He holds out two slick fingers to Ever. Ever’s eyes never leave my face as he opens his mouth and takes them in.
My breath catches all over again.
He sucks them clean slowly, swallowing down the taste of me with the same deliberate calm he brings to everything that matters too much.
My knees nearly buckle.
Shiloh laughs under his breath. “There she is.”
I don’t know what I look like. I only know what I feel like—flushed, shaking, wrung open, my dress hiked up indecently high, my hair half-ruined, my pulse still skittering under my skin like something trapped and frantic.
Nash uncrosses his legs. The sound of his shoe touching the floor is small, and it lands likethunder.
Every inch of the room changes again.
Shiloh steps back first. Ever a second later. Not far, but enough. Enough to make it clear that whatever just happened was not the end of this. It was prelude. Invocation. Preparation.
I drag in a breath and look toward Nash.
He rises from the chair with unhurried precision, rolling his sleeves one final time before letting his arms fall at his sides. His eyes travel over me in a way that feels almost tactile now—my swollen mouth, the marks beginning at my throat, the lift of my chest, the wet weakness still trembling through my legs.
I don’t move. I can’t. Or maybe it’s just that I won’t.
He comes toward me slowly—not a predator stalking his prey, but a king approaching something he already owns.
Some instinct says this is the moment that matters. Not because Ever and Shiloh don’t matter—they do, God, they do—but because Nash is the hinge. The lock clicking into place. The one I’ll feel longest after this night ends.
The real point of no return.
He stops in front of me.
Close enough that I can smell his cologne beneath the whiskey and the darker scent of the room. Close enough that if I leaned forward even an inch, I’d touch him.
His fingers lift and tilt my chin up. Behind me, Ever and Shiloh watch in charged silence. In front of me, Nash studies my face like he’s looking for the exact moment resolve becomes surrender.
Or maybe not surrender. Choice.
His thumb brushes once along my lower lip, sending my pulse stammering.
“Look at you,” he says softly.
And then he smiles—the faintest, most dangerous curve of his mouth.
I understand all at once that whatever comes next will not be a game.
It will be a claim.
“Now that you’ve taken your punishment, we can get back to you being a good girl, little wolf.”
I had my first shift where nobody died and I still came home feeling wrecked.
So that was new.
It wasn’t some big dramatic scene either. No flames. No pileup. No movie-of-the-week trauma.
Just an old woman in a cramped apartment who couldn’t catch her breath and kept apologizing to me for “being a bother.”
That part got me.
