The shift happens faster than I can track, one shape dissolving into another in the space of a heartbeat. Where the wolf stood, now Stellan rises to his full height, naked and steaming in the frigid air. His body is a map of violence, scarred and muscled and built for exactly this kind of pursuit. His cockjuts hard against his stomach, thick and flushed despite the cold, and the sight of it sends another wave of shameful heat through my core.
He stalks toward me, and I stumble backward until my heel catches on a buried rock. The snow catches me when I fall, cold and wet against my back. Before I can scramble up, he's on me, his body covering mine, his heat bleeding through my frozen layers like a brand.
His hand fists in my hair and yanks my head back.
"I told you what would happen if you ran." His voice is barely human, rough with the wolf still riding him. His weight pins me to the snow, and I can feel his cock pressing between my thighs through my clothes, thick and hot and demanding.
Every muscle arches toward him without permission. That primal, shameful part of me screaming for relief, for surrender, for him. I bite my tongue hard enough to taste blood, using the pain to anchor myself to the last shreds of my sanity.
"Then do it." The words come out savage, broken. "Take what you want. That's what monsters do."
His expression changes. The predator wavers, and for one impossible moment, I see the man beneath. See the war playing out behind his eyes, hunger fighting against conscience.
"No." The word sounds torn from his throat. "I want you to fight it. Fight until there's nothing left. And when you come to me anyway, when you hate yourself for how badly you need this—that's when I'll take what's mine."
Confusion crashes through the haze of fear and arousal. This isn't what I expected. This isn't how the monster in my head behaves. He's supposed to take, to claim, to prove that all his talk of civilization is just a thin veneer over animal instinct.
He's supposed to give me something to hate him for.
Instead, he lifts me from the snow like I weigh nothing. His arms wrap around me, one beneath my knees and one across myback, and I curl instinctively toward his warmth despite myself. The contact sends electricity racing across my skin, and a needy whimper escapes me. I hate myself for it.
"You're hypothermic." His voice has steadied, the wolf receding beneath the surface. "And your heat is accelerating. If I hadn't found you when I did, you would have died within the hour."
"Maybe that was the point."
His arms tighten around me, a dangerous fury flickering across his features. "Don't. Don't ever say that again."
He carries me back toward the keep, moving through the snow with an ease that mocks my desperate flight. The blizzard swirls around us, but his body blocks the worst of the wind, and slowly, painfully, feeling begins to return to my extremities. My fingers throb. My toes burn. And beneath the physical agony, the fire inside continues to build, fed by the proximity of his naked skin.
I should feel relief that he stopped. I should be grateful that he showed restraint when every fiber of his being clearly demanded otherwise. Instead, I feel cheated. I feel empty and aching and furious at him for denying what my body craves.
The realization terrifies me more than anything else tonight.
"I hate you." The words sound hollow even to my own ears.
"I know." He doesn't look down at me. His jaw is set, his expression carved from stone. "But you'll hate yourself more if I took you like that. Half-frozen and delirious, unable to give true consent. I won't build whatever this is between us on that foundation."
"There is nothing between us."
"Keep telling yourself that." His voice drops lower, intimate despite the cold. "But your body knows the truth. Your scent tells me everything your words deny. You want me, Iris. You want meso badly you can barely breathe, and that terrifies you more than anything I could do."
The keep looms out of the blizzard, torches flickering in the pre-dawn gloom. Guards spot us and snap to attention, their expressions carefully blank as their alpha carries a half-frozen woman through the gates. I try to summon shame for how this must look, but my reserves are empty. All I have left is exhaustion and the relentless fire that Stellan's proximity only makes worse.
He carries me to my room, removes my wet clothes and sets me on the bed with surprising gentleness. Every nerve protests the loss of his warmth, my hands reaching for him before I can stop myself. He catches my wrist and places my hand back at my side, then pulls the blankets over me with clinical efficiency.
"Your full heat will hit within hours." His voice is carefully controlled, but I see the strain around his eyes, the tension in his shoulders. He wants to stay. He wants to take the submission my treacherous flesh is desperate to offer. "It will last three days, possibly more given how long you've been suppressed. It will be painful. It will be maddening. And when you finally break, when you come to that door because your body won't let you do anything else—that's when I'll open it."
"Why?" The question tears out of me. "Why torture me when you could just take what you want?"
He pauses at the door, his back a wall of scarred muscle and barely leashed power. When he speaks, his voice is rough with restraint.
"Because what I want is worthless if you don't choose to give it. Because I've spent years watching you from a distance, learning every detail of who you are, and the woman I came to know deserves better than being mounted like an animal in heat. Because when I finally take you, I want you lucid enough to remember every second." He looks back over his shoulder, andthe intensity in his gaze pins me to the mattress. "And because despite what you think, I am not the monster your grandmother made me out to be."
He leaves. The latch clicks into place behind him. And through the thick wood, I hear him settle against the frame, positioning himself as a guard.
The heat hits an hour later.
It starts as a flush, spreading across my skin like wildfire. Then the cramps begin, deep and savage, my womb clenching around an emptiness that demands to be filled. Slick soaks through my undergarments, pooling beneath me on the silk sheets. My nipples ache with every brush of fabric. My clit throbs in time with my racing heart.
