But?
"But I also know you saved my life. I know you're risking everything to help me clear my name. I know you've spent two years protecting my investigation without asking for anything in return."
She reaches up, fingers barely grazing my cheek. The touch sends electricity shooting through my nervous system like lightning.
"I know you make me feel safe, even when we're running from people who want to kill us."
Jesus Christ.
She's looking at me like I'm something worth wanting instead of something to be feared.
Something worth keeping.
The realization hits like a physical blow. And instead of being terrified by that fact, I want to claim her so completely that she never questions the choice.
This is insane.
"You don't know what you're saying."
"I know exactly what I'm saying." She steps closer, close enough that her body is almost touching mine. "The question is whether you feel the same way."
Feel the same way.As if the thought of losing her now that I've found her doesn’t make me want to burn down everyone and everything that threatens her already.
"Mariana—"
"Do you?"
The question hangs between us like a challenge. She's asking me to be honest about feelings I've never acknowledged, asking me to choose.
Do you feel the same way?
The answer is written in every choice I've made since the warehouse and brought her to the one place in the world where I feel completely safe. Maybe even from before.
"Yes," I whisper, and the admission feels like jumping off a cliff. "I feel the same way."
Something shifts in her expression. Relief, maybe. Or recognition of something she already knew but needed to hear confirmed.
"Good," she says, and then she's reaching up to kiss me.
The contact is gentle at first, tentative. Testing boundaries, asking permission. But when I respond—when I slide my hands into her hair and pull her closer—it becomes something fiercer. Something desperate and hungry and two years in the making.
She tastes like wine, and when she makes a soft sound against my mouth, something primal and possessive unfurls in my chest.
Mine.
The thought makes me deepen the kiss. Makes me forget every reason this is dangerous and focus only on the woman in my arms who's choosing me over the life she has known so far.
Little wolf. You have no idea what you've just started.
But when she arches against me, when her hands find the hem of my sweater and slip underneath to explore the scars she traced earlier, I don't want her to stop.
Consequences be damned.
Even if it destroys us both.
Chapter nine
The Point of No Return
