CHAPTER 6: Exposure Therapy

Dominic moved through the crowd with practiced ease, stopping to speak with pack representatives and business associates as though nothing had happened in that quiet corridor, as though he had not just pinned Gabriel against a wall and scented him like something he owned.

Gabriel smiled when expected, shook hands when introduced, and spent the remainder of the evening hyperaware of Dominic's hand on his lower back, burning through the expensive fabric of the tailored suit like a brand.

They did not speak in the car on the way home, or even in the elevator. When the penthouse doors opened and Dominic disappeared into his study without a backward glance, Gabriel went to his room, sat on the edge of his bed, and stared at the city lights spread below the window until his heartbeat finally returned to something resembling normal.

He barely slept.

Dr. Helena Vance's office occupied a corner of the fifty-eighth floor of Ashford Tower, its walls lined with bookshelves holding texts that ranged from conventional psychology to volumes Gabriel recognized from restricted Order libraries. She was small, precise, and impeccably dressed, greeting them both with professional warmth that suggested she had already categorized them into clinical boxes she found manageable.

Gabriel disliked her immediately.

"Gentlemen," Dr. Vance said, gesturing toward two chairs positioned directly across from each other in the center of the room. There was no desk between them, no table, or barrier of any kind. Just two chairs close enough that anyone sitting in them would be unable to avoid breathing the same air. "Shall we begin?"

Dominic sat first, his posture perfect, his expression locked into the professional neutrality Gabriel had come to recognize as his armor. His golden eyes fixed somewhere slightly above Gabriel's head, as though direct eye contact were a concession he had decided not to make this morning.

Gabriel took the opposite chair. The mate bond responded immediately to the proximity, humming with pleased recognition, sending warmth flooding through his chest with embarrassing enthusiasm.

"The therapeutic model we're employing is based on a relatively recent theoretical framework," Dr. Vance explained, settling into her own chair to the side. "Rejected mate bonds exist in a state of perpetual tension. The theory suggests that controlled exposure, in which both parties spend increasing amounts of time in proximity while consciously resisting the bond's pull, teaches the neurological pathways to recognize the connection as unwanted stimulus rather than biological imperative."

"In plain language," Gabriel said, "you want to bore us into not wanting each other."

Dr. Vance smiled thinly. "In plain language, yes. The bond strengthens through avoidance and absence. It weakens through exposure."

"Today's session will begin with basic proximity exercises," she continued. "Maintain eye contact for five minutes. There would be no speaking, or deliberate expression of any kind. Simply allow yourselves to exist in each other's presence."

Dominic's golden eyes dropped from the wall and met Gabriel's with the particular reluctance of someone stepping onto a battlefield they knew they would lose.

The eye contact was immediate torture.

Gabriel had been avoiding Dominic's direct gaze since arriving at the penthouse, because looking directly at his mate felt like staring into the sun. Now, with nowhere else to look, he had no choice but to hold that golden gaze and let the full weight of their connection exist between them without deflection.

Dominic's eyes were extraordinary up close, containing depths that shifted like light through honey, revealing flickers of emotion that his controlled expression refused to show. Gabriel watched those eyes for tells: exhaustion, carefully buried. Hunger, more carefully buried still. Something that might have been grief, pressed down so far beneath the surface that Gabriel almost missed it.

The mate bond sang between them, louder than it had been in the penthouse, louder than it had been in the corridor at the gala.

"Phase two," Dr. Vance said. "Move your chairs closer. I want your knees touching."

Their knees made contact, and the mate bond flared with the intensity of touch after deprivation. Dominic's jaw ticked. Gabriel felt the warmth of his mate's legs against his own, felt the controlled tension radiating from Dominic's body.

"Now," Dr. Vance said, "Mr. Thorne will place his hands on Mr. Ashford's knees. Mr. Ashford, place your hands on Mr. Thorne's waist. Focus on controlled breathing."

The silence that followed was absolute.

"Is that strictly necessary?" Dominic asked.

"The research indicates controlled physical contact is the most effective method for this to work," Dr. Vance replied without looking up. "If you're uncomfortable, we can schedule a different approach."

The suggestion that he might be uncomfortable was apparently something Dominic found unacceptable. He reached out and placed both hands on Gabriel's waist with the deliberateness of someone disarming an explosive device.

Gabriel rested his hands on Dominic's knees, feeling the expensive fabric of his trousers, feeling the hard muscle underneath, feeling the controlled tension of a man trying very hard not to respond to something his entire body wanted desperately.

Through the mate bond, Gabriel felt Dominic's body temperature rising, felt the careful rhythm of his controlled breathing stutter and restart.

"Breathe in a four-count pattern," Dr. Vance instructed. "Focus on the breath rather than on each other."

Gabriel tried. The attempt lasted approximately forty seconds before the mate bond made it completely impossible.

Dominic's thumbs had moved. Just barely, it was just the smallest shift, but they were drawing tiny circles against Gabriel's hip bones through his shirt fabric. Gabriel doubted Dominic was even conscious of the movement, but his body responded with immediate and mortifying enthusiasm.

Heat pooled low in his stomach. His pulse picked up. The particular tension of arousal built despite every rational instruction he was giving himself to remain clinical and detached.

Through the bond, he felt the exact moment Dominic realized what his thumbs were doing.

The movement stopped, and Dominic's hands went completely still, his breathing suddenly very controlled in the way that suggested he was fighting his own body with every tool available. His golden eyes, which had drifted to Gabriel's mouth, snapped back to somewhere neutral.

Gabriel became aware that his own hands had tightened on Dominic's knees, that his fingers had curled into the fabric, that his body had leaned forward by some imperceptible degree. He forced himself to release the fabric, to sit back, to breathe through the want that had settled over him like a second skin.

He was failing spectacularly at not being aroused. From the rigid set of Dominic's jaw and the careful way he held himself very still, he was not alone in that failure.

"Now," Dr. Vance said, her voice carrying the professional calm of someone observing exactly what she had expected, "I'd like to discuss the night you first met. Describe your experience of the mate bond forming."

"It felt like being struck by lightning," Gabriel said, because there was no clinical language for what had happened across the burning packhouse. "Like every cell in my body reoriented simultaneously toward a single fixed point. I knew, with complete certainty and no logical basis, that the person looking back at me was the specific person my existence had been moving toward."

He felt Dominic's hands tighten on his waist, felt the involuntary response his words provoked.

"I was seventeen," Gabriel continued quietly. "Raised to believe werewolves were creatures to be cleansed from the world. And in the middle of all that fire and screaming and righteous certainty, I looked across the flames and felt everything I had been taught shatter in an instant, because the person I was supposed to hate felt more like home than anything I had ever known."

The silence that followed was dense with everything Dominic was not saying.

"Mr. Ashford," Dr. Vance prompted gently. "Your experience?"

Dominic's hands had not loosened from Gabriel's waist. His voice, when it came, was lower than usual, stripped of some of its professional polish.

"It felt like a complication I couldn't afford," Dominic said. "In the middle of a purge that had already taken someone I was responsible for protecting, I felt a bond snap into place with the person holding the weapons that had killed her. The timing was catastrophic. The person was impossible." His golden eyes dropped to Gabriel's face. "I made the only decision I believed I could make."

Gabriel's control slipped before he could catch it.

"I never wanted to be your shame," he said quietly. The words came from somewhere below careful management, from the place where five years of exile had carved permanent channels of hurt. "I never asked for the bond. I was seventeen years old and I felt something I had no language for, and you looked at me like I was the worst thing that had ever happened to you."

The room went very quiet.

Something moved across Dominic's face, crossing it too quickly to be fully cataloged. A fracture in the controlled surface, a glimpse of something raw and unguarded beneath all the carefully maintained armor. His hands on Gabriel's waist trembled very slightly, just once, before everything locked back down again.

His expression returned to neutral, and his hands steadied. Every crack sealed itself over with practiced efficiency.

"I think," Dominic said, his voice perfectly controlled, "that's enough for today."

Dr. Vance closed her notepad. "You've both done well for a first session. Same time tomorrow."

They walked back to the elevator in silence, standing close enough that their arms almost touched, the mate bond humming with desire, history and the devastating knowledge that neither of them had suppressed a single thing.

The therapy was supposed to make the bond smaller.

Gabriel suspected it was going to make them both completely undone.