Chapter 6
Chapter six
Sharma
Sweat beads along my hairline and drips into my eye.
The salt burns. I blink against it, but my arm weighs too much to lift.
The ceiling fan cuts the air in lazy circles, each rotation pushing ac's cold breath across my skin.
Neither are helping. It's too hot. Always too hot.
I stopped checking my temperature six hours ago.
Numbers stopped mattering when the burning started in my bones.
A knock cracks against the door. Three sharp raps. "Sharma?" My jaw clamps shut. The sound drills into my skull, sharp as a masonry bit. "Sharma, open up. You missed breakfast and lunch."
The sheets tangle around my legs, damp and clinging to muscle and lace.
I haven't shifted position—flat on my back, staring at the blades slicing shadows—since the sun crossed the midpoint of the sky.
Maybe longer. Time blurs when the fever spikes.
The lock clicks and the knob turns. The Vaughns rented a private island for the wedding, and I can't get any privacy.
Footsteps cross the bamboo flooring, quick and light.
Vivian's shadow falls across the bed, blocking the ceiling fan's relief.
"Oh god." Her hand covers her mouth. The gesture trembles. "You look—"
"Don't." The word feels like a razor blade slicing my throat. "Don't say awful."
"Not awful." She lowers her canvas bag. It thuds against the floor, and her face is drawn with concern. "You look like you're dying. Is it Jas' flu? The fever?"
I shake my head. The movement sends vertigo spinning through my skull, a vicious carousel that makes my stomach lurch.
"Then what?" Viv perches on the mattress's edge. The shift bounces me slightly. I bite my tongue—trapping the groan that wants to escape. Every nerve ending screams at the contact, too sensitive, too exposed. "Sharma, you're burning up."
Not burning. Dissolving. From the marrow outward. "It's not..." I swallow. My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth, pasty and useless. "Not flu."
"Then what is it? Food poisoning? The water here—"
"Mate fever, Viv."
Silence slams into the room, heavier than the humidity.
Her eyes widen. Dark blue irises flick across my face, my throat, noting the symptoms she suddenly recognizes.
The sheen coating my collarbones. The way my hips rock involuntarily against the mattress, seeking friction against the hollow ache.
The mark throbbing on my neck that I'm too tired to hide.
"But..." She blinks. Her mouth gapes. "Your suppressants. You said you took your shot before the flight."
"I did." My hand finds my own throat. Fingertips press against the carotid hammering there. "Roan bit me."
Her breath catches. "He what?"
"Last night." The memory surfaces unbidden—teeth breaking skin, the claiming mark planting something permanent under my flesh that no pharmaceutical can neutralize. "It overrode the chemicals. The suppressant can't touch this now."
Viv stares at my neck. Understanding darkens her expression, shifting from confusion to dawning horror. "Shit," she whispers.
"My thoughts exactly."
She stands. Paces to the window, then back.
Her curls bounce with the movement—untamed, unlike her usual polished presentation.
When she turns, her face has shifted from shock to something harder.
Calculated. The beta mind working behind those eyes, strategizing.
"So that's it then. You're just going to. .. suffer?"
"What choice do I have?" I push up on my elbows. The room tilts, coral walls bleeding into white. I collapse back down, panting, the air too thin for my lungs. "He did this. He chose this for me. Just like he chose to torment me when we were kids. Just like he chooses everything."
"Sharma—"
"He bit me knowing I was fighting this. Knowing I didn't want it.
" My voice rises, cracks like dry earth.
"He's the same arrogant asshole who cornered me at your tenth birthday party.
Who looked right through me before I presented because he was too busy screwing models in Barcelona.
"The words spill out, carrying years of resentment. "He hasn't changed. He's still cruel."
Viv sits again. Closer this time. The mattress dips. Her hand hovers over mine, then retreats, aware that my skin is too sensitive for casual touch. "He's not," she says quietly.
The laugh that escapes me sounds broken, jagged. "Viv, he literally forced a biological bond on me without consent. That's entitlement and privilege."
Her jaw sets. The Vaughn stubbornness showing through.
"You think I don't know my brother's faults?
I grew up with him. I watched him shatter when Mom died.
I watched him glue himself back together with bourbon and smirks and avoiding anything that lasted past morning.
" Viv leans in. Her scent—the neutral, calming scent of beta—cuts through the haze of my suffering.
"I have never denied that he was an ass.
But he was also the one who was willing to pick us up and drop us off anywhere we wanted to go.
He's the big brother who never went to bed without making sure I made it home safely.
Our family was rich enough to afford servants, but he always made my breakfast and lunch, because that's what mom would have done.
The man bakes cookies, Sharma. He teased you unmercifully, but I think it was just his defensiveness about letting anyone outside of the family get too close.
He looked out for you, too, and you know it. "
I roll my eyes, but she isn't done. "I've watched him these past months. We both saw Grayson, Hunter, and Liam fall. Watching them break that stupid pact and survive it. He's terrified, Sharma. Not just of the bond—of what he did to you. Of who he was when we were kids."
I turn my face toward the wall. The paint is cheerful and sunny.
It mocks me with its vacation brightness.
"The pact," Viv continues, her voice dropping a register.
"They made it because watching Dad waste away after Mom died broke something in them.
They thought if they never loved, they'd never die like that.
They'd never hollow out and disappear." Her fingers finally brush my hand.
Cool against my overheated skin. "But you can't fight fate.
You know that intellectually. The biology doesn't care about our trauma.
And the poison of rejecting it... it's not just physical.
It eats the mind too. It makes you bitter and hollow and alone. "
My chest hitches. I refuse to let the tears come. Anger is better. Anger keeps me upright, keeps my thighs pressed together against the slick heat pooling there. "So I should just forgive him?" I ask the wall. "Spread my legs and thank him for the privilege?"
"No. And eww, gross." Viv squeezes my hand once, firm.
"You should let him beg. Make him crawl.
Make him prove he's become someone worthy of what you're offering.
" She pauses. The silence stretches, taut as a wire.
"But Sharma, you're already strong. You've built this incredible life alone.
Now be brave enough to let him in. Brave enough to be vulnerable.
The bond doesn't make you weak—rejecting love out of fear does. "
The words ripple through my resistance, finding the cracks. She stands. Brushes down her sundress. "I'll get food. Painkillers. And I'll send—"
"Don't send him."
"I wasn't going to." She smiles, small and sad, her eyes old beyond her twenty-two years. "Not yet. But Sharma? The fever won't break until you accept what your body already knows. Time isn't on your side here."
The door softly closes behind her. The silence returns, heavier now, filled with Viv's words and the sound of my own ragged breathing.
I stare at the ceiling fan, watching it slice the air into ribbons.
My hand drifts down my body, pressing against my lower belly where the ache concentrates.
The touch makes me gasp, arching off the mattress.
Not relief. Aggravation.
The light shifts, slicing across the bed in brutal, shifting patterns. My body wars with itself—mind screaming no while flesh screams yes, wet and wanting and desperate for his hands, his mouth, the knot that would lock us together and end this burning.
Another knock. Harder. Insistent.
"Sharma." Roan's voice through the wood. Rough. Desperate. "Open the door."
"Go away."
The knob moves. Metal sliding against metal.
Damn this feeble island security. He has a master key.
Of course he does. The door swings open.
He fills the frame, shoulders blocking the sunset, backlit by the dying light.
His scent hits me first—blackcurrant and salt and male aggression, rolling across the room like a violent storm.
My hips buck off the mattress. A moan escapes before I can trap it behind my teeth.
Roan slams the door. The noise travels through the floorboards into my spine. His eyes find me in the wreckage of damp sheets, and anger ignites his face—fury and hunger and stark terror.
"What the fuck are you doing?" His voice is low, controlled. The opposite of the storm in his eyes, the white-knuckled grip of his hands.
"Suffering," I manage. My voice is unrecognizable. "Thanks to you."
He crosses the room in three strides. Stands over the bed.
His jaw tightens, muscle ticking. He drags a hand through his hair, then lets it fall.
His fists clench at his sides, release, clench again.
The stillness before action. The pause that costs him.
"Is it so hard?" he asks. "Being my mate.
Is it so fucking unbearable that you'd rather die in this bed than accept me? "
"It's temporary."
"Temporary?" he laughs, humorless. Sharp as broken glass. "Your temperature is spiking toward dangerous. I can smell your distress from the pathway, Sharma. This isn't temporary. This is your body rejecting your stubbornness."
I push up, forcing myself to sit. The room spins in a vicious whirl. I catch myself on the headboard, fingers gripping the wicker until it creaks. "I don't want you."
"Liar." He leans down, planting his hands on either side of my hips.
Trapping me. His breath wafts across my throat, stirring the hair there.
"Your pulse is hammering. Your pupils are blown.
You're slick and hot and waiting for me.
Tell me again how you don't want this. Tell me you don't want my knot filling you, stretching you, marking you from the inside out. "
My thighs press together. The friction makes me gasp, arch toward him despite myself. "Fuck you," I whisper. The defiance sounds thin, worn.
"That's exactly what you need." He straightens, tearing his shirt over his head in one violent motion. Muscles ripple, tan skin glowing in the dying light, the dusting of hair on his chest catching the sun's last rays. "You don't need food. You don't need painkillers. You need me."
He reaches down, grips my ankles through the tangled sheets. His thumbs press into the bones. He pulls, dragging me flat. I slide down the slick cotton, legs spreading involuntarily, spine scraping against the fabric. He looms over me, alpha command radiating off him like heat from stone.
"Spread your legs." He orders, the command causing me to fucking gush. "Submit to the bond before you burn alive. Before I fucking lose you. I can't fucking lose you, Sharma."
My resistance crumbles. Not because of the command—though my body screams yes to the authority—but because of the fear lurking beneath his words.
The desperation. The ghost of that nineteen-year-old boy who lost his mother and decided love was the enemy, now terrified he's destroyed the only woman who matters. "Roan—"
"Now, Sharma." He grips my wrists, pins them above my head. His weight settles over me, heavy and perfect and inevitable. "Surrender. Accept me. Accept us."
I arch beneath him, fever and biology and yearning overriding everything else. The fight drains out, replaced by a hunger sharper than pain.