"Explain." One word. Dropped like a brick through glass.
I wrench my arm free. No.
He crowds closer, heat pouring off him in waves that press against my skin before his body does. I feel the pull low in my stomach, the same traitorous hunger that had me arching under him earlier, chasing the stretch of his cock and the weight of his chest pinning mine. My fingers twitch at my sides, remembering the hard plane of his torso under my fingers, the way the muscles there had flexed when he drove deeper.
"Explain," he repeats, advancing one step. The floorboard beneath his right foot creaks, a dry splintering warning. "Why do you think that? How could you think that? After?"
My chin lifts. My nostrils flare. The heat in my chest migrates upward, threatening my composure. "Succumbing to biological urges doesn't equal a bond. It was physical. A reaction." I swallow. "My suppressants are fading. That's all this is. Was."
He leans in, palms slamming down on either side of my hips. The glass shudders in its frame. Not touching me. Caging me. His scent wraps tighter, and the urge to lean forward, to pressmy breasts against the solid wall of his chest, crawls up my spine like a live wire. I hold still.
"Your suppressants failed because we belong together."
His words are ragged, broken at the edges without his usual finesse. Unguarded. He steps closer, and his scent envelops me—smoke and salt and something darker, alpha, andright. My backbone straightens until the vertebrae threaten to separate.
"Chemistry isn't destiny," I say. Each word clips itself short, audited, filed. I enunciate like I'm presenting to a hostile board. "It's a trick of receptors and hormones. A misfire. A bad batch of biology. It happens sometimes, you know?"
"Bullshit." He crowds me, growling. "You think I don't know my own body? My own instinct?" His eyes narrow, focus sharpening to a needlepoint that scrapes my nerve endings bare. "You're mine, Sharma. You've been mine since before you presented. Since before I knew what the word meant."
The urge to duck under his arm bolts through my thighs, electric, traitorous. I suppress it. Plant my feet wider. "You don't own me."
"I will." His voice drops, grating, sure. "That's not a threat. It's… It just is what it is. We didn't choose it, and we don't get to change it either."
"There is no bond." I shove his chest. Muscle gives beneath my hands, hot, resilient, familiar in a way that nauseates me. He doesn't budge. His nostrils flare. Stillness settles over him—the terrible calm before glass shatters. He studies my face with an intensity that should belong in a hostile takeover, dissecting leverage points, hunting for the line where resistance cracks.
"What are you so afraid of?" he asks.
The low-dose question nearly undoes me. He leans in, close enough that his exhale gusts against my mouth. I want to bite his lower lip until it bleeds. I also want to bolt past him and swim until my legs give out. Swim until this terrible, insatiable hunger is left behind on a distant shore.
"Why won't you accept it?" he demands. "It's blatantly obvious. To both of us."
I pull in a breath. It shudders. The memories slip through then, silent and seismic, nights I buried under textbooks and distance. I am sixteen again, presenting as an omega at school, hiding in Vivian's upstairs bedroom while I cry into her pillow so no one will hear. My voice drops. "Do you know how many nights I went home broken?"
Roan goes rigid. The storm in his eyes banks. Suspended as his eyes zero in on me. "Not from school," I continue. The words measure themselves out, each one a brick laid in a wall I thought I'd finished years ago. "From you. Your teasing. Your careless, arrogant cruelty—" My throat locks. I swallow around a sharpness that hasn't moved in a decade. "You made me feel insufficient. Invisible. Beneath your notice. I was a teen, Roan. A child trying to find my way in a body that wouldn't stop growing, and you made me hate every curve."
His jaw tightens until the bone threatens to snap. A vein throbs at his temple. His hands flatten against the window ledge, fingers spreading wide, tendons standing rigid beneath the skin. "I didn't mean to hurt you," he says, softly. "I was stupid and immature. I had no idea—I didn't know—"
"You didn't know it was wrong? Or you didn't know I was your mate? Neither one changes anything." I push off the ledge, forcing him back a step. My hands shake. I hide them at mysides, fingers curling into tight fists. "You don't get to erase sixteen years of humiliation because my scent finally caught up to you. Trust isn't a switch you flip with a good knot and an apology you haven't even given yet."
"I didn't know," he repeats, quieter. The stillness around him fractures. He lifts one hand, reaching, palm up, a gesture too close to pleading for an alpha of his stature. "Sharma, if I had known—if I'd understood what I was doing—"
I step back. My heel hits the chair leg. "I can't trust you. And I never will. You want to know what I'm afraid of?" My voice rises, cracks, steels itself again. "I'm afraid of becoming the girl who cried in her bathroom because a Vaughn boy looked through her like she was glass. I'm afraid that version of me is still in here, waiting for you to find her and finish the job."
The confession hangs in the air, ugly and bare. His face shifts, stricken. For a heartbeat, the arrogant marketing veneer peels away entirely, and underneath stands a man who watched his father die of grief, who made a sacred pact against ever becoming weak, and who is now staring at the wreckage of that pact in the form of a woman he broke before he ever touched. The impulse to comfort him rises in my gut, bitter as swallowed seawater. I almost reach out. My fingers uncurl. Then I fist them again.
"I hope so."
My brows furrow. "Hope?"
"I hope I can find that girl. Because all I want to do is make her feel better. My alpha is dying inside, fucking dying that I can't heal my mate. All I want to do is take care of you. You want an apology. Here it is. I'm so fucking sorry. I would get down on my knees and fucking beg if it would make a difference.Because you are my everything. I know that's because your aroma is my biggest weakness. But it is more than that. It's who you've become despite the damage. That girl who lets her inner strength triumph over her inner demons. I want that girl with everything in me. If you'll let me have her… unconditionally."
"I can't…"
"What about the sex?" The question lashes out, desperate, cutting. "The way we burned through that mattress? The way you screamed my name when I hit that spot inside you? That's us. That's connection."
I shake my head. "Great sex is just great sex, Roan. Endorphins. Friction. Technique." My voice trembles on the last word. I hate it.
"Maybe." He crowds me again, not touching, but close enough that the heat of him radiates against my bare arms. "But it's still real. You can't fake that. You can't engineer that in a lab."
