I stood at the window for a long moment, my reflection a ghost in the glass.The mountains were silver and black under the moonlight, the peaks sharp against the dark sky.Beautiful.Cold.Indifferent to the man standing below them with a mate he couldn’t touch and a heart he couldn’t heal.
The wolf pressed against my consciousness, quieter now but no less present.He could feel her from here.Could track her breathing, her heartbeat, the slow rhythm of her grief through walls and floors and the physical distance she had put between us.
She said she loved you.Before.She said the words.
She had.That night, the night before her father died, she had looked at me with those blue eyes and said she loved me.And my heart had cracked open in a way I had never allowed before.And then hours later I had crushed her with words designed to destroy.
You were convenient.A warm body with a debt to pay.Nothing more.
I turned from the window.Lay down on my back.The bandages pressed against the mattress, a dull ache that was almost comforting in its simplicity.Physical pain was manageable.Physical wounds healed.
The damage I had done to her was harder to repair.Might be impossible to repair.But I had to try.
The wolf settled into grief rather than rage.Not acceptance, exactly.More like the tired recognition that tonight’s battle was lost and tomorrow’s would be different.He curled in the back of my mind, whimpering softly, mourning the mate who slept alone on her wedding night.
Tomorrow, the work begins.
Patience.Consistency.Actions instead of words.I would prove myself to her one small kindness at a time.I would respect her boundaries even when every cell in my body screamed to cross them.I would wait, and work, and earn.
She didn’t have to love me.She didn’t have to forgive me.She just had to let me protect her long enough to keep her alive, to shield her from the Pakhan’s interest and the stalker’s threat and all the dangers she didn’t know existed.
But even as I thought it, I knew I was lying to myself.
Protection without love wasn’t enough.Not for me.Not for the wolf.We needed her heart as much as we needed her body safe.
She had no idea what power she held.She could break me with a word if she ever learned how completely she owned me.
And earning that heart might take the rest of my life.
Sleep wouldn’t come.I knew that already.So I lay in the darkness, staring at the ceiling I couldn’t see, listening to the house settle around me.Tracking her heartbeat from rooms away, that steady thump-thump that was the only music I wanted to hear.At some point she stopped crying.At some point her breathing slowed into the rhythm of sleep, her body surrendering to exhaustion even if her mind wouldn’t surrender to me.
Good.Let her rest.Let her wake up tomorrow and find that I hadn’t invaded her space, hadn’t forced her into a wedding night she didn’t want, hadn’t proven myself the monster she believed me to be.
Let her begin, in some small way, to wonder if she had misjudged.
The stars burned outside my window, cold and beautiful and impossibly far away.I had spent thirty years learning not to hope.Not to want.Not to need anything I couldn’t take by force or buy with money.
But she had broken all those rules the moment I had scented her.
Still there, still possible.
Tomorrow, I would begin proving I deserved them.
7
LENA
The ring was still on my finger.
I stared at it in the gray morning light, that platinum band catching the weak sun through the curtains.I hadn’t taken it off before falling asleep.Hadn’t even considered it, which was worse.My body had accepted the shackle while my mind was busy drowning in a pillow soaked with tears.
My room.The same vaulted ceiling and burgundy drapes and the vase that Alice kept filled with fresh flowers.White roses today.I wondered if she thought that was appropriate.For a bride.For a prisoner.I couldn’t tell the difference anymore.
I sat up, pushing the hair from my face.My eyes were swollen, my throat raw, the skin under my jaw tight with dried salt.The pillow was damp on both sides because at some point in the night I had flipped it, searching for a cool spot that didn’t smell like grief.Pathetic.I had spent my wedding night weeping into Egyptian cotton while the man who had put me here slept somewhere below.
Except.The door.
Closed.Locked from the inside, the way I had left it.The handle hadn’t turned in the night.No footsteps had paused outside.No knock, no demand, no whispered reminder of what the marriage certificate entitled him to.
