Page 84 of Mane Rival in Store

“You’re bleeding too,” she pointed out.

“Superficial.”

“It’s a six-inch gash.”

“It’s healing.”

“You’re a medical marvel and a terrible patient.” She wrapped her uninjured arm around his neck. His hair rose at the contact—gentle this time, the lift of greeting rather than alarm. “Your coat is ridiculous.”

“It’s Aspen’s.”

“It’s a size 4.”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“Rune, just like before, you look like a linebacker wearing a napkin.”

The corner of his mouth pulled upward. The almost-smile that had graduated, over weeks, from rare occurrence to regular event. “You’re making jokes. You’ve been making jokes since the warehouse.”

“I make jokes when I’m scared.”

“I know.” He set her on his bed—the bed with the Scandinavian sheets that they’d wrecked before. His hands lingered on her waist. “You can stop being scared now.”

“I stopped being scared when you dropped to your knees next to me with your hands shaking over my shoulder.” She caught his fingers. Drew them to the bandage. Let him touch it—gently, the pads of his fingers tracing the edge of the gauze with the same care he brought to fragile things. “You were afraid to touch me.”

“I was afraid to hurt you.”

“You held a lion’s throat in your jaws and chose not to bite. You’re not going to hurt me.”

He sat beside her. Close—his thigh against hers, his arm around her waist, the heat of his body bleeding through Aspen’s absurd coat and her blood-spotted blouse. The night pressed against the windows. Manhattan glittered below. His hair was settling, strand by strand, into a calm she’d never seen—not the deliberate press-flat of control, not the wild disarray of arousal, but a resting state. The lion at peace.

She turned to face him. Her good hand found his jaw, her thumb tracing the line of bone she’d memorized weeks ago. He leaned into her palm. The gesture was unconscious—a lion pressing into contact, seeking comfort through skin.

“I’ve been yours since you put me in a cape.”

She traced his jaw with her thumb.

His eyes opened. Blue and raw and stripped of every performance he’d worn since the day his father handed him the Pride. The king was gone. This was the boy who had collected comics at nine and fallen in love with a woman who sold villain lipstick and hadn’t known how to tell her without it sounding like a corporate assessment.

“Say that again.”

“I’ve been yours since you put me in a cape on a Brooklyn rooftop and kissed me like the world was ending and kept the cape afterward because you couldn’t admit why.”

He kissed her.

Not gentle. Not tentative. Not the careful, control-releasing progression of their first night on this rooftop. This was adrenaline and relief and the primal, shaking aftermath of almost-loss—his mouth on hers with a hunger that had nothing to do with desire and everything to do with confirming she was alive, she was here, she was his. Her blood was on his hands and his blood was on her shoulder and neither of them cared because the alternative—the world where she hadn’t moved fast enough, where the claws had found Aspen, where he had arrived too late—was a world neither of them could survive and this kiss was the proof that they didn’t have to.

She pulled him down. Her injured shoulder screamed. She ignored it. His weight settled over her—careful even in desperation, braced on his forearms, his hair falling around her face in a curtain that blocked out the skyline and the night and everything except the two of them in this bed in this room in this city. His hands found her face. Held her. Looked at her.

“I’m going to claim you.” His voice was low. Rough. Stripped to its foundation. “I need you to know what that means. It’s permanent. My scent changes yours. My roar changes. Every lion who hears me will know you’re mine. There is no undoing it.”

“I know.”

“Lark.”

“I know what it means. Rune, I know. I chose you before your Pride chose me. I chose Aspen on a Brooklyn dock with nothing but my body and my nerve. I chose this.” She pulled him closer. Her fingers found his hair and the strands rose to meet her and she didn’t catalog it this time, didn’t file it under comedy or observation or defense. She let it be what it was: a lion recognizing his mate’s touch. “Claim me.”

What followed was not the patient, thorough, composure-dissolving encounter of three nights ago. It was raw. It was primal. It was the distillation of everything the night had broken open—the terror and the blood and the mercy and the choice—poured into the space between two bodies that had almost lost each other.