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My other hand had already reached the hem of my T-shirt before I consciously decided to move it.

This time, I did not stop myself.

I slid my palm over my stomach, including the soft curve I had spent years trying to hide, and for once I did not waste a single thought criticizing it. I imagined Kaelen’s hands instead, large and warm and still rough with traces of soil, and remembered how carefully those same hands had held mine.

When I cupped my breast, I pictured his palm there instead.

My nipple hardened against my hand almost immediately, and the sensation pulled a gasp from me. I rubbed my thumb over it again, slower this time, and felt my body tighten in response.

That was the moment I stopped pretending I had any intention of resisting.

My hand moved down my stomach and slipped beneath the waistband of my panties. I was already soaked, far wetter than I expected, and the realization made another rush of heat move through me. When my fingers slid through the slick warmth of my pussy and brushed my clit, my hips lifted from the mattress before I could control them.

I bit my lip and touched myself again, this time slowly, circling with enough pressure to make my breath catch.

My mind went straight back to Kaelen.

I imagined what might have happened if he had not pulled away in the Glasshouse. I pictured him closing the last inch between us and kissing me against the glass while rain hammered against it behind my head. I imagined his hand leaving mine and moving beneath my wet cardigan until it found my breast, his palm closing around it while my nipple hardened beneath his touch.

Then my thoughts carried us farther.

I imagined him pushing me back onto one of the old wooden benches between his mother’s roses. I imagined him lowering himself between my knees and looking up at me with those bright gold eyes before putting his hands on my thighs and spreading them apart.

A moan escaped me before I could swallow it.

The fantasy became more vivid instead of breaking.

I imagined his fingers slipping beneath my panties and finding me exactly as I was now, so wet that there would have been no possibility of hiding what he had done to me. I wanted to see his expression when he touched my pussy and realized how badly I wanted him.

My fingers moved faster over my clit, slick enough now that every movement came easily. I pressed my mouth into the pillow to muffle another sound.

Then I felt the bond.

The ache beneath my breastbone, the one that had been there since the courtyard, suddenly sharpened. The sensation had appeared before when he looked at me across the Great Hall, but this time it was stronger and more focused. I could feel it pulling downward, through the tower, toward the ground two hundred and twelve steps below me.

Someone was standing there.

I knew who it was without going to the window.

Kaelen was outside.

I could feel his presence at the base of the tower, somewhere on the narrow strip of wet grass where I had seen the black wolf pacing five weeks earlier.

The bond was how I knew he was there. I had no idea whether he could smell me through the leaking window or whether he could feel the same heat traveling along whatever impossible connection still existed between us. After what had happened in the Glasshouse, however, he did not need access to my thoughts to know exactly who I was thinking about.

He knew.

That realization should have embarrassed me enough to stop.

Instead, it made everything worse.

I pictured him standing below my window with his hands clenched, his body rigid, knowing exactly what I was doing because he knew exactly what he had done to me. He had rejected me in front of the entire school. He had told me to run from him. Yet now he was outside my tower in the middle of the night during lockdown because, whatever he claimed, some part of him had still come back.

For the first time since arriving at Ironmoor, the imbalance between us did not feel quite so absolute.

He could call me the Stray. He could turn cold and distant whenever anyone was watching. He could pretend that whatever existed between us meant nothing.

But he was still standing outside.