"I did, didn't I." It came out breathless, which was embarrassing, but also honest.
His hands slid up my waist, thumbs tracing my ribs, then fisted into my hair. He tilted my head back and exposed mythroat and the scar, the pulse beneath it, everything I'd spent years hiding.
"You're done running."
"Completely."
"You're done hiding."
"I don't even know where my running shoes are. I think Fergus ate one."
Fergus crept out of the bathroom, tail down.
Artem’s mouth brushed my jaw, feather-light. "Good. Because you're mine. Not just on paper. Mine."
"I'm yours." I gripped his shoulders, needing the anchor. "And Ivan's. And Gregor's."
"You are." He kissed me, hard and fast. It was a claiming and was nothing like the careful kisses of the night before. His mouth devoured me and I met him with the same ferocity, my legs wrapping around his waist as he pressed me back against the mirror.
"I need your knot." I didn't recognize my own voice. "I don't need slow. I appreciate you but I need you to stop holding back. I want you to be who you are around me."
He tore the robe off. His shirt followed. His pants. Then he was naked against me, all heat and muscle, and his mouth was on my throat and his hands were everywhere.
"Artem."
He pinned my wrists above my head with one hand, the other sliding down my face, neck, breasts, stomach, through my slit. “So wet.”
“Always ready.”
He held his cock between my spread legs, pressing slowly. Looking at each other, not blinking.
He groaned when he was fully inside me. It was just for a moment and then he pulled out and pushed back inside.
I moaned as his finger slid back up my body, over my stomach, breasts, stopping at the crook of my neck. Right over the scar. Finn’s scar.
He paused. His eyes found mine again.
Even now, completely consumed by the alpha drive to claim, he gave me a heartbeat. A single fraction of a second to change my mind.
I tilted my head further. "Take me. I'm not going anywhere."
He leaned forward, purred around my ear and then he bit down.
Not the tearing violence I remembered from Finn. Something sharper and cleaner and awful in its precision. This pain bloomed instantly into heat, euphoric and blinding, flooding every nerve I had.
And then the click.
That was the only word for it. Something deep in my chest that had been floating, untethered, for twenty-seven years simply dropped into place. An anchor hitting the seabed. The permanent weight of belonging to someone who belonged back.
I gasped, my spine arching off the mirror. My body sang as the bond flared to life, a tether of champagne, caramel and storm clouds that was mine, and now woven through his. I could feel him. Not just his body against mine but him. The depth of his devotion, the immovable wall of his protection, the absolute and terrifying certainty that I was his and he was mine and nothing was taking either of us anywhere.
He kept his teeth in my flesh, his chest heaving against mine, his own body absorbing the bond like a man who'd been drowning and finally found air. When he pulled back, a slow trickle of blood ran down my neck and mixed with his saliva and our scent.
He licked the wound. Tender. Slow. The contrast of it made my eyes sting.
Then his forehead dropped to mine.
"You're mine," he whispered. "Ours."
