The Sentinel's Vow
"An operational loophole?"
I looked down at her—at the dark, fierce devotion shining in her eyes, at the delicate throat pulsing rapidly beneath my touch, at the woman who had looked into the eyes of a lethal predator and chosen to walk into the dark beside him.
"No," I rumbled, my voice thick with a dark, terrifying honesty that stripped away every layer of tactical coldness I had spent fourteen years building. "It is because if any man ever attempts to put a hand on you, I want the law to know they are stealing from what is absolute, legal, and permanently mine."