Her eyes widen.
“You feel that,” I say.
“Yes,” she whispers. Her hand presses harder against my chest. “What is it?”
The current deepens again. The lights in the room flicker…just once, just barely. The water glass on the nightstand trembles. The air between us thickens the way it did in the cave, but this isn’t the destructive force that cracked the glass. This is something I’ve never produced before. Something that’s building between us with her hand on my chest and my heart under her palm and the word “mate” sitting in both of us like a key turning in a lock.
“I don’t know,” I say. “It’s new.”
Her pupils are wide. Her lips parted. Whatever this is, it’s in both of us now: in her hand, in her pulse, running through her body into mine.
The lights flicker again. The vending machine outside goes quiet.
Her fingers curl into my shirt.
“Rafael,” she says. My name in her mouth, the room trembling around us, and something opening between us that neither of us has walked through before.
I don’t know what’s on the other side.
Her hand pulls me closer.
Chapter 28
Rafael
Sable reaches for me first. After everything—Faith’s ruined face on the asphalt, Creed’s headlights disappearing down the mountain, Brenna’s voice on the phone asking if Sable was safe from me, the twenty-four captives waiting somewhere I can still imagine too clearly—she reaches.
Her hand finds my jaw. Her thumb settles against the corner of my mouth. The touch is warm and deliberate and has nothing to do with checking my pulse.
“You’re here,” she says. “Really here.”
“Yeah.”
“Mine.”
“Yours.”
She pulls me away from the bathroom doorframe. Her other hand slides to the back of my neck, fingers curling into my still-damp hair. The power that stirred between us a moment ago isstill there, low and warm, waiting under my skin like it knows something I don’t.
The room is bathed in cheap yellow light and shower steam and the smell of pine cleaner and old carpet. Food wrappers on the table. The drip from the bathroom. One bed with a quilted spread that should be on pension.
But it’s a room with a door that we locked ourselves.
She’s looking at me as if she can see past the blood, the scars, the number, all the way to the man I’m still trying to become.
“I don’t understand,” I say. “How can you look at me like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like I’m someone worth giving everything up for. After all that you’ve seen me do.”
Her hand tightens on the back of my neck. “You stopped a dragon mid-shift. You held off a Syndicate extraction team. You spoke for yourself to an alpha who was ready to write you off.” Her thumb moves against the base of my skull. “That’s what I saw.”
“I mutilated a man.”
“You protected us.”
“Sable—”
