"So you decided to weaken the bond without telling me."
"I decided to do something. Anything." His hand stills in my hair. "For the first time in three hundred years, I had a chance to actually save someone instead of just watching them die. Was it wrong? Yes. Was it selfish? Yes. But Kess—I've stood over forty-seven graves. Forty-seven women I killed just by being what I am. I couldn't add you to that number. Not when I could do something to prevent it."
The knot pulses again. More release, more clenching. My body is completely out of my control, responding to his whether I want it to or not.
"You should have trusted me," I say, and my voice shakes. "You should have told me the risks and let me decide."
"You're right."
"I'm not some fragile thing that needs protecting?—"
"I know."
"Then why?—"
"Because loving you made me stupid." The words come out ragged, scraped raw. "Because every time I looked at you, all I could see was your name carved into that wall. Because I've never wanted anything the way I want you, and the idea of losing you made me desperate enough to do terrible things."
I close my eyes and let out a breath that shudders through my whole body.
"That's not an excuse."
"No. It's not." His arms tighten around me. "But it's the truth. The only truth I have left."
We lie there in silence while the knot slowly, slowly starts to soften. The heat has burned itself out completely now—just a normal post-rut heaviness settling into my limbs, exhaustion and oversensitivity and the strange hollow feeling of emotions too big to process.
"I don't know if I can forgive you," I finally say.
"I know."
"I don't know if I can trust you again."
"I know that too."
"So where does that leave us?"
He's quiet for a long moment. The knot pulses one last time, and I feel it starting to deflate—the pressure easing, his cock beginning to slip free.
"It leaves us here," he says quietly. "In the dark. With me loving you and you hating me and a child growing between us that we made together. It leaves us broken, Kess. But still breathing. Still alive."
"That's not enough."
"Maybe not." His hand cups my face, tilts it up so I have to meet his eyes. "But it's a start. If you want it to be."
I don't answer.
The knot softens enough that he slips free, and I roll off him onto cold ground.
That's when I feel it.
Wetness between my thighs. Too much wetness. Different from slick or seed.
I look down.
Blood.
Not a lot—pink-tinged fluid rather than bright red—but there. Unmistakable against my pale inner thighs.
"Kess." His voice shifts, fear cutting through the post-coital haze. "You're bleeding."
