Stellan stands at the threshold, leaning against the frame with his arms crossed over his chest. His expression is utterly still, unreadable, his pale eyes fixed on my face with an intensity that makes my skin prickle. He doesn't look angry. He looks like a man waiting for a verdict, braced for whatever judgment I'm about to deliver.
"You're insane." The words come out steadier than I feel. "This is... you watched me for years. All those years."
"Yes."
"You knew I was omega before I did."
"Yes."
"Why didn't you just take me then?" The question tears out of me, raw with confusion and fury and desire I don't want to feel. "You could have. The blood pact was always there, waiting. You could have claimed me at eighteen and saved yourself all of this." I gesture at the files, the photographs, the journals that document his compulsion in damning detail.
He pushes off from the doorframe and walks toward me, slow and deliberate. I hold my ground, even though every instinct screams at me to retreat. He stops close enough that I can feel the heat radiating from his body, close enough that his scent wraps around me like a physical embrace.
"Because I wanted you ripe." His voice is low, rough, barely leashed. "Taking a frightened girl proves nothing. I wanted you grown. Strong. I wanted you to build a life worth mourning sothat when you finally came to me, we'd both know exactly what it cost you."
The words settle into my chest like stones dropped into still water, sending ripples through everything I thought I understood about this man.
"That's insane," I whisper.
"Yes."
"You stalked me. You fantasized about mutilating men who touched me. You documented my entire life like I was a specimen in a cage."
"Yes."
"And you think letting me have a few years of freedom somehow makes that okay?"
"I don't think in terms of okay." His hand lifts, and I flinch, but he only traces the line of my jaw with his knuckles. The touch is gentle, almost reverent, completely at odds with the violence documented in his journals. "I think in terms of mine. You've been mine since the moment I caught your scent. The pact, your grandmother, the years—none of it changed that. Everything I did was just patience."
There's no guilt in his voice. No justification. Just certainty—the kind that doesn't leave room for argument because argument would require him to see me as something other than his. He doesn't. He never has.
But my heart is stuttering in my chest, and my skin is burning where his knuckles graze my jaw, and the omega instincts I've spent my whole life suppressing are screaming at me to lean into his touch, to bare my throat, to let him claim what he's been waiting so long to take.
I grab his shirt and yank him down to my level.
The kiss is violent. Furious. A claiming as much as a surrender, my teeth catching his lower lip. My hands slide up his chest and around his neck, nails digging in. He makes a soundagainst my mouth, surprise and hunger tangled together, and then his hands are in my hair and his body is pressing me back against the desk and he's kissing me like he's been starving for this exact moment for endless years.
Maybe he has.
I taste blood and don't know whose it is. His tongue sweeps into my mouth, demanding and thorough, and I meet him stroke for stroke, pouring all my confusion and anger and shameful wanting into the press of lips and teeth. His hands slide down my sides, gripping my hips hard enough to bruise, and I arch into him, heat coiling tight in my core, seeking friction, seeking relief, seeking surrender.
Then I shove him away.
I wrench my mouth from his and shove against his chest. He doesn't move. Doesn't even sway. Just stands there, breathing hard, blood smearing his lip where I bit him, his eyes blazing with a hunger that tightens something low in my belly.
"I need—" The words catch. I can't say what I need. Space. Time. Air that doesn't smell like him. "I can't think when you're this close."
His hand closes around my throat. Not squeezing—just holding. A reminder of exactly how much power he's choosing not to use. His thumb strokes once over my pulse point, feeling the way my heart slams against his grip.
Then he lets go. Steps back. One step. Deliberate. A concession, not a retreat.
"Go." His voice is rough, scraped raw. "But understand something, Iris. I'm letting you walk away. That's not the same as you leaving."
I don't answer. I can't. I slip past him and out the door, my pulse roaring in my ears, his scent clinging to my skin like a brand I'll never scrub clean.
8
STELLAN
