Her breath broke on a quiet gasp.
Fucking Vykan.
The curse flickered through her mind—not spoken, but sharp enough to steady her for the barest moment. She tore her gaze from his burning eyes and forced it downward.
The only defense she had.
The ground swam slightly beneath her vision, but she focused on it, on the polished stone, on the faint rippling shadow of the waterfall behind her.
When she finally managed to speak, her voice was quiet but edged with something she couldn’t hide.
“Get out.”
She braced for impact.
For anger.
For punishment.
For the explosion of violence his form suggested.
Instead—
Nothing.
No retaliation.
No sound.
No shift in the air.
He was simply… gone.
One moment his presence weighed on her like gravity, and the next the garden felt unbearably empty, stripped of its heat and tension, leaving only the echo of what he had awakened inside her.
She sagged against the nearest stone pillar, breath shuddering, heart still racing in frantic staccato against her ribs.
Intoxication lingered.
Arousal pulsed through her with every shaky inhale.
And beneath all of it, deeper than she wanted to admit, something else stirred.
A fear that was not about him.
Not about captivity.
Not about alien worlds or impossible bonds.
A fear of herself.
Because in spite of her resistance, in spite of every instinct screaming at her to keep fighting, part of her—a treacherous, aching part—wanted to surrender to whatever he had just awakened.
And that was the part she feared the most.
CHAPTER 14
The moment the door to her chambers sealed behind him, Kyrax stopped at the threshold. The quiet hum of the locking mechanism faded, and with it the last trace of her scent—soft, human, laced with defiance and fear—drifted in the air behind him.
