Chapter 31
Chapter 31:
Slowly, in increments small enough to deny, my body softened against his. The warmth radiating from him seeped into my cold bones. Outside, thunder shook the windowpanes—but inside this circle of arms, the world was strangely, impossibly still.
“Just for tonight,” I whispered into the darkness, more to myself than to him.
His arm tightened by the smallest degree. His large hand settled, warm and heavy, over my stomach. His heartbeat—slow and relentlessly powerful—thumped against my spine, pulling me under like a tide.
The exhaustion of the day, the emotional wreckage of everything that had happened since the pier, finally caught up with me all at once.
Wrapped in the arms of the monster I was supposed to fear, I closed my eyes and let the darkness take me.
Dallas
The storm had passed. In its wake, the silence was heavy and absolute.
I opened my eyes.
There was no golden haze clouding my vision. No beast clawing at the walls of my mind. Ragnar was satisfied—curled deep in the recesses of my psyche, purring quietly, drunk on the scent of moonflowers.
I didn’t move. I had no intention of waking the woman asleep in my arms.
𝘋оո’𝗍 m𝘪𝗌ѕ 𝗻𝗲𝘸 𝘳е𝘭𝘦𝗮sе𝘀 о𝗻 𝗴𝘢𝗅ոo𝗏е𝗹s.𝘤𝗼m
Adelia had gone completely still against me, her breathing slow and even. She had stopped fighting. She had stopped trembling. In sleep, stripped of every defense she carried in waking hours, she looked exactly as she was—someone who had spent ten years bracing for the next blow and had forgotten what rest felt like.
She believed she had just saved me from myself. She believed her presence, her compassion, her bleeding heart had pulled the beast back from the edge.
A quiet, humorless smile tugged at the corner of my mouth.
She had no idea.
I shifted carefully, drawing the duvet higher over her shoulder and tucking it close. Then I pressed my face into her hair and breathed her in—finally clean of that other male’s scent. She smelled only of me now. My scent was woven into her skin, into the fabric of her clothes, into every quiet breath she took. A warning written in a language every wolf understood.
I pressed a slow kiss to the top of her head and let it linger there, sealing something that required no words.
The breakdown. The anguish. The hand extended in trembling desperation. It had been a calculated move—a gambit for territory played on a different kind of battlefield. And she had walked directly into it, led there by the same compassion that made her worth fighting for.
Mine, Ragnar murmured from the depths, smug and utterly satisfied.
Mine, I agreed, my arm drawing her imperceptibly closer.
Tonight, I had let her believe she held a choice. Tomorrow, she would begin to understand that the contract she clung to was nothing but ink and paper—and that a King’s claim ran far deeper than either.