Her dark brown eyes moved across the scene, and he watched her process it in real time — two seconds, maybe less. He’d already told her Niara was being sold to another estate. Now here he was, wearing tactical gear, a weapons harness, and a laser-pistol strapped to his thigh. Her eyes flicked to Niara — small, packed, dressed for travel, shaking — and stayed there.
Her lips parted.
He closed the distance between them before she could speak, before she could ask the question forming on her lips, and he pressed her against the corridor wall with his body.
Not violent. He was exact even in panic — his weight pinned her without crushing, one hand flat on the stone beside her head, the other gripping her upper arm with measured force. Unmovable. A wall of muscle and tactical fabric and barely leashed terror. His face inches from hers. His forearm beside her jaw. His pulse slamming against the inside of his wrist where it pressed close to her skin.
"You saw nothing." His voice came out raw — not the aristocrat's cultured drawl, not the lord's cold command. The soldier underneath, stripped and urgent. "You know nothing. Go back to your room."
Her breath hit his throat in fast, warm bursts, then the scent of her filled his senses. His beast surged against his ribs, and the reason wasn't the danger in the corridor, and he knew it, and he hated himself for knowing it even as her heat bled through his vest and into his chest.
Her eyes blazed up at him—fury so hot it could have peeled paint from canvas. Her jaw clenched. Her chin lifted the same way it had in the maze, in the auction room, every time she refused to bend.
His gaze dropped to her mouth like it had in the garden that morning when she’d turned to face him. The light had caught the curve of her lower lip and his entire body had locked in place. He’d thought about cupping that stubborn jaw. Thought about tasting the sharp words she kept between her teeth.
He hadn’t. He’d walked away. He’d stood under cold water for nearly an hour and added it to the list of things he refused.
He wanted to now. Here, in this narrow corridor, with eighty-four minutes on the clock and a girl’s life balanced on a knife’s edge, with Nadir watching and Niara trembling and every operational priority screaming at him to move—he wanted to kiss this impossible, infuriating woman pressed against the wall beneath him.
His eyes found hers again.
Fury. Bright and scalding.
And beneath it—his beast caught the scent before his mind could deny it—want.
Her chin lifted. Her jaw set. The muscles in her arm tensed beneath his grip, not pulling away but gathering, and even pinned against a wall by a man twice her size, she looked like she was the dangerous one.
"Get your hand off me."
Each word placed like a knife laid on a table.
He released her.
His hand left her arm, and he stepped back. The cold air rushed into the space where she'd been. His beast howled at the absence. He drove it down.
The mask came. Lord Skarreth looked down at the woman whose scent was still burning through his nerve endings and said, in a voice that betrayed nothing: "Return to your room. Now."
She held his gaze for three heartbeats. Four. Five.
Then she turned and walked back down the corridor, her bare feet silent on the stone, her spine a blade, hair swaying with each step. At the junction where the corridor bent toward the east wing, she stopped.
She looked back at him over her shoulder.
Not submission. Not fear. Not even fury, though fury lived in the set of her jaw.
A promise.I saw. I will not forget. And you will answer for this.
She disappeared around the corner, and her footsteps faded.
Eighty-one minutes.
"My lord." Nadir's voice, carefully empty.
Skarreth unclenched his fists. He hadn't realized they'd closed.
"We move. Now."
The extraction was controlled chaos.
