Lilia’s POV
This man , I had feared him from the first moment I watched him tear a throat open with his bare hands in the forest.
He killed without blinking.
He answered to no rules at all.
And yet he could intercept a prisoner transfer and upend a balance two Packs had spent years building , without one heartbeat of hesitation , simply to keep me near him.
“Kael… stop…” I turned my head aside, both hands pushing at his chest, my voice shaking.
“I really can’t… let me go… please…”
He only watched me with those near-gold eyes, his thumb moving gently along my cheek , a tenderness nothing like his usual force.
“What’s this? Still afraid of me?” he asked softly.
I bit my lip and didn’t answer.
But my heart was slamming so hard it nearly broke out of my chest.
Of course he knew.
He always saw through me that easily.
“You can go on fearing me.” He bent to my ear, his breath scalding.
“But tonight , don’t push me away.”
The hem of my gown rose, slowly.
My knees clamped together on instinct, and his own came between them, gentle and immovable.
His palm settled warm on my thigh, and the heat of it set me trembling.
I caught his wrist to drag it away and found I had no strength at all.
“No… please, no…” I shook my head, my eyes going hot , the curse.
The one I had heard whispered at the tavern, the one Cora had pressed into my ear with her hand over mine.
“Kael. If I , if anything happens between us, there’s no escaping it afterward…”
He paused.
The words had struck something.
The gold in his eyes dimmed , but he didn’t pull back.
He came closer, his forehead resting against mine.
“Then don’t escape,” he said, voice rough and low.
“Stay.
Be mine.”
”I am not a thing you own!” Both hands shoved hard at his shoulders.
“You’re always like this , you crash into my life without asking, did it ever occur to you that I can’t carry the weight of this , of you caring about nothing, and doing it anyway,”
Before the words finished, his mouth came down over mine.
Harder than before, a conquest, a swallowing tide.
I hit his chest, shoved at him, and got nothing for it but his arms closing tighter.
He pinned my wrists in one hand and lifted them over my head.
“Go on, then,” he murmured between kisses, his voice gone rough.
“Fight me. And when you’re finished , tell me you don’t want me at all.”
I glared up at him, gasping, and the tears finally spilled.
I wanted him.
Damn it all , I wanted him.
“I don’t know…” The words came out with the tears, and I couldn’t stop either one.
He bent and kissed the wet tracks from my cheeks, and then slowly returned to my mouth.
This kiss was different , patient, quieting , and my struggling ebbed out of it by degrees.
His hands moved with a care that contradicted everything else about him, coaxing where they touched, and my body betrayed me in small, honest tremors no amount of pride could stop.
“Look at you,” he whispered against my skin.
“Your body is far more honest than your mouth.”
”Shut up…” I burned to hide, and his grip at my waist gave me nowhere to go.
He took his time.
The cold air touched overheated skin and I shivered, and still he didn’t hurry , he was, I realized dimly, being gentle.
Deliberately, maddeningly gentle, drawing every response out of me until fear and need were tangled into one thread.
The fear was still there.
But the body had gone over entirely without consulting me , and when the wave finally crested, I broke apart against his mouth, shaking, both hands fisted in nothing, his name on my lips before I knew I’d said it.
In the undertow of it I lay gasping, tears still leaking from the corners of my eyes.
Kael rose over me and kissed me, and stopped , the last inch between us, held.
“One last time.” His forehead against mine, his voice low and wrecked.
“Tell me to stop. Or tell me to come closer.”
I closed my eyes.
The fear was still there.
But louder now, undeniable, was the wanting , for this dangerous, unreasonable, consequence-blind man who had crossed two Pack borders to interrupt one drinking game.
My arms rose, shaking, and locked around his neck.
“Closer…”
He made a sound low in his chest, and the world folded shut.
Fullness and ache and pleasure braided together, and the fear , impossibly , thinned. Find the original chapter at g.com.
He moved slowly at first, deep and unhurried, one palm cradling the back of my head the whole while, the other hand laced through mine, fingers locked.
“Watch me,” he said quietly.
It was not quite a command.
I opened my eyes to gold.
And then there was no more slowness.
The bench frame rocked, the room filled with the two of us and nothing else, and every forceful stroke found the same place in me, dragged me back up the crest, and threw me over.
A last thread of fear still glimmered somewhere under it all, and the pleasure drowned it.
I was crying his name and clinging to his back, nails leaving faint lines on his skin.
“Kael… Kael…”
He turned me over and took me from behind, deeper in that position, one hand spread flat on the small of my back, the other reaching around, relentless.
The second climax hit fast and brutal , my whole body seized around him, and I sobbed his name , and he drove through it, groaning, and finally buried himself to the root and let go, warmth flooding through me in wave after wave.
He didn’t withdraw at once.
He gathered me against his chest exactly as we were, his fingers combing slowly through my sweat-soaked hair, his lips at my forehead.
“Still afraid?” he asked softly.
I hid my face in his chest and listened to the heavy, steady drum of his heart.
It was a long time before I answered, hoarse.
“…A little.
But…
less than before.”
”Then get used to it slowly.” His voice was at my ear.
“I have all the time in the world to make you stop fearing me.”
Much later, he rose, brought a warm towel from the cabinet, and cleaned me with a touch gone careful enough to be unrecognizable , my thighs, my stomach, an inch at a time , and then dressed me again, gently.
“Does it hurt?” he asked softly.
I hadn’t gotten a word out when knuckles landed on the door , sudden, wrong, loud.
Then footsteps outside it, familiar enough to turn my blood to ice.
And a voice I would carry to my grave , low, contained, heavy with a fury strong enough to tear through the door itself.
“Alpha Kael. Are you in there?”
It was Nathan.