Anger flashed. It cleared my head. “You don’t get to decide that.”
“No,” he said. “You do.”
“That’s not what you just said.”
“It is exactly what I said.” His voice roughened. “You decide when you let go. You decide what you grieve. You decide what you owe him,if anything. But there is no path from this room back to the life you had before the claim. Not for you. Not for me. Not for him.”
I stared at him. He held my gaze, stubborn and territorial and entirely too certain.
“The bond is not courtship, Catalina. It is not an invitation. It is not a man asking politely for space in your life.” His throat moved. “It is fate.”
“I hate that word. People use it when they want to stop being responsible.”
“Yes,” he said. “And I am responsible. For the claim. For the bite. For every consequence that follows. But I will not pretend this can be undone because there was a man in your life before me.”
Behind my sternum, the burn held steady.
“You are mine,” he said, and before I could move, before I could spit the obvious answer, he continued. “Not to command. Not to use. Not to take. But mine to guard. Mine to answer to. Mine to wait for.”
My hand curled at my side.
Heat moved through my hips, sudden and traitorous, as if the bond had reached down and turned a key I hadn’t given it permission to hold. My thighs pressed together on their own.
Dominic went very still. His breath changed. He had scented exactly what my body had done. His eyes darkened, and I hated the hot, embarrassed twist of satisfaction that took me when I realized he knew.
“And I am yours,” he said, voice rougher now. “Whether you want that today, or in ten years, or never.”
The last word hit strangely.
Never.
It should’ve sounded like freedom. Instead, it sounded like distance. The need to close the distance between us pulled hard. I set my teeth against it.
“You don’t get to erase my life,” I said.
“No,” he said. “But I will not make room for a man who cannot stand inside this bond with you.”
“That’s territorial.”
“I have never been confused about what I am.”
No. Apparently not.
Everything his voice hadn’t said arrived anyway. Want. Desire. The stubborn, impossible certainty of him. My body answered in a way I couldn’t blame on confusion, adrenaline, or poor lighting, and the muscle in Dominic’s jaw jumped as he felt it too.
For one breath, neither of us moved.
Then he said, “Go back to your room.”
Want crossed the space between us, and the heat climbed my sternum. I could smell cedar on him.
Cedar had become the smell of the corridor outside my door. The blanket that appeared folded on my sofa every evening. The coffee at the correct temperature. The formal, infuriating discipline of his week spent trying to be of use without asking my forgiveness.
He had taken too much from me.
He had also spent eight days proving he could stop taking.
I moved forward. Four feet became two. Two became one.
