Magnus stared down at her, chest rising and falling. His voice came out dark and visceral.“Tell me to stop.”
He meant it.Even now. Even like this. He would stop if she asked.
That undid her more thoroughly than anything else tonight.She held his gaze. “No.”
Something fierce and unmistakably male broke open in his expression.
Magnus lifted her up in his arms and started for the stairs.The room tilted beneath the sudden motion. One arm hooked around his shoulders automatically. Her dress spilled over his forearm. The hall ahead stretched in warm pools of shadow and light.
Behind them the discarded shirt, the scattered studs, and the dark drops of blood remained where the night had leftthem.
Ahead of them lay his bedroom.
Magnus didn’t slow once.
Elia looked up at his face, at the hard lines of his face and the terrible purpose in his eyes, and knew with a certainty that shook her to the core that whatever happened next would change everything.
The knowledge should have terrified her.Instead she tightened her arms around his neck and let him carryher upstairs.
The stairs passed beneath her without her registering them.She was aware of him instead. The heat of his bare chest against her side. The strength of his arms. The way he carried her without effort, as though her weight was something he had already accounted for and dismissed as irrelevant. His eyes were fixed forward. The bandage on his forearm brushed her shoulder with every step, and every time it did, something tightened in her chest that had nothing to do withfear.
He had bled forher.
The thought kept returning in a loop she couldn’t break. Not metaphorically. Not abstractly. He had put his body in front of a blade meant for her throat, and now he was carrying her upstairs in his own house with blood still drying on his skin, and he hadn’t once looked at her as though she owed him forit.
That undid her more thoroughly than the kisshad.
He nudged open the bedroom door with his shoulder. The room beyond was warm and dim, lit by low lamps. The bed was still made, the covers pulled tight and meticulous the way the staff kept everything in this house. She had sat on the edge of that bed before. Had thought about him from it. Had lay awake staring at the ceiling and told herself the wanting was just gratitude, just proximity, just the predictable confusion of a woman who had never been given anything without a price.
She had stopped believing that somewherearound thepool.
Magnus set her down at the foot of the bed. He didn’t step back. He stood directly in front of her, close enough that she had to tilt her head to keep his eyes, and for a moment he simply looked at her. The same way he had looked at her on the balcony at the gala. The same way he had looked at her across every distance he had ever knowingly maintained betweenthem.
Like she was something he had been patient about for a very longtime.
“Still shaking,” he said.
“I know.”
“Adrenaline.”
“Probably.” She reached up and pressed her palm against his sternum. His skin was hot. His heartbeat moved beneath her hand, steadier than hers. She flattened her fingers and felt the breath expand in his chest. “Or maybe this.”
His gaze dropped to her hand. Something moved through his expression—afracture in the tough surface he maintained the way other men maintained fortresses.
“Elia.”
Her name in his mouth still did something to her she couldn’t catalog properly. Not the way the Donati sons had spoken it, snapping it out to summon her from the edge of a room. Not the way Bianca had used it, clipped and diminishing. Magnus said her name like it meant something. Like it was a word he had been given privately and intended tokeep.
“I’m not afraidof you,” shesaid.
“I know.”
“I need you to know that I’m not doing this because I’m grateful.” Her voice was steadier than she expected. “Or because I think I owe you. Or because I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
His eyes sharpened. “Why are you doing it?”
“Because I want to.” The words came out certain and nothing like the version of herself that had stood in the Donati drawing room with her eyes cast down and her hands folded and her wants packed away in a place where they couldn’t inconvenience anyone. “Because you’re the first person who made me understand that wanting is allowed.”
