LILLIAN
I hold my breath.
Azriel’s expression has gone somewhere I’ve never seen it go before—not the cold wall, not the controlled stillness.
His eyes burn, dark and lit through with something that wants blood, and I feel the shift in the air before he even opens his mouth.
“Kill them,” he says.
“All of them.”
His men move.
I don’t think.
I don’t decide.
My hand closes around the blade of his sword before I understand what I’m doing, and the metal bites into my palms immediately, deep and clean, and I press the tip against my own chest hard enough that I feel it through my ribs.
“Lily—!” Kyler’s voice cracks across the clearing, raw with horror.
Blood runs down my wrists, dripping off my fingers onto the dirt.
“Take my life instead.” My voice comes out barely above a whisper, but it carries in the sudden silence.
“Please.
Spare them.
Take me.”
Azriel’s jaw locks.
Every muscle in him goes rigid, corded tight beneath his skin, and for one endless second I don’t know which way this breaks.
“Remove your hands.” The words come out a low growl, torn loose rather than spoken.
“They live.
You have my word.”
I let go of the blade the instant the promise leaves his mouth—no, not yet, there’s still Kyler to deal with—and I wheel on him instead, chest heaving, blood dripping from my palms.
“Go.” My voice rips out of me, jagged.
“Take your men and go.
Now.”
“I’m not leaving you here.” Kyler’s voice breaks on it, raw and furious.
“Not with him.
Not like this.”
I turn on him.
Whatever is left of the girl who used to sit under an oak tree with him, laughing about nothing, I bury it and let something colder rise in its place.
“If you stay,” I say, glass-sharp, “you will watch me die.
Do you understand me?
You will stand there and watch it happen, and it will be because of you.” I hold his gaze, unblinking.
“Never risk your life for me again.
Never risk theirs.
If you disobey me—if you ever try this again—I will end my own life before he ever lifts a sword.
I swear it on the Moon Goddess herself.”
Kyler’s face goes white.
Something in me softens, just for a moment—just for him.
I give him a small smile, grief folded into every corner of it.
“He needs an heir from me,” I say, quieter now.
“He won’t kill me yet.
I’m not going anywhere tonight.” My throat tightens around the next word, but I push it out anyway.
“Go, Kyler.
Please.”
I turn back to Azriel and drive myself harder against the sword’s tip, the metal biting deeper, and I hold his eyes without blinking, without flinching, waiting.
Melva’s voice breaks through, thick with tears.
“He’s gone—Lillian, he’s gone, he’s already gone—”
Only then do I let go of the blade.
My palms are open and ruined, blood running freely down my wrists, and I feel the sting of it distantly, like it belongs to someone else.
“Healer,” Azriel roars.
“Now.”
He doesn’t look at me again.
He turns his back and walks, and the space where his fury was still hangs in the air behind him.
Melva is at my side in an instant, her hands hovering over mine, not quite touching.
“Come—come on, into the carriage—”
She guides me up the steps, and the healer arrives within minutes, sharp-eyed and quick-handed, cleaning the cuts and binding them tight.
The pain is distant, background noise.
I sit very still and let it happen and think about Kyler’s face when he understood I meant every word, and about the look in Azriel’s eyes before he gave his promise, and I can’t tell which one frightens me more.
The healer finishes and gathers her things and slips out.
Melva’s composure breaks the moment the door shuts.
“Do you understand what you just did?” Her voice shakes.
“No one—*no one*—approaches him like that.
Men twice your size have looked at that sword and stepped back.
You threw yourself onto it.” She presses a hand to her chest.
“I have never been so afraid in my life.
I didn’t know if the bond would even stop him.
I didn’t know.”
I open my mouth to answer.
The carriage door slams open.
Azriel’s voice comes low, one word, lethal enough that Melva is gone before I register her moving.
He steps inside.
His hand closes around my throat.
I claw at his wrist on instinct, gasping, and his eyes—gray, blazing, furious in a way I have never seen—hold mine with a fury that has nowhere left to go but through me.
“How dare you.” The words come out a snarl.
“How dare you risk your life for another man.
That life is not yours to spend.
It belongs to me.”
Before I can answer, he wrenches me forward.
His mouth crushes mine.
It isn’t a kiss.
It’s punishment, it’s ownership, it’s every furious thing he refuses to say given shape and pressed into my mouth.
He bites down on my lip hard enough that I taste blood, and then he deepens it anyway, one hand fisted in my hair, his arm locked hard around my waist, dragging me against him.
I push against his chest.
He doesn’t yield.
His mouth moves over mine, brutal and reckless, taking without asking, and underneath the force of it I feel everything he’s pouring in—pain, betrayal, something obsessive and raw that has no other outlet.
*Fight him.* My mind screams it.
*Fight—*
My body goes still instead.
And then it surrenders.
My knees weaken.
My lips answer his despite everything—despite the blood, despite the cruelty, despite the fear still hammering under my ribs—and I hate myself for it, hate that some starved, traitorous part of me needs him back more than it needs to breathe.
That terrifies me more than his hand at my throat ever could.
When he finally tears his mouth from mine, I’m gasping, my lip bruised and bleeding, my lungs burning.
He doesn’t let go of my waist.
“You’re mine,” he growls against my cheek, low and rough.
“Throw yourself away like that again, and I will chain you to my bed and remind you every single day exactly who you belong to.”
His forehead drops against mine.
For one suspended moment, neither of us moves.
I feel the restraint trembling through him, barely held, and I don’t know if I’m afraid of what happens if it breaks or afraid of how much I want it to.
Then he catches himself.
He releases me all at once, stepping back, fists clenched at his sides, chest rising and falling hard.
I stand there.
My lips throb.
My palms sting beneath their bindings.
My chest aches where the sword pressed into it.
None of that is what undoes me.
What undoes me is the fact that my heart is still slamming, hard and fast, for the same man who just had his hand around my throat—and somewhere beneath the fear, beneath the blood, something warm and unfamiliar has started, quietly, to stir.