"Beth, you don't have to—"
"I know I don't have to. I want to. That's what I've been saying this entire time. Iwantthis. I wantyou."
His eyes close. Something in his expression fractures.
"I am choosing you," I say.
When he opens his eyes, they're bright and unguarded in a way I've never seen. He leans forward. His hand slides into my hair, cradling the back of my head, and his mouth finds the right side of my neck, mirroring Mason's mark, his lips warm against my pulse.
"I'm going to spend a very long time earning this," he murmurs.
Then his teeth break skin and the bond detonates.
Knox crashes into me like a wave hitting a seawall. I feel his mind: sharp, fast, always running, always calculating three moves ahead. I feel the architecture of his thoughts, clean lines and contingencies and escape routes mapped for every scenario. But underneath all of it, underneath the control and the strategyand the five-year plans I always tease him about, there's a hollow.
A space shaped like loneliness.
The kind that comes from being surrounded by people and convinced that none of them would stay if they saw the scaffolding. The kind that builds walls and calls it efficiency.
And right now, flooding through that hollow space, filling every corner of it: me. My presence in his bond like light finding a dark room. I feel his shock at it. His disbelief.
I'm real,I think, even though I don't know if he can hear me yet.I'm staying.
When he pulls back, his forehead drops to mine and he doesn't say anything for a long time. His breath is ragged. Through the bond, I feel something I can only describe as a man putting down something he's been carrying for years.
"Beth," he says.
"I know."
"You can feel—"
"All of it."
He makes a sound. Not quite a laugh, not quite a sob. Somewhere in the territory between.
I turn my head, the two newly forged bonds inside my chest humming, actively aching for the final piece to snap into place. "Arthur," I breathe.
He has been quiet through all of it. Through his pack brothers' confessions and both bonds snapping into place. He's been sitting against the headboard with his arms resting on his knees, watching.
He unfolds slowly. Moves toward me. Settles in front of me, close enough that I can see the pulse in his throat.
"I don't have a confession," he says. "And I don't have a speech."
"That's okay too," I chuckle.
He smiles. "Tell me where."
I tilt my head back. Bare my throat. Right over the pulse, where the skin is thinnest and the mark will sit between the two already there.
"Here," I say. "Where everyone can see."
His hand curves around the back of my neck. His thumb strokes once along my jaw. He leans in, and his lips press against the spot first, soft, reverent, before his teeth find their place.
The bond opens like a door to a room with every light on.
Warmth. That's what hits me first. The warmth of a man who walks into a room and immediately checks if everyone's glass is full. Who remembers how you take your coffee and asks about the thing you mentioned in passing three weeks ago.
I move deeper and the warmth only thickens. I feel how much of he gives. The relentless, generous, inexhaustible outpouring of himself into everyone around him.
