It cracked something open inside me anyway. Because he could have climbed in without asking. Could have pushed past my boundaries like he'd pushed past every other obstacle between us. I was in no position to stop him, weak from the sedative, overwhelmed by heat symptoms, surrounded by his pack in the middle of nowhere with no way to escape.
He had all the power. And he was stillasking.
"No," I whispered, and my voice broke on the word, cracking like thin ice over deep water. "No, you can't. Stay out. Stay away from me."
Mason nodded. No argument. No pushback. No flash of Alpha dominance designed to override my refusal.
"Okay," he said simply. "I'll wait." And then—impossibly, inexplicably—he sat down. Right there on the floor. Just outside the boundary of my nest, his back against the bed frame, his long legs stretched out in front of him. He pulled out his phone, glanced at something on the screen, then set it aside and tipped his head back against the mattress.
Waiting.
I stared at him. Waiting for the catch, the trick, the moment when he would stop pretending to respect my boundaries and take what he wanted anyway. Waiting for the mask to slip, forthe predator to show through, for the violence that had to be lurking beneath that gentle facade.
He just sat there. Patient. Calm. His scent wrapping around me like a blanket I couldn't escape, warm and sweet and devastatingly familiar. Minutes passed. Five. Ten. The silence stretched between us, broken only by the soft sound of our breathing and the distant cry of wind against the windows.
"I hate you," I finally said.
"I know." His voice was soft. Unsurprised.
"I'm never going to forgive you for this." I told him, voice filled with anger.
"I know that too."
"So why?" My voice cracked again, and I hated it. Hated how weak I sounded, how broken, how far from the fierce defiance I'd felt during my escape attempt. "Why go to all this trouble? Why wait three years? Why not just drag me back the moment you found me?"
Mason was quiet for a long moment. I watched his profile in the soft golden light—the strong line of his jaw, the curve of his lips, the way his lashes cast shadows on his cheeks when he closed his eyes.
When he finally spoke, his voice was barely above a whisper. "Because I want you to choose us, Red."
I blinked. "What?"
"I want you to choose us." He turned his head, meeting my eyes, and the raw honesty in his gaze made my chest ache with something I refused to name. "Not because you have to. Not because your heat gives you no other option. Not because we've trapped you and broken you and left you no way out. But because youwantto. Because somewhere underneath all that fear, you remember what it was like when we were a family. When you were happy. When you belonged to us, and we belonged to you, and everything madesense."
"You kidnapped me," I said flatly. "You drugged me. You've been stalking me for three years. That's not exactly a compelling argument for choosing you."
"No," he agreed. "It's not. But I've loved you since you were sixteen years old, Ava. I've waited seven years for you, three of them watching you from a distance, wanting you so badly it felt like dying, and I never touched you. Never approached you. Never did anything but wait and watch and hope that someday, you'd be ready to come home."
His hand came up, hovering in the space between us. Not reaching into the nest. Not crossing the boundary I'd set. Just... there. An offering.
"I can wait a little longer," he said softly. "I can wait until you're ready. Until you see that this isn't a prison—it's a homecoming. Until you remember that you loved us once, and realize that maybe, underneath all the fear and the anger... you never really stopped."
I didn't take his hand. I didn't tell him to leave, either. Instead, I pulled the blankets up over my head, curled into the center of my nest, and pretended he wasn't there.
He stayed anyway….and somewhere, deep in the broken parts of me I refused to acknowledge, I was glad
CHAPTER SIX
AVA
I woke alone.
That was the first thing I noticed, the absence of warmth where Mason had been sitting all night. At some point, I must have fallen asleep, exhausted by fear and fury and the constant, grinding ache of my failing body. At some point, he must have left.
I could still smell him embedded in the blankets I'd pulled around myself like armor. The cashmere throw, my cashmere throw, the one I'd brought from home, the one that had always smelled faintly of something I couldn't name, was wrapped around my shoulders, and now I understood why I'd been so desperate to bring it.
I wanted to throw up.
Instead, I sat up slowly, cataloging my surroundings with clearer eyes than I'd had last night. The bedroom was large, obscenely large for a cabin, even a luxury one. Floor-to-ceiling windows dominated one wall, looking out over a vista of snow-covered mountains and endless evergreen forest. Beautiful.Remote. The kind of view that cost a fortune and guaranteed complete isolation.
