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“I’ll handle him.” Marcus picks up his jacket from the back of the chair. “Drink water. Don’t follow any more alpha consciousness connections into the abyss today.” He looks at Nash steadily for one moment, something passing between them in the shorthand of people who have known each other long enough that they don’t need words anymore.

Then he nods once and looks at me. “Good to meet you properly, Mia.”

“You too,” I say.

He leaves.

The door clicks shut behind him.

Nash sits up and looks at me across the space. His color is fully back. His expression is the controlled version he wears when he’s feeling something he’s decided not to lead with. But I know that expression now. I’ve learned the difference between Nash being closed off and Nash choosing his moment, and I’m not sure when that knowledge happened.

“You stayed with me,” he says, and more than the words, it’s the softness they’re wrapped in that flusters me.

He’s right. I stayed. And that means something. It probably means way too much, actually. And now I need to find a way to make it mean less. Fast.

“Marcus needed someone to—I mean, I was coordinating the interview structure with him. There’s a lot to⁠—”

“Mia.”

I stop talking.

He’s watching me with that expression. The one that bypasses every defense I have, not because it’s forceful but because it’s patient.

I push off the wall. Take a step toward the bed.

“You scared the hell out of me,” I say. Quiet. Against my better judgment and the direct instruction of approximately every self-protective instinct I have. “When you went down. I—” I stop.

Something in his face softens in a way that makes the thing in my chest worse rather than better. “I'm sorry.”

“Don't apologize. Just—” I stand because the chair has become a trap. “Don’t do it again.”

His brows lift. “Offer a blood oath to prove my loyalty to a pack I believe in?”

“Any of it.” I turn to face him. “The volunteering. The going too far. The passing out and letting me think you were dying. All of it.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I glare at him. “Prepotente.”

His mouth curves faintly. “You keep calling me that.”

“You keep earning it.”

“What does it mean?”

“Domineering jerk,” I say, possibly a little too smug.

His brows lift. “That’s what you’ve been calling me?”

“Among other things.”

“And here I thought it was something romantic.”

I can’t help that my chest feels gooey when I admit, “It is when I say it.”

The smile he gives me is soft enough to be dangerous. “Then I’ll allow it.”

“You’ll allow it?” I repeat.