way I'd never seen. "No one has ever marked me back. The pack scar doesn't count. This—" she pressed my hand to it, "—this counts."
Something in my chest cracked open. "Willa—"
"Don't." She pressed a finger to my lips, but she was smiling. "No speeches. The sky heard enough. Just — stay. However long the world lets you."
We lay there while the sun climbed, dozing in the grass, her head on my chest, my fingers idly stroking her ears — which, I learned, made her purr like an engine. Eventually we dressed, packed the bedroll, and walked back down toward Millbrook hand in hand, her tail wagging, my wrist aching pleasantly, both of us smelling of grass and sun and each other.
It was, I reflected, the single best morning of my life, in either world.
We took the long way down, because Willa insisted the deer path had better views and I suspected she just didn't want the morning to end. She taught me a wolfkin phrase on the way — *"sha'na vek"* — which she claimed meant "my heart runs beside yours," though when I repeated it later to Paula, Paula laughed so hard she dropped her sword and said it actually meant "my stomach is beside yours, feed me," and Willa had to be physically restrained from starting a second duel before lunch. But in that moment, on the deer path, with her fingers laced through mine and her tail brushing my leg, it meant what she said it meant, and I chose to believe her. You are reading on novelping dot com, the official source.
"You know," I said, "back in my world, people pay for wilderness retreats. Couples' bonding experiences. Trust falls. This was better."
"Trust falls?" She tilted her head.
"You fall backward and your partner catches you."
She considered this. "That is just falling. With extra steps." She sniffed the air, ears swiveling. "Town soon. I smell bread. And —" her nose wrinkled, "— something wrong. Incense. Temple incense."
I laughed. "You're making that up."
"I never make up smells. Smells are facts." Her pace quickened, unease prickling through her. "Hurry."
Which meant, by the iron law of narrative causality, that something was about to go wrong.
We heard the commotion before we saw it. Millbrook's square — usually drowsy at midday — was packed. A crowd ringed the fountain, and at its center stood a woman in the gray-and-silver robes of the Temple of Grace, her pale willowy frame held like a blade, her flat expressionless face turned slowly across the gathered townsfolk.
Sister Maren. I didn't know her name yet, but I knew the uniform — Paula had described it, voice tight with old fear. The Inquisition's gray. The ones who measured grace.
"—a man of foreign aspect," the woman was saying, her voice carrying, cold and precise, "whose taste has been *corrupted*. Who consorts with the graceless. Who spreads spiritual disease by his mere presence."
The crowd murmured. Someone pointed. Heads turned.
Toward me.
Willa's hand tightened on mine. Her ears went flat. A low growl built in her chest.
The inquisitor dismounted in the center of the square, her gray-and-silver robes settling around her like falling ash, and unrolled a parchment with the Temple's seal.
"People of Millbrook," she called out, her voice carrying the way only a woman used to being obeyed can carry it. "I am Sister Maren, of the Temple of Grace. I am looking for a man. A stranger. Word has reached the Temple of a man with a corrupted taste — a man who looks at the ungraceful and calls it beautiful."
A murmur ran through the crowd like wind through wheat.
Willa's hand tightened on mine. Her ears went flat. A low growl built in her chest.
I did the only sensible thing. I took half a step backward, into the shadow of the fountain, and tried very hard to look like a man with absolutely nothing to be curious about.
Sister Maren's pale eyes swept the square — over the stalls, over the crowd, over the wolfkin trying to look inconspicuous with her tail bushed out to twice its size — and for one terrible heartbeat I was certain those eyes would stop on me.
They didn't. Not yet.
"If anyone has seen this man," she said, "the Temple would hear of it. There is a blessing for the helpful."
And I stood there in the shadow of the fountain, with a wolfkin's teeth-marks fresh on my wrist and the Temple's inquisitor asking the whole town about me by description, and realized that my life had just become exactly as complicated as I'd been afraid it would.