Page 59 of Hush

Home, I tell him.

The single thought carries more than the word alone. Home. Den. Heart of my ground. The place where I sleep, where I keep what matters, where no human foot has crossed in longer than their calendars have existed. The place I bring him because the bond made the choice long before tonight.

I duck through the root-hung entrance and into the den. The main chamber stretches wider than the opening suggests, the old rock walls arcing up into darkness crossed by roots and the occasional hanging thread of dried moss.

I do not need light to move here, but small pale clusters of fungus glow faintly from a damp seam near the back wall, and moonlight filters in through a crack high above where the stone split in some distant freeze. It leaves silver across part of the floor and the edge of the nest.

My nest.

I built it over years, remade it each season, changed its shape as my life changed. At its base is a natural hollow worn smooth by older things than me. Over that I layered furs, dried moss, thick woven grasses from the marsh in summer, cedar boughs refreshed often enough to keep their scent alive, and soft bark stripped from fallen birch.

It is broad and deep, built to hold a body larger than mine, with room left for another pressed close. I have slept there alone through too many seasons. Not tonight.

Lucas lifts his head enough to see it, and I feel the reaction through the bond before I hear it in his breath—surprise first, because some part of him must have expected something wilder or harsher: a pit of bones and rough hides perhaps, some monster’s lair built from fear.

Then another feeling rolls in over that, softer and more dangerous. Emotion too tangled for one word. Relief. Want. Tenderness. The dizzy recognition that I made a place to keep precious things warm, and now I have brought him—my precious mate—to it.

“You have a nest,” he says at last, voice gone almost hoarse with awe and fever.

Yes.

The answer comes with no embarrassment. Why would it? This is old and right because my kind make nests. We make places to sleep, to heal, to scent, to hold mates if we are lucky enough to find them. If anything, I feel only pride that he sees it and does not laugh.

I feel the shape of a smile against my throat before he whispers, “Of course you do.”

My little mate.

I lower my head until my forehead touches his, careful and brief. Then, at last, I bend and lay him in the center of the nest.

He sinks into it with a soft sound, moss and fur giving under his heat-flushed body, the whole nest taking his shape at once as if it has waited for all its existence to know him. His copper hair spreads darkly over my furs. His shirt rides up slightly at the waist where I have to slide one hand free from beneath him.

I straighten slowly and look down at my mate in my nest, fever-bright and trembling and impossibly beautiful, and the whole of me narrows to that sight. My nest has never looked so right and so new at once.

He arches, eyes gone wide and dark. I kneel, hands braced on either side of his ribs, and lower until our mouths hover inches apart, breath tangling. He tilts his chin, lips parting, and I finally seal the distance. The kiss is molten—no shy hesitation, only the slick, desperate slide of tongues and the low, broken noise he makes when I suck softly on his lower lip.

“Please,” he whispers against my lips, voice so choked the word barely shapes, but the bond thunderclaps approval. His thighs open around me and the scent of slick drifting up from his body triples—sweet and dizzying—primal as biology recalibrates itself to the bond’s directive.

I remove his shirt and drag my palms down his sides to the waistband of his pants, tuck fingers beneath, and pause again. Lucas nods hard, cheeks burning. I peel the fabric away slowly, baring the lean lines of his legs, and the flushed jut of his cock beading at the tip. The scent intensifies, dizzying even to me, and my mouth waters with need I do not try to disguise.

I run one hand up the inside of his thigh, spread slick with my thumb to ease the stretch already beginning at that hidden furrow below, and he jerks, keening low. Panic flickers in his eyes—too new, too sudden—and I still my hand, leaning to kiss the hollow beneath his ear and speak steadily.

Breathe, little mate. I taste the fear, but I will not hurt you.

“It’s not fear.” His voice wavers, half shame and half yearning. “It’s going to break me.”

I will hold the pieces, I vow, and brush a second finger gently through the slick. His head falls back, the tendon in his throat standing out taut, and a tremor passes through him from shoulders to toes. I drag both fingers up to his mouth, watch his lashes flutter when he sees them shine.

Taste, I say, wanting him conscious of how his body is already coaxing us forward. He parts his lips, and I slip the pads against his tongue. He sucks without instruction, eyes rolling, and the sound he makes lights the bond like lightning over summer trees.

The fever drives urgency through him; he lifts his hips, and I see his hole pulsing with the need to be filled. But I am patient, sliding down to settle between his knees, pressing slow kisses to the flat of his belly and lower, tracing every new tremor.

When my mouth closes over the head of his cock, Lucas cries out so sharply I feel the echo in my spine, and the bond flares with staggered relief—finally, finally. I take him deep and slow, swallowing until his hips jerk against the hold of my hands, then ease back, tracing the vein with my tongue.

“Onyx!” he keens, slipping his hand into my hair and thrusting into my mouth.

Each time I swallow down again, slick spills anew beneath my chin and his voice cracks, pleading. I move my mouth lower and spread him apart. Lucas sobs my name before I even put my tongue against his hole, and the sound nearly drags claws from my fingers again. I brace my hands against his thighs instead, holding him open with a gentleness that costs me more than force ever would.

I lap my tongue over him once, and his hips jolt hard enough that I have to pin one thigh to the furs before he hurts himself. His fingers twist in my hair, and through the bond I feel the startled, mortified thoughts before he can bury them: too much, too good, too strange, want more.