LOGINEMBER’S POVWe eat terrible ice cream in Rayana’s hospital bed. Three women, three plastic cups, and the steady beep of a heart monitor keeping time like a metronome.And the conversation that follows is the most honest I’ve had with anyone other than Knox.Rayana starts it. She puts her ice cream down and looks at me, and the performative energy drains from her face like water from a tub.What’s left is just a woman in a hospital bed who needs to say something that has been sitting on her chest for weeks.“I owe you an apology,” she says. “About Rafael.”I go still. Queenie goes still.“I brought him into your life. I co-signed that trip. I sat in his living room and drank his champagne and listened to him talk about fate and mate bonds, and I thought he was charming and romantic and I INTRODUCED you to his personal orbit.” She swallows. “He told me things, Ember. About his beliefs about you. About his obsession with the idea that you were his fated mate. And I thought it was sweet.
EMBER’S POVI look at Knox, and the look that passes between us is the kind that makes other people uncomfortable.It is loaded with private language, inside jokes, the shared history of a thousand terrible moments and a handful of perfect ones.He rolls his eyes in a way that is so exaggeratedly put-upon that it’s obviously an act, and I blow him a kiss because I can, because he’s mine, because blowing a kiss to the Lycan King in a hospital room while his ex-fiancée watches is exactly the kind of petty, delicious power move that I have earned the right to make.Knox catches the blown kiss — actually reaches up and closes his fist around the air like he’s grabbing it — and puts it in his jacket pocket.“For later,” he says.And then he WINKS at me, the bastard, and the wink is so stupidly charming and so deliberately over-the-top that Rayana makes a gagging sound from the bed.“Get OUT,” Rayana says. “You two are revolting, and I’m dying, and I don’t want my last memories to be the Ly
EMBER’S POVI sit with Maurice for twenty minutes before Knox comes to find me.Twenty minutes isn’t long enough for everything I want to say to a man who is lying in a hospital bed with tubes in his arms and machines counting his heartbeats.But twenty minutes is what I have because we’re leaving Alaska today and there’s a list of things that need doing before we board that plane.Knox has been letting me take my time, but I can feel him hovering in the corridor the way he hovers when he’s being patient against his natural instincts, which is to say: loudly.“I’m going to find her,” I tell Maurice’s unconscious face. His hand is warm in mine, and the machines beep their steady rhythm.His chest rises and falls softly.“Devika. I’m going to find her and get every answer you were too scared to chase. About my father, about the suppressants, about the woman with the twin girls and the black car. All of it.”He doesn’t respond. Obviously. But his fingers twitch against mine in a way that
EMBER’S POV“Knox— I’m close—”“I know.” His mouth is at my ear, and his voice is wrecked, barely held together, and the knowledge that I am doing this to HIM — that my body wrapped around his is dismantling the most controlled man I’ve ever known — is its own kind of intoxicating. “I can feel you tightening around me, and you’re so wet and so warm and so perfect that I can barely hold on, and I need you to know that I am going to do this to you every night for the rest of our lives because this is what you said yes to on that highway. This is what being mine means. This is what waking up in my bed every morning leads to.”His hips drive forward, and I choke on air.“Get used to it,” he growls against my throat, slamming into me harder, faster, the wet slap of skin on skin echoing off the rocks. “Because I will never get tired of being inside you, or the way you say my name when you’re about to come, or the way your nails feel in my back, or the sound you make when I go this deep—” He
EMBER’S POVHe pushes into me slowly at first — torturously slow — letting me feel every thick, veined inch stretching my cunt open, the brutal stretch burning so good it makes my mouth fall open against his neck in a silent scream.The water changes everything: resistance, drag, that slick, heated friction that makes every millimetre feel like he’s splitting me in half.By the time he’s fully seated, balls-deep, I’m so full I swear I can feel him in my throat, his massive cock bottoming out against my cervix, stretching my walls to their limit, my pussy fluttering and creaming wildly around the invasion like it’s trying to suck him even deeper.“Fuck, Ember.” His forehead drops to my shoulder, and the raw, wrecked quality of his voice when he’s inside me — the way my name sounds in his mouth when he’s buried to the hilt and trying not to lose himself immediately — is a sound I will never get tired of hearing. “You feel like everything. Like coming home and losing my mind at the same
EMBER’S POVHis mouth seals over me and he sucks and his fingers curl and his tongue flattens and strokes in one continuous, devastating motion.And I come so hard my vision goes white, and my hands twist in his hair and my back arches off the rock and the sound that comes out of me echoes off every surface within a hundred metres and scares something in the treeline that crashes away through the undergrowth.My cunt clamps down on his fingers in violent, rhythmic spasms, gushing hot cream all over his hand and tongue in powerful, squirting waves as wave after wave rips through me, my clit pulsing wildly against his mouth like it’s trying to explode.He doesn’t stop. He works me through every wave — tongue softening as I peak, then firming again as the aftershocks roll through — and by the time my body stops shaking, the water around me is rippling with the tremors of my release.He surfaces. Wet hair. Gold eyes. The most satisfied expression I have ever seen on a human face.“That wa
EMBER’S POVI slump back into my seat unconsciously, not realizing how rigidly I’d been holding myself until the tension drains away.Knox lifts our entwined hands to his lips and presses a kiss to my knuckles, his eyes on me.It slows the tightening in my chest. Loosens the knot that Harrison’s qu
EMBER’S POV“Because I saw you on the news.” His voice cracks again. “During a press conference. I saw you standing up there, speaking to the camera, saying five words they have haunted me every night. You are dead to me. And though it wasn’t directed at me, I felt it so much. I felt it down to my
EMBER’S POVMy mother stands in the doorway, draped in designer everything as always.A silk dress in garish emerald that probably cost more than she can actually afford. Jewelry dripping from her neck, her ears, her wrists, every piece fighting for attention.Hair and makeup done to perfection, no
EMBER’S POVThe mattress dips sometime after three in the morning.I’ve been lying here for hours, staring at the ceiling, my mind running circles around the photo of Queenie still burning a hole in my phone.Sleep feels impossible. Every time I close my eyes, I see Rayana bleeding on the marble. S







