LILLIAN
Help me undress.
The words sit in the air between us, and for a moment I don’t move at all.
The lantern throws his shadow long across the canvas, and the rest of the tent has gone very quiet now that Melva’s footsteps have faded into the camp noise outside.
I make my legs work.
One step, then another, until I’m standing close enough to feel the heat coming off him in the cool night air.
My hands lift to the fastenings at his shoulder.
I’ve spent my whole life doing things for other people—pulling boots off drunk pack warriors, stripping soiled bedding, handling a hundred small, intimate tasks for people who never once looked at me while I did them.
This should be the same.
I tell myself it’s the same.
My fingers find the first clasp and work it loose, then the second, and I keep my eyes fixed on the fabric instead of the line of his throat just above it.
I draw the outer layer back off his shoulders, and as it slides down my knuckle grazes bare skin.
The heat of it is a shock.
It travels straight up my arm and lands somewhere behind my ribs, and my heart kicks so hard I’m certain he can feel it through the air between us.
It’s just warmth, I tell myself.
He runs warm.
All wolves do.
But my pulse doesn’t believe me.
It’s gone loud and fast and stupid, hammering at the base of my throat where the mark sits raised and tender against my skin.
I peel the last layer down his arms.
And I look.
I don’t mean to.
My eyes move before I can stop them.
Firelight catches the broad shoulders, the hard lines of muscle across his chest and stomach.
There’s a thin pale scar across his ribs and another along his side, and somehow they only make the rest of him worse.
He is beautiful in the way a drawn blade is beautiful—lethal, made to be looked at and feared in the same breath.
My face goes hot.
“See something you like?”
His voice is low and unhurried, threaded with something that wasn’t there a second ago.
Amusement.
A dark, lazy kind of amusement.
The blush burns all the way up to my hairline.
I drop my eyes to the floor and take a step back, the discarded fabric still clutched in my hands like it can shield me.
“No,” I manage.
“There it is again.”
I don’t understand at first.
Then I do—terrible liar—and my stomach drops.
He turns toward me fully, and whatever idle amusement was in his face a moment ago has gone somewhere colder.
He closes the distance I just opened, slow, deliberate, until I have to tip my head back to keep his eyes.
“You stand there lying to your king,” he says softly, “with your heart pounding like that, and you think I can’t tell.” His hand comes up and closes around my jaw—not hard, just certain, the way he holds everything.
“You forget what you are to me now.”
“I haven’t forgotten anything,” I whisper.
“No?” His thumb drags once along my cheek.
“Then say it.”
I don’t.
His grip shifts to the back of my neck, possessive, his fingers spreading warm against my skin just beneath the mark.
“Your life is mine,” he says.
“Every breath in you belongs to me.
I pulled it back out of the dark myself.” His voice drops lower, almost gentle, which is somehow worse than if he’d snarled it.
“Don’t ever lie to me again.
I’ll always know.”
He releases me as abruptly as he took hold.
The loss of his hand leaves a cold print on my skin.
He turns and crosses toward the partition at the back of the tent, where steam is already rising from a deep copper tub the staff must have filled before he came in.
“Bring me a towel,” he says, without looking back.
I stand frozen for a breath.
Then I move, because that’s what I do—I find the folded linens on the camp table and I take one and I make my feet carry me toward the bathing area, my pulse still wild, the heat of his hand still ghosting at my throat.
He’s already in the water when I come around the partition.
The tub is small enough that the surface laps at his chest, and the steam softens the hard edges of him, and the lantern light pools gold over wet skin.
He’s watching me approach over the rim of the tub with that same unreadable stillness, except it isn’t unreadable now—there’s something underneath it tonight, something patient and hungry.
I hold the towel out at arm’s length.
He doesn’t take it.
“Come in,” he says.
“Wash with me.”
The words land slow, and then all at once.
No.
The refusal rises up before I can stop it, hot and instinctive.
No, I can’t, I won’t—
But I look at him in the water, the line of his shoulders, the dark eyes fixed on mine, and I think about who he is.
The man who brought two guards to their knees with two words.
The man who took over my entire pack without raising his voice.
There is no one in this camp who would lift a hand for me.
There is no one in the entire territory who would dare.
To survive, you please him.
That’s the whole of it, stripped of everything else.
No one challenges what this man decides.
Not the pack he swallowed, not the warriors who follow him, not even the goddess who turned my damaged ear into what she called a gift.
Certainly not me.
I set the towel down on the stool beside the tub.
My hands are shaking when I reach for the ties of the gray dress, and I hate that they’re shaking, hate that he can see it, hate the slow heat that’s climbing my spine that has nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the way he’s looking at me.
I work the knot loose.
The fabric gives and slides, the same way it did that first night in the pack house, except there’s no wine in me now to soften the edges—just my own bare nerve and the steam and his eyes tracking every inch as the dress falls away from my shoulders and pools at my feet.
The air is warm here, near the water, but I shiver anyway.
I lift my chin.
If I’m going to do this, I won’t do it cowering.
I’ve cowered enough for one life.
I step over the rim of the tub and into the water.
The heat closes around my legs, my hips, and I lower myself in across from him—but he doesn’t let me stay there.
His hands find my waist beneath the surface, sure and unhurried, and he draws me toward him, turns me, settles me back against him until I’m sitting on his lap with the water rising warm to my collarbone.
And the moment my bare skin meets his, something ignites.
My wolf is still there, but barely—weak and distant, the part of me I waited eighteen years to meet damaged before she ever fully woke.
I shouldn’t feel the bond this strongly.
But I do—a pull low in my belly, a current running between every point where his skin touches mine, fierce and undeniable and entirely beyond my control.
My breath stutters.
His chest is solid against my back, his arms loose around me, and I can feel his heartbeat where we’re pressed together.
I close my eyes.
Don’t.
Don’t let it mean anything.
“You feel that,” he says against my ear.
Not a question.
His mouth is at my throat now, his breath warm on wet skin.
His hand spreads flat against my stomach beneath the water, and I feel the slow, deliberate drag of his thumb, and I bite down on the sound that wants to come out of me.
“You’ve gone and woken something,” he murmurs.
His voice has changed—rougher, lower, the control in it stretched thin over something far less controlled.
“I’ve kept it locked up for fifteen years.
And you walk in half-dead off a forest floor and undo it without trying.” His arm tightens, drawing me closer until there’s no space left between us at all.
“You’re mine tonight.
Understand that.
Whatever else you are, tonight you’re mine.”
He turns my face toward his with two fingers under my chin, and the look in his eyes stops my breath in my chest.
It’s not the blank wall.
It’s not cold.
It’s focused on me with a singular, devouring intensity, like I’m the only thing in the world and he intends to consume every part of it.
I feel stripped of more than the dress now.
I feel seen, all the way down, and it terrifies me almost as much as it pulls at me.
His mouth drops to the mark on my neck.
He kisses it—slow, open, his tongue tracing the raised edge of his own claim—and the sensation arcs through me so sharp and bright that my whole body goes taut.
My fingers curl against his forearm.
“I want all of it,” he says against my skin, the words half a growl.
“Your body.
Your defiance.
That mouth that never knows when to stay shut.” His teeth graze the mark, and I shudder.
“I want every part of you.
And I despise wanting anything this badly.”
The honesty of it cuts through the haze.
He hates it.
He hates that he wants me.
And somehow that—more than the heat, more than the bond—is the thing I can hold onto.
Because if he hates wanting me, then the wanting is real.
And if the wanting is real, then it’s the one thing I have that he didn’t take.
The one thing he can’t simply decide.
I turn in his arms enough to look at him.
“You can have my body,” I say.
My voice comes out steadier than it has any right to.
The water ripples with each too-fast breath, but the words don’t shake.
“I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
You marked it.
You bought it.
It’s yours, and we both know I have nothing to bargain with.” I hold his gaze, and I make myself smile—small, and sharp, and entirely my own.
“But there’s a part of me you’ll never get.
It doesn’t live in my skin where you can put your teeth in it.
You can devour every inch of the rest.
That one piece stays mine.
And there’s nothing you can do about it—not with all your claws, not with all your guards, not with the whole nation kneeling at your feet.
It’s the one thing in the world that isn’t for sale.”
Something flickers across his face.
Surprise, maybe.
Or the still attention of a man handed something he didn’t expect and deciding what to do with it.
Then his hand leaves my waist and rises to my throat.
His fingers wrap around it—not crushing, just there, the heat of his palm against the wild flutter of my pulse, his thumb resting at the corner of my jaw.
He could close his hand.
He doesn’t.
He simply holds it, the way he holds everything, like ownership is a thing that doesn’t require force.
“You think a locked door keeps me out,” he says, very quietly, his eyes burning into mine.
“I don’t need your permission, Lillian.
I never have.” His thumb strokes once along the line of my throat, almost tender, which is the most dangerous thing about him.
“That part you’re guarding so carefully—I’ll have it too.
Sooner or later.
I’ll take all of you, every locked room, every last thing you think is yours.” His mouth curves, slow and certain and terrible.
“And you’ll hand me the key yourself.”
The water laps warm between us.
His hand stays at my throat.
And the worst part—the part I’ll never admit, not to him, not to Melva, not even to myself in the dark—is the way my heart leaps to meet the threat.