She huffs again—a different huff this time, shorter, the one that means I’ve landed a point she’d prefer I hadn’t.
“Whatever.”
She turns to leave.
My arm catches her.
Not rough—never rough with her, not in the ways that matter—but firm. My forearm hooks around her waist, the muscle pressing against the curve of her hip just above where the leathergives way to bare skin, and I pull her back into me. The motion is fluid, practiced, the kind of maneuver that happens between two bodies that have learned each other’s geometry through repetition and urgency and the particular intimacy of keeping someone alive long enough to argue with them in the morning.
Her back meets my chest.
And the contact—the sudden, full-body collision of her coolness against my heat—sends a current through me that starts at the point of contact and radiates outward with the focused intensity of a controlled detonation. My Alpha biology, already primed by the visual assault of her legs and the leather and the half-asleep vulnerability she wears like a second skin, registers her proximity with a surge of possessive awareness that I feel in my teeth.
Mine.
The word appears unbidden, primitive, from a part of my brain that predates language.
I don’t push it away.
I’ve stopped pretending I don’t mean it.
She pouts.
There it is. That expression. The one that dismantles every defense I’ve built with the efficiency of a precision weapon designed specifically for the structural weak points in my composure. Her bottom lip pushes forward, the motion so slight it’s barely visible, and her storm-gray eyes lift to meet mine from beneath those dark blue lashes with a look that is equal parts defiance and surrender and something softer that she’d deny to her last breath.
Cute.
Victoria Sinclair—the woman who tortured her twin sister for seventy-two hours and kicked her off a cliff without shedding a tear—is cute.
And I would sooner eat my own fist than say that word out loud in her presence.
My thumb rises to her mouth.
The pad of it—callused, scarred across the knuckle from an old break that never healed correctly—traces the curve of her bottom lip with a slowness that is entirely deliberate. I feel the softness of her skin against the roughness of mine, the contrast sharp and somehow perfect, and I watch her eyes as I do it—watch the way those storm-gray irises darken at the edges, the cobalt rings contracting as her pupils dilate by the fraction that tells me everything her expression refuses to.
She’s looking up at me.
And behind the practiced blankness, behind the walls and the void and the elaborate emotional architecture of a woman who has turned not-feeling into a survival strategy—I can see her. The real her. Thinking. Processing. Wanting things she’s trained herself to believe she doesn’t deserve.
“Never like to listen to me.” My voice drops lower, rougher, the Alpha register that I don’t always control and don’t always try to. My thumb presses lightly into the plush of her lower lip, feeling the warmth of her breath against my skin. “But love when I feed this mouth of yours, hmm?”
She says nothing.
Stares back up at me with those eyes that try to hide everything she’s thinking and succeed with everyone except me. The silence stretches between us—not uncomfortable, not awkward, but charged. Loaded with the specific electromagnetic tension that exists between two people who have been doing this long enough to have developed their own language of unspoken cues and implicit permissions.
I know what she wants.
She knows I know.
And she’s staying here, being that silent, submissive thing she becomes in these moments—not because she lacks the ability to speak, but because her silence is its own form of asking.
Victoria Sinclair doesn’t beg.
She just… stays.
And her staying says more than anyone else’s words ever could.
I want to make her struggle for it.
