8. Rune #2
Ben's chair scraped against the floor as he stood abruptly. "I think I'm going to head to bed. It's been a long day." He looked between them with the expression of someone who recognized he was about to witness something monumentally private. "I'll let you two work this out."
Ben's footsteps retreated, each one growing fainter until silence settled over the dining room. The grandfather clock in the corner marked the seconds with mechanical precision while Rune found himself trapped under Maple's unwavering stare.
Just tell her the truth. She's already sensing it—you can see it in her eyes, and the way her pulse quickens when you're near. She's too intelligent not to piece it together.
"You're my fated mate, Maple." The words left his mouth with brutal honesty, cutting through the charged air between them. "That's why the claim marker only reacts to you. Why it's resonating more strongly the longer you're here, the more you're around me."
Those green eyes—the ones that had been haunting his thoughts—widened as understanding crashed over her features.
"So I can't be unbound from it." Her voice held no question, only the flat certainty of someone watching her carefully constructed world shift beneath her feet.
Rune's jaw clenched. "You might be able to be unbound from the ancient magic in the marker." He paused, knowing his next words would change everything between them. "But ever since I touched you—when I pulled you from that car—you're connected to me now."
The admission hung in the air, impossible to take back. Maple's expression cycled through shock, confusion, and something that looked dangerously close to recognition, as if pieces of a puzzle were finally clicking into place.
"So what does that mean?" she whispered.
You've said too much already. Walk away before you reveal everything.
The vulnerability clawing at his chest felt like exposure. Every instinct screamed at him to retreat, to rebuild the walls that had protected him for centuries. He pushed back from the table with enough force to make the wine glasses tremble.
"I can't talk about this right now." The words came out rougher than intended, edged with the desperation he was fighting to contain. "I just—I already said too much."
He turned toward the doorway, seeking escape from her penetrating gaze and the scent that seemed designed to drive him insane. But before he could take more than two steps, her hand wrapped around his arm with surprising strength.
"No." Her voice carried the same determined tone he'd heard in Bram's office, the one that suggested she'd rather face down a landslide than back down from a challenge. "You're going to tell me right now what this means."
The heat of her palm seared through the fabric of his shirt, sending fire racing up his arm and straight to his chest. Every nerve ending blazed where she touched him, the mate bond singing with triumph at the contact.
He could feel his control fracturing, could sense his dragon pressing against the careful restraints he'd built over centuries.
"It means we're tied together." The admission felt like bleeding.
"Until I claim you and mark you, the bond is incomplete, but we're still tethered.
We can walk away from each other now, but the bond isn't something that can just be undone.
Now that it's locked in place, it's something that will get increasingly harder to fight. "
He tried to step away, to put distance between them before he did something irreversible, but her grip only tightened. The warmth flooding his system from that simple touch threatened to overwhelm every defense he'd ever constructed.
"So why do you look at me like I'm damnation?" The question hit him like a slap. "Why do you restrain yourself so much around me? What are you afraid of?"
Everything. I'm afraid of everything you represent—the loss of control, the possibility of becoming my father, the way you make me want things I swore I'd never need.
"I don't know what you're fighting," she continued, stepping closer until he could count the gold flecks in her eyes, "but I know something is happening between us. And all I want to do right now is kiss you. Maybe I shouldn't want that, but I do."
Her confession shattered the last thread of his control like a blade through silk. Three centuries of careful restraint, of denying his dragon's demands, of protecting himself from the very thing standing before him—all of it crumbled in the face of her honest admission.
With a growl that came from somewhere primal and desperate, he hauled her against him, one hand tangling in her dark hair while the other splayed across her back.
Her sharp intake of breath was lost as he crashed his mouth against hers, claiming her lips with all the hunger he'd been denying since the moment he'd first caught her scent.
She responded with equal ferocity, her hands fisting in his shirt as she pulled him impossibly closer.
The kiss was everything—desperate, consuming, perfect in its intensity.
His dragon roared with triumph while every cell in his body sang with recognition.
This was what he'd needed for three centuries, what had been missing from his carefully controlled existence.
The taste of her, the way she molded against him, the soft sound she made when he deepened the kiss—it all combined to create something that felt dangerously close to completion.