She looked beautiful.
"Happy now?" she spat, her voice dripping with venom.
"Getting there," I replied evenly. I held out my hand. "Come on. You need to eat." She stared at my hand like it was a snake. Through the bond, I felt her revulsion, and underneath it, against her will, the pull. The need. Her body wanted to take my hand, wanted to let me lead her, wanted to submit to her Prime.
She was fighting it with everything she had.
"I'm not hungry," she said flatly.
"I didn't ask if you were hungry. I said you need to eat." I kept my hand extended, patient. "The rules are simple, Avalon. You eat meals with us. You sleep in the nest. You allow physical contact. Follow the rules, and this is easy. Fight them, and it gets harder."
"Rules," she repeated, her voice bitter. "You kidnapped me, claimed me against my will, and now you want me to follow rules?"
"Yes."
She laughed—a sharp, broken sound. "And if I don't?"
"Consequences." I let the word hang in the air. "Not punishment. Consequences. There's a difference."
"Enlighten me." She hissed, eyes blazing.
"Punishment is about causing pain. Consequences are about teaching." I took a step closer, and she flinched back. "If you refuse to eat, we feed you. If you refuse to come out of the bathroom, we go in and get you. If you try to hurt yourself again—" My eyes dropped to the bandage on her neck. "—we restrict your freedom until we can trust you."
Her green eyes blazed with hatred. Through the bond, I felt the force of it—hot and bright and absolutely genuine. I also felt what she didn't want me to feel. The pull. The ember Caleb had talked about—that tiny, flickering remnant of what she'd felt for us before she learned to be afraid.
"Breakfast," I said firmly. "Kitchen. Now." For a long moment, she didn't move. I felt her resistance through the bond—the desperate need to defy me, to prove that she wasn't beaten.
Then her shoulders slumped, just slightly. The exhaustion won out over the defiance. She walked past me toward the kitchen, her spine rigid, her head held high. A queen walking to her execution.
We followed. Caleb fell into step beside me, his massive presence a wall of calm certainty. "She'll come around," he said quietly, so only I could hear.
"I know."
"We just need to remind her of her old feelings once more.." Through the bond, I felt his patience, vast and deep and utterly unshakeable. He'd waited three years, watching her from the shadows, never breaking. He could wait longer.
We all could.
Ava reached the kitchen and stopped, staring at the table where breakfast was already laid out. Through the bond, I felt her despair. Her fury. The part of her that was screaming to run, to fight, to do anything other than submit.
And underneath all of it, buried deep but not deep enough to hide from us: The pull. The memory of loving us.
We'd fan it back into how it used to be. However long it took.
She was ours now. And we weren't letting go.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
AVA
The bond was loud.
That was the only way I could describe it, a constant noise in my head that never stopped, never quieted, never gave me a moment's peace. Four presences humming at the edges of my consciousness, four heartbeats layered beneath my own, four sets of emotions bleeding into mine until I couldn't tell where I ended and they began. I sat at the kitchen table, a plate of eggs and toast in front of me that I hadn't touched, and tried to remember what silence felt like.
Mason sat across from me, eating his own breakfast with infuriating calm, his golden hair catching the morning light, his honey-brown eyes occasionally flicking up to study me. Ethan was to my left, reading something on a tablet, occasionally sipping his coffee, his green eyes sharp behind the screen. Leo lounged to my right, watching me with those sharp gray eyes, a small smirk playing at the corner of his mouth, his dark hair artfully mussed.
Caleb stood by the doorway, arms crossed over his massive chest, ice-blue eyes fixed on me with that patient intensity that made my skin crawl. He hadn't said a word since I'd emerged from the bathroom. He didn't need to. I could feel him through the bond—calm, certain, waiting. They could all feel me too. That was the worst part.
Every flicker of hatred, every surge of despair, every traitorous moment when my body wanted to lean toward them instead of away—they felt all of it. There was nowhere to hide. No thought I could keep private. No emotion I could suppress deeply enough that they wouldn't sense it. I was transparent to them now. Exposed. Owned in a way that went far beyond the marks on my neck.
