I open the door before her knuckles can connect with the wood.
She stands in the dim light of the hallway, wearing one of the simple dresses the pack women provided for her, her hair loose around her shoulders, her feet bare on the cold stone floor. She looks like she has not slept since the confrontation in the hall. Like she has spent the last several hours trying to talk herself out of coming here.
I step aside and let her enter.
She crosses the threshold and stops in the center of the room, her arms wrapped around herself as though she is cold. The fire burns hot in the hearth. She is not cold. She is afraid of what she has come here to do.
"You almost killed him," she says finally.
"I showed restraint."
"That was restraint?"
"He threatened you." I close the door behind me and lean against it, giving her space, giving her the illusion of control over what happens next. "Restraint was letting him keep his tongue."
She stares at me, processing what I am capable of. What I committed for her. I can see her working through it, turning it over in her mind the way she turned over the photographs and journals in my study. Trying to reconcile the man who watched her from a distance for years with the man who just shattered another wolf's arm in front of his entire pack.
"Why?" The word is barely a whisper.
"You know why."
"Say it."
I push off from the door and walk toward her. She does not back away. Her chin lifts, stubborn and defiant, even as her breath quickens and her heartbeat flickers visibly at her neck.
"Because you are mine." I stop close enough to touch but do not reach for her. Not yet. "Because anyone who threatens what is mine forfeits their right to mercy. Because I have spent years watching you from a distance and I will not spend a single day watching someone else make you afraid."
She moves before I finish speaking.
She closes the distance between us and takes my face in her hands, dragging my mouth down to hers, kissing me with the same violence she showed in my study, all desperation and demand. I let her take what she wants for exactly three seconds. Then I grip her hips and spin her, pressing her back against the wall with my body.
The kiss changes. Deepens. Her mouth opens under mine and I taste desperation and hunger and something sweeter underneath. Something that might be surrender if she would let herself name it.
I slide my hands down her sides, gathering the fabric of her dress, dragging it up until my palms find bare skin. She gasps against my mouth as I grip her thighs and lift, and then her legs are wrapped around my waist and her back is arched against the wall and I am pressed against the heat of her through nothing but thin fabric.
"Stellan." My name on her lips is a prayer and a curse combined.
I press my mouth to her neck, feeling her pulse hammer against my tongue. My hand slides between us, finding the wet heat of her, and she cries out as my fingers stroke through slick folds.
"So wet." I push one finger inside her and she clenches around me, her hips rolling instinctively, seeking more. "How long have you been like this? Since the hall? Since you watched me break him for daring to speak your name with disrespect?"
She does not answer. She cannot. I add a second finger and curl them inside her, finding the spot that makes her spine arch and her breath shatter into pieces.
"Answer me, Iris."
"Yes." The word is torn from her throat. "Since the hall. Since you called me yours in front of everyone. Since you made him kneel."
I reward her honesty with my thumb against her clit, circling slowly while my fingers work inside her with ruthless precision. She is close already. I can feel it in the flutter of her walls, the desperate clench of her thighs, the way her nails dig into my shoulders hard enough to draw blood.
"Good girl," I murmur against her throat. "Come for me. Let me feel it."
She breaks apart with a cry that echoes off the stone walls, her body shuddering against mine, her heat pulsing around my fingers as the orgasm crashes through her. I hold her through it, drawing out every wave, every tremor, until she is limp and gasping in my arms.
I carry her to the bed and lay her down on the furs. She reaches for me as I settle over her, her hands fumbling with my belt, trying to free me from my clothes.
I catch her wrists and pin them above her head.
"Not tonight."
