Chapter 199

Kaelen’s POV

She tasted like blood and salt and years of absence.

I kissed her like I was trying to consume her. Like if I pressed hard enough, deep enough, I could erase every mile she’d put between us. Every night I’d spent staring at the ceiling of our empty chamber.

Ela fought.

Her free hand shoved against my chest. Hard. Her palm flat against the ridge of my sternum, fingers clawing at the fabric of my shirt. She twisted beneath me, her wrist jerking with a desperate energy.

She kicked my shin. The impact was sharp—precise, aimed at the bone. A stubborn instinct. The sheer defiance of a prey refusing to be conquered. She was choosing to fight me with everything she had rather than submit.

I didn’t stop.

I caught the back of her neck with one hand. Held her there. Her silver hair tangled through my fingers like threads of moonlight. She made a sound—strangled, furious—and then her teeth found my lower lip.

She bit down. Not a love bite. Not a playful nip. She sank her teeth into the flesh with the intent to wound, and she succeeded. Pain lanced through my mouth. Hot. Bright. The taste of my own blood flooded my tongue.

I pulled back just enough to see. Crimson dripped from my lip onto her collarbone.

Her ice-blue eyes blazed up at me. Defiant. Terrified. Both at once.

Good, Alex snarled inside me. She still has teeth. Now claim what’s ours.

I spun her.

One fluid motion—my hand on her hip, the other still gripping her nape. I turned her body and pressed her face-first against the wall. Her wrist twisted overhead. Her free hand slammed flat against the stone, bracing.

I caught that wrist too. Pinned both above her head with one hand. My fingers locked around the delicate bones like iron.

The force of it shook the tapestry. The heavy fabric swayed, its embroidered edge brushing her shoulder.

“Years,” I said against her ear. My chest pressed into her back. I could feel every ridge of her spine through the thin, stained fabric of her shirt. “For years I searched for you.”

“Kaelen—stop—”

“For years you were out there struggling. Barely surviving. Nearly dying.” My voice wasn’t steady. Wasn’t controlled. It was something dragged across gravel and set on fire. “And you didn’t come home.”

“Let go of me—” she gasped, her breath ragged.

“Do you know what that did to me?” I pressed closer. My mouth grazed the shell of her ear. Her body was rigid against mine—every muscle locked, every tendon drawn tight.

A sob ripped through her. Raw. Involuntary. The sound cracked something in the air between us.

I turned her back around. My hand found her jaw. Tilted her face up. Those shattered blue eyes, swimming with tears and fury and something underneath both that I recognized because it lived inside me too.

I kissed her again.

Slower this time. Deliberate. I pressed my bleeding lip to her split one and tasted our pain mingling together. She resisted—her body stiff, her breath ragged through her nose. Her free hand pushed against my shoulder.

Then—

A few moments. Maybe less.

Her fingers stopped pushing. They curled into the fabric of my shirt instead. Her mouth softened. Just barely. A brief fraction of surrender so small anyone else would have missed it.

But I wasn’t anyone else. I was her mate. And I felt it the way I felt my own heartbeat.

Alex roared in triumph. The sound reverberated through my bones, primal and possessive, shaking loose what remained of my restraint.

I lifted her.

She weighed nothing. That was the first wrong thing. My hands spanning her waist, my fingers nearly touching at her spine—she weighed nothing. But the wolf didn’t care. Alex didn’t care. Years of starvation had made him feral, and now his mate was in our arms and nothing else existed.

I carried her to the bed. Laid her down. Her hand pressed flat against my chest again—not pushing now. Just there. A barrier made of trembling fingers and paper-thin resolve.

I straddled her hips. Looked down at her. Silver hair fanned across the dark sheets. Tears tracking through the dirt and blood on her face. Chest heaving.

I grabbed the collar of her shirt with both hands.

And ripped.

The fabric tore with a sound like a wound opening. It split down the center, falling away from her body in bloodstained strips that hung from her shoulders like shed skin.

Mark her, Alex commanded. Now. Before she runs again. Before she disappears. MARK HER.

I gathered both her wrists and pinned them above her head. She bucked. A sharp, desperate movement. Her knee caught my thigh but I shifted my weight and pressed her deeper into the mattress.

I lowered my head toward her neck. The hollow where her pulse hammered. The sacred place where a mate’s mark would bind us permanently—flesh to flesh, soul to soul, unbreakable.

My canines descended. Fully extended. I felt them press against the inside of my lips, razor-sharp and aching. Alex was howling now, a continuous, maddening sound that urged me on, drowning out everything—her breathing, my thoughts, the distant wind against the windows.

I opened my mouth against her skin.

Then I saw.

Her shirt was gone. And beneath it—

My canines retracted so fast the sting made my jaw ache.

Her body was a ruin.

Ribs. I could count every single one. They pressed against her skin like the bars of a cage, rising and falling with each shallow, terrified breath. Her stomach was concave. Her collarbones jutted like blades.

But that wasn’t what stopped me.

The bruises. Layers of them. Fresh purple blooming over faded yellow over green over brown—a calendar of violence painted across her torso.

The burns. Bandages wrapped around her right forearm and shoulder, edges darkened with seepage. Beneath the loosened gauze, I caught a glimpse of raw, blistered skin—deliberate. Precise. The shape of something pressed against flesh and held there.

The cuts. Thin white scars crisscrossing her arms and shoulders. Some old. Some not. Some still scabbed, barely closed, angry red lines that mapped a history of systematic brutality.

She was trembling.

Not the way she’d trembled before—from anger, from resistance, from the effort of fighting me. This was different. This was the trembling of a body that had been taught, through repetition and pain, to expect the worst from the hands that held it down.

She was shaking because she was afraid of me.

Of what I was about to do.

I looked at her face. Really looked. Past the defiance. Past the tears. Into those ice-blue eyes that I had loved since the moment they found mine through a mask at a ballroom I had no business being human in.

She was waiting for it. The bite. The claim. The violence. Her jaw was clenched. Her eyes were open. She wasn’t going to close them.

She was going to watch me do it.

The way she’d watched everything else that had been done to her.

“Damn it.”

The curse left me in a whisper. Hoarse. Wrecked.

I released her wrists. Pushed myself off the bed. My hands were shaking—my hands, which hadn’t shaken since I was a child watching my parents’ funeral pyre.

I stood there. Looking down at what years of my failure had produced.

The wolf inside me went silent, drowned in self-loathing.

I shrugged off my coat. The heavy wool settled over her exposed body, covering the bruises and burns and bones. Covering the evidence of every way I had failed to protect her.

She flinched when the fabric touched her skin.

I walked to the door. Each step deliberate. Measured. Holding myself together with nothing but willpower and the grinding of my teeth.

At the threshold, I stopped. My hand rested on the frame. I didn’t turn around.

“Don’t run.”

My voice was a cold, Alpha command. Flat. Emptied of everything that was destroying me from the inside.

“If you run this time, Ela, I will find you in hours. Not years.” I let the silence stretch. Let the weight of it settle over her shaking body. “And there won’t be another chance.”

I stepped through the door and pulled it shut behind me.