Chapter 5

ELARA

"No," I said. Which wasn't entirely true. My knees still ached faintly from six nights ago, bruises only just starting to fade, but none of that was from today, and I didn't think he meant six days ago.

He held out his hand.

I looked at it for a second too long before I understood what he was offering. Then I took it, and he pulled me up off the floor like I weighed nothing at all, and his hand was warm and steady around mine in a way that made the hollow place in my chest ache with something I didn't want to name.

"Come with me," he said.

It wasn't a request. Alphas didn't make requests. But there was something underneath the order that wasn't quite the same as the command he'd given Garrick — something lower, something that felt almost like he was asking permission and ordering at the same time, daring me to refuse and clearly hoping I wouldn't.

I didn't refuse.

He didn't let go of my hand as he led me down the corridor, past Garrick still scrambling with the linens, past the open doorways where pack members paused to watch us pass and then quickly looked away when Damon's eyes cut toward them. We walked up the back stairs, the narrow ones meant for staff, and I realized with a strange lurch in my stomach that he knew exactly where my room was. He had never once been there since the night of the ceremony. He had never once acknowledged that he knew.

He opened my door and pulled me inside and shut it behind us, and the small room went dark and close and warm with both of us in it.

For a moment neither of us said anything.

"You didn't tell me," he said finally. His voice was rough in the dark. "How long has it been happening like that?"

"Like what?"

"Don't." His hand came up, not touching me, just hovering near my jaw the way it had that first night. "Don't pretend with me, Elara. I saw your knees on the floor before I said a word. That wasn't new today."

I said nothing, because there was nothing safe to say.

"Six days," he said, like he was working it out himself, like saying it out loud made the shape of it real. "Six days and I didn't—" He stopped. His jaw tightened, the muscle there working like he was holding something back by force. "I told myself it wasn't my place to check on you. I told myself that was the right thing to do, after everything. Letting you go. Letting it be done."

"It is done," I said quietly. "You made that very clear."

"I know what I said." His hand finally landed against my jaw, tipping my face up toward his, and even in the dark I could feel the weight of his eyes on me. "I know what I chose. None of that changed when I saw him put his foot near your face."

The bond pulsed — the broken, severed thing that should have gone silent and quiet by now, six days into healing, and instead it surged up between us like it had never stopped breathing at all.

"Damon," I said, and it came out as a warning I didn't fully mean.

"I know," he said. "I know what this is. I know what I am to you and what I'm not allowed to be." His thumb moved along my cheekbone, slow, like he was trying to memorize the shape of my face in the dark. "I told myself I wouldn't come back here."

"You didn't," I said. "I waited that night. You didn't come."

Something flickered across his face — guilt, maybe, or the closest thing a man like him allowed himself to feel. "I know," he said again. "I'm here now."

"That's not the same thing."

"No," he agreed. "It isn't."

And then his mouth was on mine, and I stopped arguing, because some wounds don't close just because you tell them to, and some hungers don't care what's right, and the broken bond between us was howling so loud in that small dark room that neither of us had any strength left to pretend we could ignore it.

His hands found my waist and pulled me against him like he'd been starving for six days and only just now allowed himself to admit it. I felt the wall at my back, felt his weight pressing into me, felt every place where his body fit against mine like it had been built to.

"Tell me to stop," he said against my mouth, low and rough, giving me one last chance to be the one with sense between us. "Tell me now, Elara, because in another minute I won't be able to."

I didn't tell him to stop.

I pulled him closer instead, and somewhere outside in the corridor I thought I heard footsteps — slow, careful, deliberately quiet — and I went still in his arms.

Someone was outside my door.