17: Staking His Claim

I was up on my feet, pacing across the room when I smelled him. It wasn’t like before, a subtle hint of cardamom; now it was a stronger, full-bodied assault on my senses. A sharp knock sounded at the door and I froze.

My body reacted before my mind did.

I knew who it was.

I didn’t answer.

The door opened anyway, swinging open before I could even find my voice to tell him to stay out.

Raguel stepped into the room, and the air seemed to vanish.

I had been practicing my speech for twenty minutes. I was clear-headed now. The shock of the divorce, the betrayal, and the sight of the Mayor on his knees had finally settled into anger. I was going to tell him that I was leaving, and that he couldn’t keep me here.

But as he walked toward me, the words died in my throat. He had stripped away the suit, replaced by a black T-shirt with short sleeves, exposing forearms that looked like they were carved out of steel. His grey sweatpants hung low on his hips, the fabric clinging to the powerful length of his thighs. My eyes betrayingly drifted lower, catching the heavy, unmistakable outline of his dick—the very thing I had felt pressed against my thigh just two days ago when he had stuck his fingers in my pussy.

I was mortified. My face burned with a heat that had nothing to do with anger.

How could I be thinking about the way he felt when my entire life had just been sold for a bank transfer?

It had been so long since I’d felt anything—years of Aaron’s coldness and the mechanical intimacy of our marriage—which was probably why my body seemed to be screaming for the man in front of me, drowning out the protests of my mind. He oozed a raw sex appeal that felt like deja vu, smelling like a memory I’d forgotten I had.

“Lyra.”

His voice was a low, warning rumble that snapped me back to the present. He was standing too close, his heat radiating off him in waves.

“Let me go,” I said. It was supposed to be a command, but it came out as a breathless, weak suggestion. I tried again, forcing some courage into my words. “I’m serious, Raguel. Let me leave.”

“Why?”

The question caught me off guard.

“What do you mean why?” I snapped, latching onto the frustration. “Because none of this makes sense! You keep saying things like they’re facts when they’re not. Werewolves are not real.”

“Even if they were, I wouldn’t know! I’m just a human girl, born to human parents. I grew up in a human house, Raguel. Now, you’re asking me to believe that I’m part of something I don’t even understand. That I’m some…queen? You’ve made a mistake. You’ve spent decades looking for a ghost and you’ve pinned your hopes on the wrong person.”

“I do not make mistakes about things like this, Lyra,” he said, his voice dropping to that terrifyingly calm, authoritative register.

His certainty made something twist in my chest.

I shook my head.

“I don’t care!” I yelled, the frustration finally boiling over. “I want to go home. I want to go back to the apartment and talk to Aaron. He was scared, he was cornered—he didn’t mean those things. If I talk to him, if we just sit down without you looming over us, we can fix—”

“Enough,” Raguel growled. “Stop bringing up that coward’s name in my house.”

“He’s my husband!” I pushed past him, pacing again. “We had a life. We had a plan. I would have made a perfect life with him if you hadn’t interrupted us. If you hadn’t baited him into gambling, if you hadn’t forced that divorce paper on him—”

“You would have lived a lie until the day he finally broke your spirit or your neck,” Raguel countered, his shadow falling over me as he intercepted my path.

“You don’t know that! You ruined us! You saw a happy marriage and you decided to—”

I didn’t get to finish the lie.

Raguel reached out, his hands fisting in the hair at the base of my neck and tilting my head back with a firm, silencing pressure. He didn’t argue. He didn’t use logic. He simply lowered his head and crashed his mouth against mine.

It wasn’t a gentle kiss to comfort me. It was a possessive claim designed to burn down the memory of Aaron’s name. The moment his lips touched mine, the anger that had been fueling my speech vanished.