LILLIAN
I tell myself it’s the bond.
Every time his mouth moves against my skin and my body arches toward it without permission—the bond.
Every time his hands settle somewhere new and the heat travels straight through me like I’m made of paper—the bond.
It’s the only explanation that makes sense, the only one I can live with.
Because the alternative is that I want this, that some part of me has chosen it, and I can’t afford that.
I won’t afford it.
So I call it the bond and I hold onto that.
His mouth drags slow along my collarbone, and my fingers tighten against his arm, and I think—it’s not me.
It’s not real.
It’s just what a mate bond does to a body that’s never been touched with anything other than cruelty.
And maybe that’s the truest part of it.
I have spent my entire life being handled.
Dragged, struck, discarded, shackled to walls, left in rooms too small to breathe in.
I know exactly what hands feel like when they mean to hurt you.
I know the weight of contempt and the specific, practiced cruelty of people who have decided you’re worth less than the floor they’re making you scrub.
I grew up inside that knowledge.
It was the first language I ever learned.
Half-blood.
That’s what they called me—all of them, everyone, even the Omegas who had no one else to look down on.
My mother was human, which meant I was wrong from the beginning.
Wrong blood, wrong body, wrong kind of daughter.
Frederick never said it to my face—he was too careful for that—but I felt it every time he looked past me like I wasn’t standing there, every birthday that passed without acknowledgment, every meal I earned by working instead of received by being loved.
My relatives plotted against me before I was old enough to understand what plotting was.
Julia had been practicing her version of me since we were children.
Even the servants had more standing than I did, because at least they were fully one thing.
I never was.
And now I’m here.
In a copper tub, in a camp tent somewhere between the territory that threw me away and a capital city I’ve never seen, pressed against the chest of the most powerful man I’ve ever encountered—more dangerous than Dylan ever pretended to be, more powerful than Harlow at his most calculating—and he is the first person who has ever openly acted on my behalf.
Not quietly.
Not ambiguously.
Openly.
In front of everyone.
He draped his coat over my shoulders in the forest like I was worth keeping warm.
He stood in the hall and told a room full of people who despised me that I belonged to him.
He marked me to save my life while I was unconscious, and afterward he gave orders that no one in his territory was permitted to touch me.
Possession.
That’s what I called it, and it is—I know what I am to him, know the shape of it, don’t let myself romanticize the edges.
But there is something in being possessed by a man like this that feels, for the first time in eighteen years, like being seen.
Like taking up space that someone decided was worth defending.
No one has ever defended anything for me.
Not my father, not a pack member, not a single person in that house who saw what was happening and looked away because looking away was easier.
Azriel has always looked directly at me.
When he does, he never looks away.
His mouth finds the mark on my neck.
The sensation rips through me so suddenly that a sound escapes before I can catch it—small, involuntary—and I feel him still against my skin.
Then his lips curve there, right against the raised edge of the mark, and the satisfaction in it is unmistakable.
“I’ll possess every part of you,” he says against my throat.
His voice has gone lower, rougher, the controlled surface of it wearing thin in a way I’ve only started to recognize tonight.
“Every part.
Until you forget what it felt like to resist me.”
His hands move as he says it—slow, deliberate, like a man who has made a decision and is taking his time executing it.
His palms drag up my ribs, and the wildness in his eyes when I glance up at him is nothing like the blank precision I’ve been reading him by.
It’s something older.
Something that doesn’t live in the controlled, unhurried commander I’ve been trying to understand since the forest.
This is underneath all of that, and it’s looking at me like I’m the only thing in the world.
I hate him for this.
The thought rises clean and sharp through everything else.
I hate that he can say I’ll possess you and mean it as a promise instead of a threat.
I hate that my body can’t tell the difference.
I hate the longing that’s been building since his hands found my waist in the water, slow and unrelenting, impossible to reason away.
I hate him for making me feel wanted in the same breath as owned, because I’ve never had one without the other and I don’t know if I’d recognize the difference if it came.
I hate him.
And I can’t stop wanting him.
Both things are true at the same time, and the tension between them has no resolution—just this: his mouth on my skin, my pulse running loud and traitorous at my throat, and eighteen years of being invisible collapsing under the weight of being this seen.
He tips my chin up with two fingers and kisses me.
Not the careful, deliberate thing from before—fierce, the way the outline of him suggested was always underneath the control.
His mouth moves against mine with a force that presses me back, one hand spread flat at the base of my spine, and every careful thing I’d assembled to get through this night comes apart at once.
I kiss him back before I’ve decided to.
My hands find his chest without being told to go there, and the heat of his skin under my palms is immediate and overwhelming.
I push toward him—that reflex I can’t seem to kill, reaching for the current of thought beneath the surface.
The wall meets me.
Smooth and total as always.
But I don’t need to hear him.
I can feel it—there, through the places where our bodies meet, through the press of his hand at my spine and the way his breath has changed against my mouth.
Something restless.
Something barely leashed.
Mixed and complicated and real, threaded through every deliberate movement like a current he’s been running from for longer than tonight.
He lifts his head.
His eyes are dark and direct.
“Touch me,” he says.
The words come out even but lower, with a weight behind them that turns it into something more than a command.
“If you want to survive in my world—if you want to know how to handle what’s coming for you—learn how to touch the monsters whose fate is tied to yours.”
I look at him for a moment.
Then I raise my hand and press my palm flat against his chest.
His heartbeat is there immediately—strong and fast, faster than I expected, and the discovery of it moves through me like something loosening.
He has a heartbeat.
He’s not immune.
I spread my fingers, feeling the heat of him, the solid muscle beneath his skin.
His eyes track my hand without blinking.
I move it lower.
His fingers close around my wrist.
In one motion he lifts it, pins it above my head, and the look on his face is nothing like the composed unreadability I’ve come to expect.
Something has cracked open in it—the control stretched past its limit, the wild thing underneath pushing through.
His chest is heaving.
His jaw is set.
He looks down at me, my wrist pinned above my head, like a man who has just discovered something he hadn’t planned for and can’t decide whether to be furious or shaken by it.
“Don’t,” he says.
His voice is rough at the edges in a way it has never been.
“Don’t do that unless you mean it.”
“I meant it,” I say.
The words land between us.
He stares at me for one long, held moment—something moving behind his eyes that I can’t name, that the wall won’t let me reach, that I’ll have to figure out from his hands and his breath and the way he’s looking at me like I’ve dismantled something he built very carefully over a very long time.
Then his free hand moves to my leg.
He parts my thighs slowly, deliberately, the way he does everything—without hesitation, like a man who has already decided and is simply following through.
He settles himself against me, the heat of him unmistakable now, and when his eyes find mine again the wild thing is still there, looking out at me through all that dark composure.
He doesn’t move.
Not yet.
He just holds there at the threshold and looks at me.
And the worst part, the part I’ll never say out loud, is that I don’t look away.