In sleep, he looked younger.The hard lines softened, the tension that lived in his jaw finally released.Dark lashes fanned against his cheeks.I searched for signs of the wolf now that I knew to look for them.The inhuman stillness that had always unsettled me.The way his eyes caught light in dim rooms.The heat that radiated from his skin, warmer than any human should run.The way he always knew when I entered a room before he could possibly have heard me.
It had all been there.I just had not known how to read it.
Fated mates.The words echoed in my head, still not quite fitting into any framework I understood.His wolf had recognized me the moment we met.Everything he had done, every cruel word and calculated manipulation, had been warring against an instinct that screamed I was his.
What did that make me?
His eyes opened.For a moment, I saw the amber flare beneath the gray, the wolf checking for danger.Then his focus sharpened on my face, and I watched him brace himself.Waiting for the fear.The regret.The morning-after realization that I had made a terrible mistake.
I reached up and touched his jaw instead.The stubble rasped against my palm.
“You’re still here,” he said.His voice was rough with sleep and something else.Wonder, maybe.Or disbelief.
“I told you I wasn’t running anywhere.”
His arm tightened around me, pulling me closer until my back pressed flush against his chest.I let him.Let myself be wrapped in his heat, his scent, the impossible reality of what we were.His nose brushed behind my ear, and I heard him inhale deeply.Scenting me.The way he always had.
“You have questions.”Not a question itself.He knew me well enough by now to read the thoughts spinning behind my eyes.
“About a thousand of them.”
He pressed his lips to my hair.“Ask.”
I traced my fingers along his collarbone, down to his chest, feeling the steady thump of his heart beneath my palm.The rhythm was slower than a human heartbeat.Stronger.Then my fingers drifted lower, to the place where my shoulder met my neck.The place where his teeth had grazed last night, sharp enough to feel but not enough to break skin.
“What would happen if you bit me?Really bit me?”
His whole body went rigid.Tension slammed through him like a door slamming shut, every muscle locking in place.
“Lena.”
“You pulled back last night.I felt you hold yourself back.”I tilted my head to look at him, meeting those dark eyes that held the wolf even now.“Why?”
He was quiet for a long moment.His thumb traced circles on my hip, an absent motion that might have been soothing himself as much as me.When he spoke, his voice had gone rough.Careful.“A claiming bite creates a permanent bond.You would feel what I feel.Know when I was hurt, when I was angry, when I wanted you.We would be connected in a way that cannot be undone.”
“Connected forever.”
“Yes.”
I let that settle.Permanent.Undoable.A bond that went beyond marriage vows or legal documents, beyond contracts and signatures and all the human ways we tried to bind ourselves to each other.This was something written into the very fabric of what we were.
“Why haven’t you done it?”
His hand came up to cup my face, his thumb brushing my cheek with a gentleness that made something ache behind my sternum.The gesture was tender.The expression in his eyes was not.
“I wanted to.Last night.My wolf was howling for it.”He swallowed, and I watched his throat work.“I pulled back because I don’t trust myself.I don’t know if I ever will.”
“Trust yourself to do what?”
He was quiet so long I thought he might not answer.His heartbeat had picked up beneath my palm, faster now, and his scent had changed.Sharper.The smell of fear.
When he did speak, his voice had changed.Lower.Rougher.The sound of something being dragged up from a place he kept buried.
“My father was a wolf.My mother was human.He loved her more than anything in the world.”He paused, and I felt his heartbeat beneath my palm.“One day, she came home smelling like another man.It was innocent.She had only brushed past a coworker in a hallway.Nothing more.”
Ice crept down my spine.“Raphael.”
“His wolf did not understand innocent.Did not care about context or intention.”His eyes had gone distant, looking at something I could not see.Something that had happened twenty-seven years ago in a room I would never enter.“He shifted.Lost himself completely.And he killed her.”
