LILLIAN
The bottle is on the bedside table.
I don’t think about it.
I just reach for it, pull the stopper, and drink.
Two long swallows, enough that the burn travels all the way down my throat and settles in my stomach like a coal.
I set it back down with a small, precise click against the wood.
There.
Whatever that does, I need it to do it fast.
I stand at the edge of the bed in the gray dress Melva found me, and I don’t look at him.
I look at the wall.
The fire in the outer room throws amber light through the doorway, and I focus on the way it shifts across the floorboards while I try to make my hands stop trembling.
You have nothing left to lose.
That’s what I told him.
I meant it when I said it.
I’m trying to keep meaning it.
I reach for the ties at my waist.
My fingers find the knot and work it loose.
The fabric gives—slowly at first, then all at once—and slips down over my hips to the floor in a soft heap around my feet.
The air in the room is cold against my bare legs.
My knees feel like water.
For one terrible second, I think they’re going to give out entirely, and the humiliation of that—collapsing in front of him now, after everything I said, after standing in that hall and offering my life like it was nothing—is worse than anything else.
I don’t let them.
I plant my feet.
I straighten my spine.
I lift my chin and look at him directly, the way I’ve been doing since the forest, because I have spent seventeen years looking at the floor and I am done with it.
Azriel is watching me.
He’s sitting in the chair at the far side of the bed, his elbows on his knees, his dark eyes steady on my face.
Not my body.
My face.
That same unreadable expression, that total sealed-off stillness that gives me nothing—no cruelty, no eagerness, nothing I can brace against.
Just those eyes, the fire behind him, and the silence.
I push toward him automatically, the way I can’t seem to stop doing.
I reach for the current of thought that flows beneath everyone else’s surface.
The wall meets me.
Smooth and complete and seamless as always.
Of course.
“Come here,” he says.
Two words.
The same quiet authority as everything else he says, like he has never once in his life had to ask for something twice.
I cross the room.
He doesn’t move as I approach—just watches me close the distance between us, unhurried, like he has all the time in the world and has already decided exactly how this goes.
When I stop in front of him, the warmth coming off him is immediate.
The mate bond hums low in my chest, that involuntary pull I’ve been trying to ignore since the forest, and I hate it.
I hate how my body responds to him without asking my permission.
“Sit,” he says.
The word lands, and I understand what he means.
My breath catches—just for a second, just enough that I know he notices, because he notices everything.
I hesitate.
Don’t.
The voice in my head is my own.
You knew what this was.
You agreed to it.
You have nothing left.
I move.
I put one knee on the chair beside his thigh, then the other, and settle over him—careful, deliberate, my hands finding his shoulders to steady myself.
The position feels exposed in a way that has nothing to do with clothing.
He’s solid beneath me, warm and entirely still, and the mate bond flares so suddenly it almost knocks the breath out of me.
I go very still.
His hands find my waist.
Not gripping—just resting there, his thumbs against my hip bones, as if he’s simply noting where I am.
I make myself look at him.
Up close, his face is even more severe than it seemed from a distance.
The sharp jaw, the dark eyes, the line of his mouth that has never once softened into anything I could call ease.
There is nothing warm about him, nothing that tells me what comes next.
What are you thinking?
I push toward him one more time, helplessly searching for some foothold, some way to understand what’s behind those eyes.
Nothing.
The wall.
Always the wall.
He reaches up.
His hand curves around the back of my neck, slow and certain, and he draws me down toward him.
My hands tighten on his shoulders.
The last of the alcohol’s warmth is spreading through my chest, softening the edges of everything just enough that when his mouth meets mine, I don’t pull away.
The kiss is nothing like I expected.
I don’t know what I expected.
Something cold, maybe.
Something that matched the expression he always wears—controlled, deliberate, nothing wasted.
But his mouth moves against mine with a thoroughness that undoes all my careful preparation, and the mate bond surges so hard and suddenly that my fingers curl into his shirt without meaning to.
Don’t feel this.
My own voice, somewhere very far back.
Don’t let it mean something.
His hand slides from my neck to my jaw, tilting my face slightly, and I forget what I was telling myself—
He stops.
All at once.
Like a door slamming shut.
His hands go still.
His mouth lifts from mine.
I open my eyes and find him looking at me with an expression I have never seen on him before—not the blank wall, not the unreadable calm.
Something sharp.
Alert.
A tension runs through him all the way to his hands, still holding my face.
“What—” I start.
Something shifts in my stomach.
A slow, wrong heaviness, like the floor tilting under me even though I’m sitting still.
My tongue feels thick.
The warmth from the alcohol is changing into something else—something that presses against the inside of my skull and makes the edges of the room go soft.
I look at the bottle on the bedside table.
The wine.
“The wine,” I say.
My voice sounds far away.
Azriel’s expression is already moving past me—past this room, past whatever just happened between us—into something cold, furious, and very focused.
That is the last thing I register clearly before the room tilts sideways and darkness closes in at the edges of my vision.