"Star—"
"I thought you were my alpha." I shrug. "Clearly, you are not. That's fine. I'll find another."
He freezes. His brows drop, and his nostrils flare. His scent floods the room—cedar, thyme, and underneath it something hotter—rage. The bond mark on my throat lights up like a struck match.
"What did you just say?"
Not a question.
"You heard me."
He moves.
One step. Two. He doesn't run. He doesn't have to. His hand finds my throat—not squeezing, just there, his thumb pressing exactly where he marked me—and the touch quakes through me.
"Say that shit again."
"There are other alphas—"
His mouth crashes onto mine.
It is not a kiss. It's a brand. He is marking me. His tongue forces my lips open. One hand fists in my hair, and he drags the other down my spine to my hip and yanks me flush against him. He is shaking, his entire body is shaking, and instead of pushing him off, my hands are yanking his lapel, and I am kissing him back.
I hate that I'm kissing him back.
His mouth slides off mine and finds my throat. The bond mark. His teeth scrape it—warning, not bite—and a sound, half moan, half plea, rips out of me without permission. His arms tighten like he's heard a confession.
"There is no other," he growls against the mark. "Do you understand me? There is no other for you. Not for the rest of your fucking life."
"You're—" My voice is gone. My whole body is humming, the bond is screaming yes, every nerve is reorienting toward him. "You're getting—married—"
"I'll fix it."
"You—"
"Look at me."
I don't.
He finds my jaw and tilts my face up. His other hand is still at the small of my back, holding me against him so that the heat coming off him singes me through three layers of fabric. His eyes are wrecked.
"Look at me, Star."
I look.
"Mine," he says. Just that. Once.
He kisses me again. Slower this time. Worse. His hand on my jaw, his thumb at the corner of my mouth, his teeth grazing my lower lip, and the bond at my throat keening, and somewhere inthe middle of it, he says it again into my mouth—mine—and my knees do go this time. His arm catches me before I drop, and the worktable rattles against my back from the way he braces us.
I am breaking. The careful glass I built around myself between Friday and Tuesday morning is cracking under his hands, and a part of me—an enormous, stupid, biological part of me—wants to let it. Wants to tilt my head and let him put his teeth back in. Wants to take him upstairs. Wants to believe whatever he says next as long as he keeps his hands on me.
Six weeks.
The number surfaces.
Six weeks until he marries someone else, and his teeth are inches from reclaiming me on a Tuesday morning on my own goddamn worktable.
I push. Then I push again. Harder. Pressing my weight into it until he finally lifts from my throat. Slow. Reluctant. His chest, under my palms, is heaving as if he's just run a marathon.
