He’s leaning against the door. Arms at his sides. He hasn’t taken off his jacket. The only light in the room is from the window and it cuts him in strips. Jaw. Shoulder. One hand hanging at his side.
“Nico,” he says.
“One night,” I say. “Three years ago. I was human. He was on the circuit. I didn’t know what he was.”
He pushes off the door and walks to the chair where I set my jacket. Takes off his own. Folds it. Places it on top of mine. Then he rolls his sleeves to his forearms. Slowly. The care he takes with each fold is obscene, given what I feel building behind the contained bond.
Something low in my stomach tightens.
“He wanted more,” I say. “I didn’t. I had Simone. I had fights to win. It was nothing.”
He says nothing.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
He lifts his head.
He starts moving.
Not toward me. Around me. He walks to the window. Past it. Runs his fingers along the back of the second chair. Comes around the far side of the room in a slow arc that puts me between him and the door. He’s not looking at the furniture. He’s looking at me. How he tracks my face while his body takes a different path makes my skin prickle.
I don’t turn to follow him. I hold my position and track him with my eyes, and the hair on the back of my neck stands up.
He stops behind me. Close. His body cold behind mine. His breath on my neck.
“I don’t care about one night three years ago,” he says. His voice is low. Right against my ear.
My breathing changes.
"I don't care about a wolf shifter sitting at a bar." His arm comes up. He wraps his hand around my throat. His thumb rests against my pulse.
“What I care about,” he says, “is that you are mine. And I want every trace of anyone who came before me erased until you can’t remember what it felt like to be touched by anyone else.”
My breath leaves me.
His thumb presses against my pulse. One degree harder.
“Then erase it,” I say.
He doesn’t move.
The seconds stretch. His hand on my neck. His body behind me. The shadows stir against his skin where his wrist touches mine. The room is so quiet that both of our breathing carries.
“Maximus.”
Nothing.
“Erase it.” Again.
He spins me around, and my back hits the wall, and his mouth is on mine before I finish the breath. The kiss is nothing like the man who adjusts my collar in the mirror. This is raw and open and slightly wrecked, and I grab his shirt with both hands and pull, and he presses into me, and the wall is cold against my shoulders, and he is cold against my chest, and I am burning between the two.
He grips my hip and his fingers dig in, and I can’t move. His mouth drags from my lips to my jaw and down to the hollow of my throat, and his teeth graze the skin there, not breaking it, and I arch into it so hard my spine leaves the wall.
He pulls back. His eyes are black in the dark. The shadows have surfaced along his forearms, curling like smoke. He’s not pulling them back.
He has me pinned. Hand on my throat. Hand on my hip. The wall at my back and every inch of him pressed against my front. He expects me to stay.
I don’t stay.
