Evidence.
“You’re making it worse,” I said.
“I know.”
“Then stop.”
He immediately closed his mouth.
The silence was somehow worse than the words, because the bond kept speaking where he had stopped. Heat. The discipline he was holding with both hands. Every unsaid thing he hadn’t put between us.
I hated that I could feel them. I hated more that some reckless part of me wanted to ask to hear them out loud.
Dominic looked at me across the room, silent now because I had told him to be, and still somehow everywhere.
“You should leave,” he said.
“I know.”
The bond pulled hot. He didn’t move.
“Now.”
“I know that too.”
Then more of him came through, and his restraint slipped by one dangerous notch. I felt the dragon under the man, the wanting under the manners, the hunger contained so tightly it had become pain.
My body understood it. My brain objected. My body noted the objection and proceeded anyway.
I crossed half the room before I realized I had decided to move.
Dominic didn’t come toward me. He also didn’t move away. The distance between us closed by four feet, and the bond answered like someone had opened a furnace door.
“You can stand there and want me all you like,” I said. “Apparently we’re all suffering through that together. But you don’t get to edit my life to make room for yourself.”
For a moment, he was very still. Then his shoulders shifted. “I am not editing your life,” he said.
“No?”
“No.” His voice stayed quiet. “I am telling you what the bond already did.”
The room seemed to tilt by one degree.
“That isn’t an argument you want to make to me.”
“It is not an argument. It is fact.”
“Convenient.”
His eyes sharpened. “No.It is inconvenient in almost every possible direction.”
Heat crawled up the back of my neck.
“You can decide what happens next,” he said. “You can decide how fast. How slow. Whether I touch you. Whether I come near you. Whether I stand outside your door until the council grows old from waiting.”
My pulse gave a thud.
“But your ex-boyfriend is not part of this anymore.”
