He slides a small leather case across the console into my lap. I open it. Inside: the blood-ink kit—an ancient ritual pen, a strip of cured vellum, a vial of ink the color of dried leaves. The paraphernalia of oath-binding that is also, disturbingly, a legal instrument in his world.
“This is the private covenant,” he says. “Witnessed by my house, not the public. It makes abuses traceable through ritual signatures—but not publicly searchable. It gives you additional legal recourse without exposing the mechanics of the bond.”
We talk through the clauses again. “No unilateral veto,” I insist. “Any suspension requires a shareholder supermajority, a neutral trustee’s approval, and forensic confirmation from an agreed third party.”
“And public disclosure after resolution,” he adds, the concession obvious. “Transparency, eventually. Not secrecy forever.”
He trades ritual power for public constraints. I accept his house’s oath for the company’s safety. We are architects of a marriage of institutions.
When the lawyers leave and the cameras dim, we go upstairs to my private suite. The apartment is quiet the way a held breath is quiet. Lucien closes the door and arranges the ritual space small and private—candles in symmetry, a single velvet blanketfolded on the floor. He has learned to be deliberate. I have learned to be measured.
We stand facing each other like two people about to sign the most intimate contract either of us has ever seen.
“Consent,” I say. “Every step. Full explanation. The right to stop.”
“Always,” he replies. The bond hums beneath the word—expectant, patient. He pulls his glove off. For once he lets something of himself be visible without armor.
I extend my hand, palm up. He takes it and uncorks the vial. The ink is cold and metallic. His finger brushes mine as he pricks the pad of his finger and then mine with the same ceremonial blade. There is pain. There is also surrender—contained, deliberate. We make a small cross on the vellum.
We speak vows because he insisted on legal rigor and I insisted on language precise enough for a court. The lines we recite echo the clauses we wrote: to protect, to refrain from unilateral claim, to disclose in the event of abuse; to treat the mate bond as partnership, not property. The words are formal, almost ridiculous, and in saying them we make them true.
When our blood inks the page, something inside me relaxes. The bond is acknowledged, tethered. Not erased. Not owned. Bound to conditions I helped write. It feels like signing myself back to myself.
Then our hands become physical—clauses folded into kisses. First a test, then permission. Lucien moves with the same economy he brings to battle—precise, commanding, never careless. He explores me like an argument he intends to win by consent; I answer with equal force.
He tastes faintly of cedar and iron. He smells like salt and wind and the inside of an old house where dark things are kept safe. The wolf in him is not a monster tonight. It is an animal that knows its place at my side.
We make love like negotiators. There is strategy in the way we pause to breathe. There is tenderness in the long hand on my back. We invent language that is both legal and intimate: “Do you consent?” “I do, and I reserve the right to revoke.” We laugh once, a short harsh sound that breaks the last of my old rules.
After, we lie facing each other on the velvet blanket. The city beyond the window is a slow, blinking machine. Lucien traces a line along the inside of my wrist—over the faint raised scar from my childhood, the one that taught me never to be vulnerable. His thumb maps a route over skin and promises.
“You keep asking for control,” he says finally. “You sign contracts like lifelines.”
“It’s how I survived,” I say. “It’s how I know I exist.”
He folds his forehead to mine. “I don’t want to take that from you.”
“And I don’t want to lose you to a crown or to a clause,” I whisper. The bond answers with a scent—cedar and salt—and a memory-flash of sea cliffs where his house meets wind. The image feels less like invasion and more like orientation now.
We sleep. When I wake, morning catches the glass and fragments it again into a thousand small suns. Lucien is awake already, draped over the arm of the couch, the vellum unfolded on the coffee table. He has a cup of coffee in his hand and a look I recognize: future-mind, not present-mind. He has never been a man to linger.
“Run through the worst-case,” he says. “Regulators come back. A rival tears up the charter and drags us into litigation. A foreign court files a complaint. We lose the public trust. We lose the firm.”
“So we hold to the contract,” I say. “We release the forensic logs. We let the trustees audit. We make the public case so airtight they can’t freeze assets without a court order.”
“And what about the scroll?” he asks.
My stomach drops. I thought today would be about optics and policy, about public healing. I had not expected old paper to land on my lap again.
He slides the folded scroll across the table. I unroll it slowly. The script is cramped, ancient. Marginalia corners ideas into warnings. I find the passage Ana flagged during the raid—the line that made her go cold.
“Heirs must choose,” I read aloud. My voice is small in the wide room.
The clause continues: “In the event of union, the blood that answers the seal bears counsel and claim. Succession binds the issue to counsel convened at the sign of the tide.”
Words like tides and heirs and counsel pull themselves off the parchment like animals waking.
“What does ‘issue’ mean here?” I ask.
