It wasn't a place. It was a person.
It was him.
"I don't deserve this," I whispered.
He pulled back, his silver eyes fierce. "Don't ever say that. You deserve everything, Fate. Everything."
I wanted to argue. The coven's voices still echoed in my head—worthless, unwanted, a mistake. But the way he looked at me... maybe, just maybe, I could learn to believe him.
I reached up and dragged my fingers through his tangled hair—dark as midnight and coarse from the journey through the portal. Dirt and remnants of the Elder Dimension still clung to him.
"Let me wash your hair," I said softly.
He smiled—a real smile, not the broken one I'd seen in Alanna's court. "You don't have to."
"I want to." I reached for the shampoo. "You took care of me. Now it's my turn."
He turned, and I poured the shampoo into my palm. I worked it through his hair, my fingers massaging his scalp the way he'd done for me. He let out a low groan, his shoulders finally relaxing.
"God, that feels good."
I smiled against his back, pressing a kiss between his shoulder blades. "I know."
We stood there under the warm spray, washing away the nightmare. The dungeon. The betrayal. Alanna's cruelty. All of it swirling down the drain.
Darius turned and pulled me against his chest. His heartbeat was steady under my ear.
"I love you, Alice."
Three words. Simple words. But they filled every hollow place inside me—every crack left by rejection, every wound carved by loneliness. I'd spent my whole life starving for those words. And now they were mine.
Tears pricked my eyes. "I love you too."
“I want you.”
I gave him a crooked smile as his hard, throbbing flesh pressed against my inner thigh, hot as a brand. “Yes, I can feel that.”
But it was more than physical wanting. More than need. He wanted me—all of me. The broken parts. The scared parts. The parts I'd hidden from everyone else. And I wanted to give them to him.
He lifted my trembling thighs with his strong calloused hands, positioning them around his hips as his arousal pressed insistently against me, the heat of him scorching through me like wildfire.
I kissed him deeply, tasting the salt of his skin, breathing in his familiar scent of sweet pine. “Take me, Darius.”
He plunged into me with one powerful thrust, filling me completely, stretching me until pleasure bordered on exquisite pain. My breath caught as sensation rippled through my core, making me gasp his name into the darkness.
My body welcomed him deeper, my fingernails digging into his broad shoulder blades as we moved together.
I rocked my hips, our bodies slick with sweat and droplets of water, meeting his urgent rhythm with my own desperate need.
Pleasure surged through my veins like electricity, hot and insistent, and I arched my back against the slick tile wall as my orgasm crested in waves. The water from the shower pulsed down on our entwined bodies, steam rising around us in a cloud that made the bathroom feel like another world entirely. My whole body tingled from my curling toes to my fingertips digging into his shoulders, and I cried out his name as I came undone completely.
Darius' rhythm intensified, his fingers digging into my hips as he drove deeper with each thrust. His muscles tensed beneath my palms, a sheen of sweat making his skin glisten in the dim light.
When he finally threw back his head, the tendons in his neck stood out like cords, his face transformed in that moment of abandon as he cried out—half growl, half my name—and I felt the warm pulse of his release deep within me.
This was different. Before we'd come together in passion, in desperation, in a stolen moment. But this—this was something deeper. We'd almost lost each other. And now every touch, every breath, every whispered word felt like a promise. A vow. A beginning.
“I could get used to doing this every day,” he panted as he stared into my eyes.
