I didn’t look away.
The wave broke.
Pleasure tore through me in a long, obliterating rush, my back lifting from the furs, my voice fracturing into something I didn’t recognize. Through it all, Malric’s gaze stayed on mine and something moved across his face that his composure wasn’t fast enough to catch—something raw and real, then hidden before he’d let it fully surface.
I held his gaze until I couldn’t hold anything.
The release moved through me in diminishing waves, each quieter than the last, until I was flat on my back breathing like I’d been running. The heat that had lived under my skin for days had banked. Not gone. Settled. A fire that had stopped trying to consume everything in the room.
Thane came up beside me and drew me against his chest without speaking. His hand moved through my hair in slow passes. His breathing was controlled and I could feel what that control was costing him, yet he didn’t ask for anything in return.
After a while, I looked toward the door.
Malric was gone.
The corridor was dark and empty. The door sat at the same angle it had before, like nothing had shifted behind it. I was aware of the exact moment he changed internally before he put it back, and the feeling persisted. It sat in my chest like a splinter—too small to extract, too present to ignore.
Thane’s hand moved through my hair again.
“It doesn’t have to hurt. You know that now.”
I understood it now. That was the thing sitting strange and new in my chest, stranger than anything else that had just happened. Not the pleasure. The moment just before—Malric’s eyes on mine, my eyes on his, and what had passed between us in the space where neither of us said a word.
Malric
Iknew I should walk away.
I’d told myself I would. When Thane went in and closed the door, I’d stood in the corridor for thirty seconds, decided I was done, and walked twelve paces toward the stairs before her scent hit the back of my throat and stopped me cold.
That was an hour ago.
I hadn’t moved since.
I stood with my back against the stone wall, arms crossed, jaw clamped shut, and I cataloged every tactical problem currently facing the rebellion. Supply lines. The gap in our eastern contacts. The two conflicting intelligence reports about the king’s troop movements that I hadn’t reconciled yet. I ran numbers in my head. I composed the letter I needed to send to Caerwyn’s second when we got out of this tower.
None of it worked.
Her scent came through the door, heavy, cloying, and addictive. Sweet and thick and shot through with want, it had been building for the past hour until it was all I could smell. It permeated the corridor and arrowed straight down to my cock, which was painfully erect. My own body had decided, somewhere around the forty-minute mark, that strategy was irrelevant. My cock was hard in a way that had stopped being ignorable and started being a problem, pressure that had nowhere to go. Every time I thought I’d gotten it under control, I’d hear something from inside that room—a breath, a shift of fabric, Thane’s voice low and steady—and it would get worse.
She gasped, a throaty, raspy sound, and my head dropped back against the stone.
I shouldn’t be standing here. I was a grown man and a military commander, and I had held myself together under conditions that would have broken most people. And yet I was currently undone by a closed door and a slip of an omega in a heat spike. That was the complete picture of my situation.
I shoved off the wall and put three paces between myself and the door.
It didn’t help. Her scent followed me. Of course it did. It was in my clothes now, my hair, the back of my throat. My body had cataloged it as thoroughly as anything in my life and had developed a very clear opinion about what should happen next. But I couldn’t make myself leave the area. I was drawn to her like a fucking moth to a flame, even though I knew the flame would burn me.
I adjusted my painfully-erect cock and breathed through my nose. Bad idea. More of her scent. I breathed through my mouth instead and leaned one forearm against the opposite wall. While I stared at the stone inches from my face, I tried to think aboutsomething, anything, that wasn’t the sound she’d made thirty seconds ago.
I heard Thane’s voice, too low to make out the words. Then her voice answered, unsteady, and a band tightened around my chest when she asked about me, where I was.
And Malric?
Did she want me in the room? Or did she want me far away? I wish I knew.
I pushed off the wall and walked back. Stopped. Turned around. There was nowhere to go that wasn’t this corridor, that wasn’t adjacent to this room and everything happening inside it. No matter where I went, her scent permeated the stone, as if the tower taunted me with what I couldn’t have. That only confirmed my suspicions that the tower had some form of sentience.
Her scent spiked.
