LILLIAN
Beta Leo stops at the cave entrance like there’s an invisible line he has no intention of crossing.
“Hot spring is straight ahead,” he says.
“Follow the light.”
Melva steps forward immediately.
“I’ll accompany—”
“You’ll stand guard.” He says it the way people say things that aren’t up for discussion.
“With me.
Out here.”
Melva’s mouth tightens.
I can feel her about to argue, so I turn to her first.
“I’ll be fine.” I take the towel and the folded change of clothes from her arms, and I give her a small smile—the kind that means don’t.
“I won’t be long.”
She looks at me for a moment, reading whatever’s on my face, and then exhales through her nose.
She steps back.
I walk ahead into the dark.
The cave swallows the sound of the camp immediately.
My footsteps are the only thing, soft against the stone floor, and the dark is the kind that presses close—not threatening, just total.
Then it begins to change.
A warmth builds at the edges, amber and low, and by the time I round the curve in the rock, the darkness has given way entirely.
The hot spring fills the chamber, its water clear and perfectly still.
Steam rises from the surface in slow curls, catching the light from somewhere above—a crack in the rock, maybe, letting in a column of pale evening sky.
The air here is warm and damp and smells like minerals and something almost sweet.
Outside, the winter cold was working its way under my coat.
In here, I can already feel my shoulders dropping.
I stop.
Azriel is in the water.
Half-submerged, his arms resting along the stone edge on either side of him, his head tipped slightly back, eyes closed.
The steam moves around him.
His chest is bare above the waterline and the light catches the angles of him—the sharp line of his jaw, the broad set of his shoulders—and for a suspended, horrible second I just stand there and stare.
Why is he here?
The thought arrives flat with dread, and then the nervous energy arrives right behind it, coiling low in my stomach.
I take one careful step backward.
Then another.
His eyes open.
They find mine immediately, like he knew exactly where I was standing before he looked.
“Undress,” he says.
“Get in.”
His voice is calm.
Unhurried.
The voice of someone who has never once given an instruction and waited to see whether it would be followed.
I pull up a smile from somewhere.
“I’ll come back when you’re finished.”
His expression darkens.
Not dramatically—he doesn’t raise his voice, doesn’t shift his posture.
It’s just a change in the quality of his stillness, something that pulls tighter, and my heart reacts before my brain catches up.
It goes loud and fast and stupid against my ribs, and I hate it.
I hate that he doesn’t even have to move to do that to me.
He’s sitting in a pool of water twenty feet away and my pulse has already decided he’s directly in front of me.
He treats me like a pet.
The thought sharpens into something I can hold onto.
He bosses me around like I have no more say than the furniture around him.
I’m still holding the thought when he stands.
All of him.
At once.
Water sheeting off his body, running down his chest and stomach and the long lines of his legs, and I—my eyes go exactly where they shouldn’t and I cannot stop them, cannot override whatever traitorous reflex is running my body right now, and then what I see makes my brain go completely, helplessly blank.
How did that even—
I squeeze my eyes shut.
His footsteps on the wet stone are unhurried, of course they are, because nothing he does is ever hurried.
I feel him stop close.
The warmth of his body reaches me before anything else—heat radiating off wet skin, the specific warmth of him that the bond makes impossible to ignore.
His breath is at my ear.
“Stop closing your eyes.” His voice is low and even.
“You’ll see my body often.
Get used to it.” A pause, deliberate.
“You are my mate.
I will take you to my bed, or I will come to yours, whenever I choose.
That is your role.
You understand it.”
He steps back.
I open my eyes.
He’s watching me.
That dark, unreadable gaze, completely steady, waiting to see what I do with what he just said.
I look at him for one long moment.
And then, without a word, I reach for the hem of my shirt.
I pull it over my head and drop it.
I reach for the ties at my waist and work them loose, and the fabric falls away, and I don’t look at his face, don’t look anywhere except the water ahead of me—not because I’m ashamed, but because this is not for him to watch me do.
This is mine.
My choice, made on my terms, in my own time, and his eyes on my back don’t change that.
I walk to the edge.
I step in.
The heat closes around me immediately, rising to my waist, then my ribs, and I lower myself until it reaches my shoulders and the tension I’ve been carrying in my muscles since the caravan started moving begins, finally, to release.
I let my head fall back against the stone edge.
Inside, I am furious.
His mate.
That’s what he calls me, every time he wants something—my compliance, my body, my silence.
His mate.
But he has never once looked at me the way the bond says a mate is supposed to look.
He looks at me the way he looks at everything he possesses.
Like I am a thing he has acquired and intends to maintain.
A breeder.
That’s all this is.
That’s all I am.
I close my eyes and breathe the warm, mineral air and try to let the water be the only thing I feel.
AZRIEL
She looks like her mother.
I recognized it the moment she stepped into the cave, before she’d even seen me—the particular quality of her stillness in the dark, the way she moves.
Frederick is a man I’ve known for years.
I’ve tracked him across territories and political arrangements, watched every calculated move he makes when he believes no one is paying attention.
And Lillian is nothing like him.
Nothing in her face, nothing in the way she carries herself, nothing in that particular brand of stubbornness that keeps reasserting itself no matter what I do.
She is her mother’s daughter, entirely.
And that makes what I feel looking at her considerably more complicated than it has any right to be.
I re-enter the water slowly, the heat closing around me, and I don’t look at her.
I don’t need to.
I know exactly where she is.
I settle back against the far edge and study the ceiling—the pale column of light through the crack in the rock.
My body is still running warm.
It always does when she’s been near me, and I have no productive thoughts about that, so I don’t pursue it.
The water shifts.
I look.
Lillian has gone under.
Not surfaced yet.
I watch the place where she went down and count—one breath, two—and something in my chest that has nothing to do with reason moves before I do.
I say her name.
It comes out sharper than I intend.
She doesn’t surface.
I’m already moving when she does.
She comes up exactly where I’m reaching for her, water running off her face, hair plastered dark against her neck, and her eyes open directly into mine from a distance of inches.
She startles.
Her hands come up—
My arms close around her before she can pull back.
I draw her in, all of her, the heat of her skin against mine beneath the water immediate and complete, and she goes still in my hold the way she sometimes does—not with submission, but with the particular stillness of someone deciding what to do next.
I look into her eyes.
Defiant.
Always defiant, even now, even here, even with her breathing unsteady and her pulse visible at her throat.
Dark and furious and entirely, infuriatingly alive.
My gaze drops to her mouth.
“I’m done,” she murmurs.
Her voice aims for composed and lands somewhere short of it.
Her hands, pressed flat against my chest, are trembling—faintly, but there.
I can feel it.
I tighten my arm around her waist.
Her breath catches.
I draw her closer until there is no space left between us at all, until I can feel every point of contact, and I watch her try to hold her expression steady and almost manage it.
I let the moment sit.
Let her feel the weight of it.
Then I lower my face until my lips ghost the edge of hers, close enough that the warmth passes between us.
“You might be,” I say quietly.
“But I’m not.”