I sit on the edge of his bed. His bed. The mattress dips under my weight and I press my palms flat against the sheets and breathe.
The runner in me waits for the panic. The bolt reflex, the voice that says you don’t belong in someone else’s space because belonging means losing.
It doesn’t come.
I pull my knees up. Press my face against his pillow and wait.
The door chimes.
He fills the doorway.
Six-foot-eight of teal skin and burning yellow eyes and markings that pulse in rhythms registering in my teeth. He’s changed too—loose sleep pants, nothing else. His chest is bare and the bioluminescent patterns trace across his collarbones, down his sternum, along the planes of muscle that shift when he breathes.
“She’s asleep?” I ask.
“She faked unconsciousness within four minutes of the story beginning.” His mouth quirks. “Her acting has not improved since dinner.”
“The doors—”
“Locked. Pickles sealed them before I finished the first paragraph.”
We look at each other. The distance between us is maybe six feet. It feels like nothing. It feels like everything.
“Tavia orchestrated this,” I say.
“Yes.”
“Pickles was complicit.”
“Enthusiastically.”
“And you—” I take a breath. “You knew the whole time.”
“I calculated the probability at approximately ninety-seven percent.” He steps into the room. The door seals behind him. “I chose not to intervene.”
The air between us thickens. Charged, the way the atmosphere gets before an electromagnetic storm—all that energy building, looking for somewhere to ground.
“Cetus.” I hold his gaze. “You said tonight. You promised.”
“I don’t make promises I can’t keep.”
“Then keep this one.”
He crosses the room in two strides. His hands frame my face—always careful, claws sheathed, palms radiating warmth that sinks through my skin and into my blood. He tilts my head back and looks down at me with an expression equal parts tenderness and hunger and an ancient gravity that lives behind those yellow eyes.
“I need you to understand,” he says, and his voice drops into harmonics so low the air hums. “Lividian bonding is permanent. The bite, the claiming—it changes us both. Biochemically. My markings will respond to your heartbeat. Your scent will be encoded into my neural pathways. There is no undoing this.”
“I know.”
“You’re certain. Despite years of running. Despite every instinct that tells you to—”
“I’m not running.” I fist my hands in the waistband of his pants and pull him closer. “I’m staying. I’m yours. I’ve been yours since I hauled your cargo through a storm and didn’t charge extra, you impossible, beautiful, stubborn—”
He kisses me.
Not the desperate crash against the filing cabinet. Not the adrenaline-soaked claiming in the corridor. This is slow. Deliberate. His mouth moves over mine with the precision ofa man who catalogues variables, and right now I am the only variable that matters. His tongue traces my lower lip, coaxing me open, and the warmth floods my mouth—hotter than human, hotter than anything, tasting faintly metallic and sweet. Already addicted.
I melt into him. My hands slide up his bare chest and his patterns flare under my palms—that electric response, his whole nervous system lighting up where I touch him. He groans into my mouth, a low vibration that transfers through his chest into mine.
