LOGIN“I hate you.” The words come out cracked and true. I drag his mouth back to mine anyway, biting his lower lip hard enough to make him groan. “I will never forgive you. Not for chasing me out. Not for any of it.”“I know.” His forehead rests against mine. His voice is wrecked. “Hate me. Just don’t send me away, my love. Not tonight. Please.”That single word nearly undoes me.He has never said please like this. Not to anyone. The sound of it lives under my skin and spreads heat low in my belly until I am aching, empty, and furious at how badly I want him.His hands map me with devastating care. He peels the shift from my shoulders and down my arms, pausing every few inches like each new patch of bare skin is something he has to earn. His fingers are scarred and rough and impossibly gentle as they skim the underside of my breasts, the soft curve of my waist. When he finally draws the fabric past my hips and tosses it aside, the cold air kisses every newly exposed place and makes me shi
I should stop this His mouth finds mine and for one heartbeat I let it. His lips are warm and rough from the cold and they move like he has been starving, and my whole body leans up into him before my mind catches what my body is doing.Then I catch it.I wrench back. I get both hands flat against his chest and I shove hard, and I scramble up off the pallet and put the width of the cold little room between us before I can talk myself out of it. My breath is ragged. My mouth is still burning from his."No!" My voice shakes and I hate that it shakes. "No. Get up. Get out. I mean it, Riven. This is not.. I am not doing this. You do not get to clean a cut on my foot and kiss me and have me, that is not how this works, not after everything. Get out!"I expect him to argue. To reach for me. To use that low ruined voice and those careful hands and close the distance the way any man would, the way Kaelen always did, taking the no as a door to lean on until it opened.Riven doesn't.He goes s
LioraThe door shut behind Stiles and left me alone with the King, and the cabin was suddenly far too small and too tight.."You had no right." I rounded on Riven, glad of the anger, reaching for it like a rope. "That was mine to end, not yours. You don't get to walk in here and command him like he's still one of your soldiers, you don't get to command anyone in this room or in this pack, least of all me. And you are not welcome here, Riven. You were never welcome. I let you sit by that fire, I did not invite you into my house.""I know." He had not moved from the doorway. He filled it, all that height and shadow, and he watched me with those molten eyes and he did not come closer. "I heard the whole of it, if you're wondering. I did not mean to. These walls are thin and my ears are what they are." Something moved across his face. "You told him you'll never forgive me. I want you to know I heard that, and that I think you're right to mean it.""Don't!" I turned away from him, back to
StilesShe didn't answer.I stood there with my hands on her arms and my whole stupid heart hanging open in the air between us, and I waited, and she didn't answer, and the silence went on long enough that the answer started to become the silence itself.I had held her before. That's the thing that broke me, standing there. This wasn't the first time I'd been this close. I'd had her against me on the porch that night, had felt her lean in, had kissed her over Brenna's grave with her hands in my hair. I knew what her body did when it wanted to be near mine. I knew the give of it, the way she softened.She wasn't soft now.She was stiff under my hands. Her weight was tipped back, away, some part of her already halfway to the door, and when I breathed her in, hoping for the thing I'd felt before, I got the opposite. She was repelling me. Not with words, not yet, but with the whole animal truth of her body, the small unconscious lean of a woman who wants to be somewhere else, and I have s
"We should pack."Stiles said it after I had looked away from the King for the third time and failed, again, to make it the last. He was watching my face and he did not like what he found there, and I could not blame him."It's late," he went on, rising, holding a hand down to me. "And we ride at first light, if we're really doing this. There's a lot to gather and it's warmer inside than out here. Come. I'll help you with your things."I took his hand and let him pull me up, and I did not miss the way he angled us away from the fire as we went, his body between me and Riven the whole way, herding me gently back toward my cabin and away from the pull I could not hide from him. I let him do it. It was easier than the truth. And some cowardly part of me was glad to be taken out of range of that scent before it finished dissolving what little resolve I had left.My cabin was cold and dark. Stiles built up the small fire while I began to gather what little I owned into the travel pack, and
LioraI did not think I would ever see the Lycan King sit on the ground.But there he was, that night, folded down onto a log by the big central fire like any other wolf, his furs thrown back off his shoulders, the flames throwing gold and shadow up the hard lines of his face. His soldiers sat around him, a dozen of them, and past them, slowly, carefully, the way you approach a wild thing you have decided to trust against your own better sense, the people of Whitewaters had begun to gather too.They had spent the whole day terrified of him. I had watched them go to their knees in the snow that morning, watched them beg for their lives with their faces in the frost. And now here they were, easing closer to his fire one by one, drawn to the very thing that had frightened them, because that is what he is. That is what he has always been. A thing you cannot look away from even when every sense you own is telling you to run.I sat apart. Across the fire, on the cold side, with Stiles at my
My knees gave out on the second step.The guards didn't care. They didn't stop dragging me.My bare feet slapped against the freezing stone of the grand staircase, my toes leaving small, pathetic smears of blood where I dragged. The rough fabric of the hospital gown rode up my thighs, exposing the
LioraEight months pregnant!I chuckled, tracing the tight, swollen curve of my belly. I raised my chin and looked at myself in the rearview mirror, a massive smile spreading across my cheeks. I was finally giving an heir to my mate. I was finally going to be a true Luna for the Alpha. Kaelen was
LioraI woke up in a bed.That sounds like the smallest, most unremarkable thing. But after three years of a husband who monitored my pillow count and two weeks on a clinic cot with straps on my wrists, the weight of a real mattress beneath me — thick and warm and clean — felt so foreign it trigger
KaelenThe jagged tracks of the carriage wheels were permanently gouged into the mud.I stood at the edge of the pack square, staring down at the deep ruts left behind by those demonic horses. The freezing wind bit at my face, but I couldn't feel it. I couldn't feel my fingers. All I could feel was







