Turn 13 of 21

Pull him down to the mat with you

MC's hands find his shoulders — broader now than any human frame, the muscles dense and shifting beneath skin that runs hot as a furnace — and she pulls. It's not a suggestion. Her fingers dig into the changed topology of his trapezius muscles and she pulls downward with the full weight of her body, sinking back against the mat, and for one suspended second the strength differential between them becomes absurd, laughable, irrelevant, because he follows. He follows her down like gravity has reversed, like she is the center of the room and everything in it, including him, falls toward her.

Valko's knees hit the mat on either side of hers and the impact sends a tremor through the floor. His full weight hovers above her, held on arms that have rearranged themselves into something thicker, the joints articulated differently, the forearms corded with muscle that no longer follows human anatomy. The heat pouring off him is a physical presence between them, a wall of warmth that presses against her bare stomach and chest like a second skin. His hair falls forward around his face — longer now, coarser — and his black eyes search hers from inches away, and the tenderness in them is almost unbearable, a rawness that the transformation cannot touch.

"I didn't think you would," he says. His voice is a low rasp, barely above a whisper, and the vibration of it travels through his arms and into the mat and up through her spine.

"I didn't think —"

His mouth finds her collarbone. The kiss is careful despite everything — despite the teeth that press against her skin, despite the hands that span her ribcage, despite the tremor running through him that says control is a fiction he's maintaining by fractions. His lips trace the line of her sternum downward, and each point of contact sends a cascade through her nervous system that makes her back arch off the mat, her fingers curling into the thickened hair at his skull. The pigment lines on his torso pulse against her skin where their bodies meet, and she can feel his heartbeat through them — faster now, still slower than human, but accelerating, a rhythm that is trying to match hers and can't quite manage it, two clocks running at different speeds.

MC pulls him closer. Her legs wrap around the changed geometry of his hips, and the contact there is overwhelming — the heat, the pressure, the reality of what he has become pressing against her through layers of fabric that feel like nothing, that feel like they're dissolving. A sound escapes her that she doesn't recognize, raw and involuntary, and Valko answers it with a growl that resonates through the mat and the floor and the foundations of the building, and his mouth is on her ribs, her stomach, the line of her hip, and his hands are everywhere, rough and enormous and shaking with the effort of touching her gently.

The gym is gone. The mirrors, the weights, the digital clock reading 19:55 — all of it has fallen away, consumed by the sphere of heat and contact and the sound of two people breathing too hard in a room that was never built for this. Valko's hand finds the curve of her hip and his fingers tighten there, and the grip is past gentleness now, past the careful calibration of a man who trains human bodies for a living, into something that belongs to the other thing he is, the thing that doesn't calculate, that just holds. He pulls back to look at her again, and his face is stripped bare, every wall down, every pretense abandoned, and what's left is not a man and not a wolf but someone who has been alone with what he is for a very long time and is looking at the first person who chose to stay.