“Find her. Tell her she's welcome in the private wing again.”
He nods once and follows the guards out. The door closes, and the office fills with silence. Maeve and I are alone. The violence is over. The threats have ended. My father is caged, and the House that was never truly mine has become ours to shape.
The adrenaline fades, and exhaustion takes its place. I have been running on rage and terror for hours, and now both have drained away, leaving nothing but the hollow that follows when survival is no longer in question.
Her hand touches my arm. That emptiness fills with her presence, with the warmth of her palm against my skin, with her scent that has become home in ways I never understood I needed. Not triumph. Not celebration. Relief. Certainty. The quiet certainty that whatever comes next, we face it together.
“It's over.” Her words carry the same exhaustion weighing on me, the same wrung-out awareness that the night has taken more from us than we realized.
“It's beginning.”
She looks around the office, taking in the polished surfaces and the symbols of authority and the view of the canyon that my father lorded over for generations. “This is yours now.”
“Ours.” I mean it.
She steps closer, her hand sliding up my arm to find my face. She turns me toward her, and the touch carries gentleness that belongs to a medic examining a patient, except her gaze holds no clinical detachment.
“You're wounded.”
I am. Somewhere in the violence, someone landed a blow I did not register. The wound has already begun to close, Draveki healing sealing the damage, but blood has dried along my temple and matted into my hair.
“Later.” I catch her wrist, hold her hand against my face, let her touch anchor me here, where victory should taste sweeter and instead tastes like standing at the edge of a cliff.
She’s experienced horror tonight. Caged by my father, beaten by his servants, left in the dark with nothing but strays and her own conviction to sustain her. “I want to take you somewhere that isn't this room.”
Somewhere that belongs to us. Somewhere we can simply be.
She steps against me, and her scent floods my senses. Not her signature alone. Mine layered beneath it, woven through it, the claiming musk that marks her as chosen mixed with the sweetness that is hers alone. We have become a single scent now, inseparable, and breathing her in is like breathing myself back into existence.
I catch the undertone beneath. Heat. Slick warmth rising from her skin. She is exhausted, bruised, wrung out from hours of captivity and violence, and her body is responding to my proximity with an arousal that sends my blood rushing to my cock.
“That's the best idea I've heard all day.” Her words come out rough, but the look in her dark eyes holds nothing of exhaustion. Only hunger. Only want.
My cock hardens against her belly, and I do nothing to hide it.
“I need you.” The admission tears free without permission. “I want you. Need to make you mine again.”
She rises on her toes and presses her mouth to mine. The kiss lands soft at first, and then her teeth catch my lower lip and the tenderness burns away into need. Her fingers grip my jaw, holding me where she wants me, and I let her take what she needs because I would give her anything. Everything.
“I want you too.” She breathes the words against my mouth. “I want you so badly I can't think past it. Not here, though.” Her gaze flicks to the office that still holds my father's presence in every surface. “Take me back to your suite.”
“Our suite.” The correction emerges before thought, and her eyes darken with an intensity that makes my cock throb.
“Our suite.” She accepts the word, accepts what it means, and her hands slide down my chest to grip the fabric at my waist. “And this time I don't want to leave for days.”
The growl that rumbles through my chest vibrates against her palms. I grip her hips and lift her, and she wraps her legs around my waist with the ease of a female who belongs there. Her arms lock around my neck, her mouth finds my throat, and I carry her out of my father's office toward a future that belongs to us alone.
Chapter Seventeen
MAEVE
The corridors blur past in streaks of emergency lighting and stone that has witnessed generations of violence and will witness more before Vahiri Prime releases its grip on House Draven. Drazex carries me through them, my head tucked against his chest, my arms looped around his neck. Guards flatten themselves against walls as we pass. Servants drop their gazes. He doesn't slow. Doesn't acknowledge any of them. His grip tightens with each step, as if he expects enemies to materialize from the shadows, and I press closer because there's nowhere else I want to be.
His father is caged now. Samai is handling the aftermath, the logistics of containing a Lord who tried to murder his own heir, the restructuring that will consume weeks or months or years. None of it matters beyond the abstract. What matters is the male pulling me forward through passages that carry the scent of blood and adrenaline and musk that rises from his skin.
We round a corner and nearly collide with Korrel. The guard drops to one knee, head bowed, fist pressed to his chest in the same salute he offered before we descended into the tunnels.
“My lord.” Steady, despite the chaos still echoing through the compound. “What are your orders?”
