Dakota answered him the only way she could in that moment, not with words, but with her mouth finding his, the kiss tasting of salt and grief and something reckless that had long since stopped measuring the cost of anything.
Kade kissed her back with the careful control of a man holding himself to a very fine and deteriorating edge, one hand tightening in her hair while the other pressed her firmly against him as though the distance between them had already become intolerable.
When he finally broke away, both of them breathing unevenly, the space between them felt less like air and more like the moment before something irreversible.
“Do you think it’s easy to climb onto my bed?” he whispered, his voice low and carrying a dark current beneath the softness, while her fingers worked steadily at the buttons of his shirt.
“Only dead bodies fall out of it.” “Even in death, I would have felt a different depth, dying happy.” Dakota murmured it against his throat, her lips still moving along the column of his neck with unhurried focus.
“Who cares about death.
People be dying daily.” There was no carelessness borrowed for effect.
The words came out the way they did because she meant every syllable, because the events of the night had stripped her down to someone who had stopped being able to locate a reason to be careful about anything.
Kade was quiet, his thumb tracing slowly along the curve of her jaw, and whatever wall he had been maintaining between intention and action developed a fracture he could feel widening with each breath she drew against his skin.
“Against all odds,” he said, very quietly, “you actually don’t care.” His resistance did not collapse, it dissolved, gradually and then completely, the way something does when the force working against it has been patient and relentless and is no longer in any hurry.
His arms drew her closer until there was no space left between them, and his mouth moved from her jaw to her ear, then lower, tracing the line of her throat with a deliberateness that was its own kind of claim.
His lips found the curve where her neck met her shoulder, that particular place every wolf understood without instruction, and his teeth grazed the skin there with light, exploratory pressure.
That was when he felt it.
Kade went absolutely still.
Not the controlled stillness of restraint, but the arrested, complete stillness of a man who had touched something entirely unexpected in the dark.
Beneath his lips, faint but unmistakable, the skin carried the impression of a prior mark, old enough to have healed and settled, not old enough to have fully disappeared.
Raised tissue shaped with deliberate intention.
The kind of scar that only one act produced.
Someone had marked her.
The understanding moved through him in cold, sequential stages, first as fact, then as implication, then as something that reached his wolf before rational thought had finished processing it and ignited there with a force that had no interest in context or explanation.
His mate carried another male’s claim on her skin.
The full story behind it, whatever cruelty or betrayal had sent her out into the night with nothing left to protect, was entirely beside the point to the animal now pressing against the boundaries of his control with absolute and single-minded urgency.
It recognized only what was in front of it: a prior claim on what was his, existing without his consent, and that was categorically, irreversibly unacceptable.
His canines broke skin with the precision of an Alpha who had long since stopped pretending that what he was doing was anything other than a deliberate act.
He bit directly over the old mark, not near it, not beside it, but over it, with the full and conscious weight of his bloodline behind it.
Deep enough that the impression would not fade.
Deliberate enough that nothing about it could be read as accident.
His blood carried authority that ran back through generations of royal lineage, and he used every measure of it, pressing the claim into her skin with the kind of finality that left no room for challenge or revision.
Then her blood reached his tongue, and the world reorganized itself around a single, shattering fact.
The effect was not gradual.
It did not build or ease into him the way relief ordinarily did.
It struck all at once, a surge of cleansing heat moving through his bloodstream with the force of something that had been waiting for exactly this, burning a path through him that left clarity in its wake like scorched ground.
The parasitic infection that had been threading itself through his system for years, the cursed thing his royal bloodline had been strong enough to slow but never sufficient to eliminate, began to die.
He felt it happening in real time, felt the foreign presence burning out of him in successive, accelerating waves, his blood running cleaner with each one, his senses snapping back into a sharpness he had nearly ceased to believe was still available to him.
The pain that had been his constant, low companion simply ceased.
Not faded.
Not retreated to a manageable distance.
It was gone, wholly and immediately, as though it had never had a right to be there at all.
Kade held her tighter, his mouth still pressed to the mark he had just made, his body processing the magnitude of what was happening with a kind of staggered, silent disbelief.
Her blood was accomplishing in seconds what years of royal endurance and careful treatment had failed to do.
It was purging the corruption from him entirely, burning through what nothing else had been able to touch, and she had no awareness of it.
She was still moving against him, still chasing the oblivion she had come looking for, entirely unaware that the blood moving through her veins was rewriting his fate with each passing moment.
His mate.
His cure.
His salvation, arrived in the form of a woman who had kissed him tasting of grief and declared that dying happy was reason enough for all of it.
She did not know what she was.
She did not know what she had just done to him.
And Kade, holding her against him in the dark with the taste of her still on his tongue and the poison finally, irrevocably leaving his body, understood that whatever came next, there was no longer any version of his life that did not contain her.