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I hated that she was.
That after everything she’d gone through tonight, her fear led her to this.
I stared at her, the picture of beauty: a wounded goddess, with tears trickling from pleading eyes, illuminated across the golden tan of her cheeks. Her nose was pink, and her lips blood red.
“P-please. I can’t… I can’t go back alone.”
“You will never be alone.”
“I will. You have the bond. I don’t.”
I’d never seen her so wholly as I did in that moment, chained by fear and begging for freedom. The centre of the whole world.
“I c-can’t face them alone.”
She cupped my cheeks, and I was swallowed into eyes shimmering gold.
The most beautiful omega in the world. In pain. The ebbing tide of nightshade stuck to my throat and lungs, coating my skin—a scent so beautiful and powerful, and wounded how it should never be.
I couldn’t do it…
“You can keep me safe from them,” she whispered.
The world slowed at those words. Dizzying in their truth. Icouldprotect her, not just in this moment, but every moment from now until forever. From monsters so much more evil than even she had seen.
Icouldbite this fragment of heaven into our pack, where she would never be alone again. Where she would be safe. Where the horrors of what had just happened, would never happen again.
Her lip trembled as she begged me, and each of her words was a hook, sinking into my heart, demanding action, a jarring, desperate ache building and building.
“P-Please, Dusk.”
TWENTY-ONE
SHATTER
Teeth sank into my skin once more.
Different this time: gentle, loving, and desperate.
For a long moment, I felt nothing. He drew back, his piercing eyes finding mine. I shook my head, realising he must have tried a normal bond—a last attempt to save me from what I was begging for. Just like the first time I’d been offered a normal bond, I felt nothing.
I curled my fingers around his neck, breathing growing rapid as he paused, every desperate nerve in my body alight.
I wanted this.
“If I got a princess bond with them, it would have been because I had no other option,” I whispered. “But you are my choice, the only choice I’ve ever made because I wanted to.”
There was a long beat, and midnight opium was filled with despair. He wasn’t going to do it.
A sob caught in my chest, and fresh tears flooded my face.
He wouldn’t do it.
But then he growled, fingers weaving through my hair, dragging my neck into an arch, and his teeth found my skin once more.
A bond lit—stronger than anything Flynn had threatened. This was real. I collided with his pack, and for the first time in my life, I wasn’t alone. For the first time in my life, I had a family.
TWENTY-TWO
