"I have to be gone before you wake up."
I tense.
"Hey. Hey." His thumb keeps moving on the bite. "Just for the morning. Margot will come find you—check on you after Zero told her you weren’t feeling well. I can’t be in your bed when she does."
"...okay."
"Hey." He shifts. His hand comes up under my jaw and turns my face toward him in the dark. His eyes are warm and tired and so absolutely on me that I forget how to breathe. "Look at me."
I look.
"You're not going to be without me again."
"Bane—"
"I mean it. I'm not being romantic. It's a fact now." His thumb presses the bite, gentle, deliberate, and a wave of warm low calm rolls down my spine from where he touches. "This thing. It's me. That's me, in your chest. Always. It doesn't matter where I am. Through the wall. In the next house. In the next country. I'm in there now. I'm not coming out."
I nod against his palm. Tears slide. He catches them with his thumb.
"Say it back to me. So I know you heard."
"You're in here."
"And?"
"You're not coming out."
"Good boy."
He kisses me.
Long and slow and dark andhis. His tongue pushes into my mouth and the taste of him is the taste my body has been chasing for longer than I care to think about. The bond hums under his thumb at my neck and something low and animal in me settles the way only he can settle it now.
When he pulls back, his forehead stays against mine. "Sleep," he says.
It is soft. It is quiet. It is not a request.
The word lands in my body like a hand on the back of my neck. His scent thickens the way an alpha's scent thickens when he wants to be obeyed—a warm pulse of pheromone rolling off his skin into the inch of air between us—and a jolt of calm runs straight down my spine and washes the last of my consciousness with it.
My eyelids are too heavy to argue.
I couldn't fight him if I wanted to.
I don't want to.
His thumb keeps moving on the bite. His arm is heavy and warm across my ribs. The bond hums in my chest, steady, present, never silent again.
I go under.
Against the bare skin of my shoulder, the mark Bane has set into me thrums once, warm and steady, and stays.
Not silent.
Complete.
Chapter 2
Iwake up alone.
