I didn’t move.Didn’t lean into her touch.Just watched her with eyes that gave nothing away.
Her smile faltered.“Raphael?”
The warmth in her voice nearly broke me.I could smell her confusion now.
I extracted myself from the bed.Stood.Put distance between us.Every step cost me more than she would ever know.
“What’s wrong?”She sat up, pulling the sheet around her body.The sheet that smelled like us.Like everything we’d done.Like everything I was about to destroy.
“Nothing’s wrong.”My voice came out flat.Dead.Unrecognizable even to my own ears.
Her brow furrowed.She reached for me again.I stepped back.
“Did I do something?”The uncertainty in her voice was a knife sliding between my ribs.“Last night, was it?—”
“Last night was the fulfillment of our contract.”
The words hung in the air between us.I watched them land.Watched her face shift from confusion to disbelief.
“What?”
“You signed a contract.”I kept my voice level, dispassionate.A businessman concluding a transaction.“I collected what was owed.The debt is paid.We’re done.”
She stared at me.The color was draining from her cheeks, and her scent shifted again, flooding with something sharp and bitter.Fear.Hurt.Confusion all tangled together.
“You can’t mean that.After everything we?—”
“Everything?”I forced my lips into something that might have been a smile.Felt more like a grimace.“You mean the sex?It was adequate.”
Liar.
The wolf’s roar nearly broke through.I slammed it down, gritting my teeth against the pressure in my skull.Adequate.I’d called her adequate.The woman who’d given me everything, who’d made me feel things I’d spent thirty years convincing myself I was incapable of feeling.
Her eyes were filling with tears.I watched them spill over and track down her cheeks.I told myself this was necessary.This was protection.This was the only way to save her life.
“You held me.”Her voice was small.Broken.The sound of it cracked my resolve.“You looked at me like I mattered.You kissed me like?—”
“Like a man enjoying a warm body?”The cruelty came easier now.Like muscle memory.Like something I’d been trained to do.“Yes.That’s what men do, Lena.They take what’s offered and then they move on.”
She flinched like I’d hit her.I’d rather have hit her.Physical pain would heal.What I was doing now would scar.
I could see it happening in real time.The way her face collapsed.The way her shoulders hunched, trying to protect something vital that I was systematically destroying.She was shrinking in front of me, and I was the one making her small.
Stop.Stop.You’re destroying her.You’re destroying us.Stop.
The wolf clawed at my control, desperate, frantic.I could feel my fingernails sharpening, my jaw aching with the threat of elongation.I forced it back.Forced myself to stay human.Forced myself to keep my face stone while the beast inside me howled.
I crossed to where she sat on the bed.She looked up at me with those eyes, those impossible blue eyes that had seen through every persona I’d ever worn, and hope surfaced in her face.Hope that I was coming back to her.Hope that this was some kind of mistake, some kind of test, something she could fix if she just said the right words.
I reached for her throat.
Not to hurt her.But she didn’t know that.I saw the flash of fear, quickly suppressed, and it made me sick to my stomach.
My fingers found the collar.The chain was warm from her skin, saturated with her scent and mine.I’d put this on her myself.Claimed her with it.Watched her accept it like a vow.
“This was never meant to be permanent.”I unclasped it.Let it fall.
The sound it made hitting the floor was obscenely quiet.A soft thump against the hardwood.Nothing compared to the death of everything between us.
