I open my eyes.
Sybil steps into the room.
The breath is completely punched out of my lungs.
She is no longer covered in mud, ash, and my blood. She has showered. Her dark, heavy hair is damp, falling in clean, completely unstyled waves over her shoulders. She is wearing a pair of simple black Syndicate medical scrubs. The v-neck top is slightly too large, exposing the delicate, sharp line of her collarbones and the pale, flawless skin of her throat—the exact spot where I branded her with my mouth in the bunker.
But it is her eyes that completely arrest me.
The fractured, terrified midnight blue is gone. The perpetual panic that haunted her every movement has been entirely burned away. The gaze that meets mine is deep, dark, and utterly impenetrable. It is the gaze of a survivor who has looked the devil in the eye and realized she likes the heat of the fire.
The heavy doors slide shut behind her, sealing us inside.
She doesn't run to the bed. She doesn't dissolve into a weeping, hysterical mess of relief. She walks slowly across the white tiles, her bare feet making absolutely no sound.
She stops at the edge of the mattress. She looks at the heavy white bandages wrapping my left shoulder, tracking the faint, pink seep of fresh blood staining the gauze from where I ripped the IV out. Then, she looks at my right hand, noting the bruised, split knuckles resting on the sheets.
Finally, she looks at my face.
"You're awake," she states, her voice completely calm, completely flat.
"I told you," I reply, my voice a dark, velvet rasp that reaches out to physically caress her. "They will never kill me."
She reaches out. Her small, delicate fingers wrap around the cold steel railing of the hospital bed. Her knuckles turn white.
"I thought about letting you bleed out on that floor," she whispers, the absolute, unfiltered honesty of her words slicing through the sterile air like a scalpel.
My heart executes a heavy, violent thud against my ribs. I don't look away. I don't apologize. "But you didn't."
"No," she agrees, a single, hot tear finally breaching her defenses, slipping past her dark lashes to cut a path down herpale cheek. "I dragged your heavy, miserable body through the mud instead. And then I packed your wound while you choked me in your delirium."
"I would never hurt you, Sybil," I growl, the instinct to protect her from my own violence surging wildly in my blood.
"You already did," she counters, her voice dropping into a fierce, commanding whisper that completely commands the room. She leans closer over the bed railing. "You confessed, Thayer. In the cabin. You told me you knew my father was going to betray you. You let him do it."
"I did," I admit, the unapologetic, toxic truth hanging heavy between us.
"You burned my entire world to the ground," she chokes out, her chest heaving as the raw, unadulterated anger finally begins to break through her calm facade.
"I burned your cage to the ground," I correct her, my right hand shooting out. I wrap my massive fingers entirely around the back of her neck, my grip firm, unyielding, dragging her down until our faces are mere inches apart. The scent of the cheap medical soap on her skin is entirely overridden by the intoxicating, addictive scent of her sheer proximity. "Your father's world was a prison, Sybil. I just provided the match. I destroyed it so that you would have absolutely no choice but to reign in mine."
"You're a psychopath," she breathes, her lips trembling, her eyes darting to my mouth.
"I am your husband," I murmur, my thumb brushing over the frantic, wildly beating pulse at the base of her throat. "And you pointed a loaded gun at my underboss to protect me. You claimed me, Sybil. Just as surely as I claimed you."
The cognitive dissonance in her brain completely shatters.
She doesn't pull away from my grip. She leans into it. Her hands release the steel railing of the bed and fly up, completely burying themselves in the thick, dark hair at the nape of my neck.
She crashes her mouth down onto mine.
It is an explosion. It is the violent, catastrophic culmination of six years of obsessive stalking, eighteen years of trauma, and forty-eight hours of pure, unadulterated hell.
Her kiss is desperate, punishing, and entirely consuming. She bites down on my lower lip, a sharp, stinging pain that I welcome with a dark, feral groan. She tastes like antiseptic, salt tears, and pure, intoxicating surrender.
I ignore the blinding, agonizing scream of my torn shoulder. I slide my right arm entirely around her waist, gripping the fabric of the medical scrub top, and haul her up onto the narrow hospital bed with me.
She gasps as her knees hit the mattress, straddling my hips. She is careful, entirely hyper-aware of my injuries, keeping her weight suspended above my wrapped chest, but the sheer friction of her thighs gripping my waist sends a catastrophic surge of dark, heavy blood straight to my groin.
