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I gather her to me, resting her on my chest as I turn over. I reach for one of the cashmere blankets my mother insisted on stocking here. Ridiculously expensive things, soft enough to make a man question his masculinity. I've never touched the damn things. But Cienna makes one sleepy little sound when I cover her, a soft mew of pleasure, and just like that, Anya Brusilov has earned herself another diamond bracelet.

We're still locked together when she starts twisting against me, restless with heat again.

She was a virgin.

She gave me her first time, and I took it with all the restraint of an animal in rut. I had her on the ground in the snow. She deserved silks, soft words, and a slow, careful claiming, but instead she got a ravenous tiger and the floor.

"Cienna." My jaw is so tight the words grind. "If I had known, I would have—"

"What? Been gentle?" She snorts. Actually snorts. "Ivan, I'm in heat. You gave me exactly what I needed. Look at me." She takes my face in her hands. "It was perfect. It hurt for about ten seconds, and then it was perfect. I'm fine."

"I would have prepared you longer. I would have—"

"Woulda, coulda." She clenches around me deliberately, my eyes cross, and she smiles like the devil. "You're still inside me, and I'm still in heat, and we have a lot to talk about, but Ivan? If you apologize for the best night of my life, I will bite you again."

She would, too. My shoulder still throbs where she marked me, and my cock twitches inside her every time the soreness pings.

I wrap my arms around her, stare at the ceiling, and try to figure out what to say next. A vor does not apologize. A vor does not explain.

A mate does.

"I'm sorry," I say to the ceiling. It comes out rusty, from disuse. "Not for claiming you. I will never be sorry for that."

She's quiet for a moment. Her fingers trace idle circles on my chest. "Do you want to know why?" she asks softly. "Why I was..."

"Yes." I stroke her back. "Tell me everything. Rule number three."

"Never lie." She huffs a laugh against my collarbone. "Okay. Well. I was a child prodigy."

She tells it in pieces, curled on my chest, my knot keeping us tied, the fire cracking and settling.

"I started college at sixteen," she says. "Full ride, pre-med, the whole thing. Which sounds impressive on paper, but do you know what a sixteen-year-old girl is on a college campus? A mascot. A curiosity. A child. Nobody was going to touch me, thank God, but nobody was going to really know me either. I ate lunch with my textbooks. I went to office hours instead of parties. I was always on the outside."

"By the time I got to grad school, to med school, I'd forgotten how to talk to people who weren't patients or professors. I was painfully shy. Like, worse than a mouse. I'd stand in the door of a party I was invited to and turn around and go home because I had no idea how to relate to people." She laughs, but it's not a funny laugh. "I was so lonely, Ivan. It was the hollow sort of lonely where you sit in a crowded lecture hall and feel like an empty jar on a shelf. I lived there for years. I paid rent there."

"And then," I prompt carefully, "you met him."

"Steven," she says.

"Do not." My growl rumbles up through both our bodies. "Do not say his name. Not here. Not with my bite on your neck and my knot inside you. He does not exist in this room."

"He's going to exist in the world, Ivan. He's my research partner. Our work matters."

"The work may exist. But in this room—" I take her chin and tilt her face up to mine, "—he is he. That is all. Continue."

She rolls her eyes at me. She is mated to the vor of the Brusilov Bratva, tied to him by flesh and fang, and she rolls her eyes at me. My chest takes the hit before my pride can object. Sassy. I love it.

Love.

The word ricochets in my mind until it finds a place to rest. My tiger lifts his head, and neither of us argues.

"He had the same story," she goes on, quietly. "Different details, same isolation. Brilliant young, always the youngest in every room, always the colleague, never the... anything else. We understood each other. We started dating, and there was no… God, there was no chemistry. Ivan, I didn't even know what chemistry was; I thought attraction was a warm professional regard, but for the first time in my life, I wasn't alone. Neither was he. We were two lonely people sharing a lifeboat. We both wanted to get on with our lives. Careers, mortgages, the whole checklist. So when he suggested we marry, it sounded... sensible."

"Sensible." I let the word drip with all the contempt it deserves.

"I know. I know. And the second that ring was on my finger, I wanted it off." She shakes her head against my chest. "It felt wrong. Like wearing scrubs backward. Because my parents waited, Ivan. My parents found their true mates. My dad used to tell the story every year on their anniversary: he saw her across a state park, a cougar on a ridge, and he said the world just stopped. I grew up on that story. I dreamed about it. And there I was, wearing a sensible ring from a decent man, and it felt like I was betraying nine-year-old me. Like I was closing a door she'd been holding open."

She lifts her head and looks at me, and her eyes are wet and fierce.