I drag my hand down my face. My palm comes away damp. I close my eyes and breathe through my teeth and tell myself it was only a dream. The bond is alive between us. She is sleeping next to me, on her back now. There is nothing in this room but the two of us.
I open my eyes and look at her.
She is so beautiful in this light. The line of her shoulder. The slope of her back where the sheet has slipped down. The mark on the side of her neck, dark and clean against her skin, exactly where my mouth went.
The horror I held off all night comes back through my entire body in a slow, cold wave. I marked her. I broke the most important promise I ever made to myself. I broke the promise my father spent twenty years making me memorize. Sienna is going to wake up bonded to me for life, and I do not know how to tell her what that is going to do to her.
A dream, I say to myself again. The bond is whole. She is breathing.
She moves in her sleep. Lets out a small, contented sound and rolls toward me again. Her arm slides across the sheet. Her hair falls back from her shoulder. The pillow shifts under her cheek.
My eyes drop to the space below her neck.
There is a mark there.
Not the mating mark. The mating mark is on the other side, raised and warm and right where I put it.
This mark is on her collarbone. It is small. The size of a fingertip. Black. Faint.
Crawling.
All the blood in my body goes cold.
I cannot move. I cannot make my hand reach toward her. I am sitting up in the bed with her sleeping beside me, the bond singing softly between us, and I am staring at a single black tendril on her skin. Behind my ribs, my wolf is making a sound I have never heard him make before.
The dream is no longer a dream.
I cannot wake Sienna because I cannot bear to be the one who shows her what I have done.
I sit there in the dark, my mating mark on her throat and the curse on her collarbone, and I cannot breathe.
Chapter Eighteen
Sienna
I wake alone.
The other side of the bed is empty, but the sheets are warm. I turn my head on the pillow.
Lucas is in the armchair by the window in pajama pants and nothing else. He is bent forward with his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped in front of his mouth, his head bowed. He doesn’t look up when I stir.
It all comes back to me in one rush. The kiss. The bed. His teeth at my throat. The mark sealing into my skin. My voice crying out his name.
My body still aches from him. He didn’t let me have a break. He was possessive in a way I had not seen him before, dominant in a way that should not have been a surprise but was. Heat climbs the back of my neck as I think about it.
I lie here for a long time with my eyes on the ceiling, trying to come to terms with my new reality. The bond hums between us, low and steady and present. I can feel it like a second heartbeat. My wolf is awake, curled inside my ribs and sighing contentedly.
I hate her for it.
Slowly, I pull myself into a sitting position, dragging the sheet with me and wrapping it around myself, holding it at my chest. I don’t bother looking for my clothes; I am not about to bend over to hunt for them in front of him. I tuck my legs under me on the edge of the mattress and pull the sheet tighter.
Lucas has lifted his head and is watching me now. His face is stripped of every alpha mask I have ever seen on it. He looks like a man who has not slept, who has spent hours in that chair with heavy thoughts weighing him down. I bet he regrets what happened.
My heart twists at the thought.
But I refuse to care. I refuse to let myself care.
“We need to talk.” My voice is hoarse, and I feel ashamed of myself for it.
