She is so fucking small, so tight and delicate-looking that it's impossible not to imagine how easily she would fit beneath me, how her soft little body would writhe if I got my hands on her.
There is something wild about her—untamed, untouched—and that only makes it worse.
No man's ever had her.
I know it in my bones.
She moves like she doesn't even realize what she's doing to me, and for the most part, I am a man of discipline.
Either way, I'm not sorry I'll be the first and the last.
Not sorry at all.
3
KEIRA
We marry in the Donnelly chapel, though calling it that now feels more like a nod to history than a matter of truth.
The saints are gone.
The altar is new, quarried stone polished until it gleams like bone, set against a backdrop of soft gold lighting and garlands of wild ivy threaded with garden roses from the western wall.
The pews are full with watchers—men in tailored suits with eyes like scales, women in velvet with too-smooth hands, everyone dressed for war under the cover of celebration.
But despite the names, the threats, the whispered alliances traded over bread and blood, there is music in the air.
There is scent.
There is warmth, impossibly so.
I walk the aisle alone.
Not because no one offered but because I refused to let a stand-in pretend to mean something they didn't.
My arm is bare, my spine straight.
The sound of my steps against the old stone floor echoes high into the rafters.
I wear white, but not bridal white—not the frosted sugar-puff fantasy of some wide-eyed girl.
My dress is satin, clean and cut close to the body, clinging where it should not and falling where it must.
It gleams in the lightlike water under moon, the kind of white that draws the eye and keeps it, the kind of white that dares you to speak.
Ruairí is already at the altar, standing beneath the carved arch where the crucifix used to hang.
His suit is darker than black, and the tie he wears—green, understated, just barely there—is the only color he allows himself.
His hair is brushed back, his jaw shadowed like he didn't bother shaving for the occasion.
But his eyes, when he lifts them, are clear.
Focused.
On me.
There is no scripture recited aloud.
