31. Jasmine
JASMINE
Later that morning, Cyrus comes back, "You're awake. Don't insult me by pretending otherwise."
Cold fingers close on my jaw and tilt my face up. Cyrus crouches, immaculate even now, eyes reading me like a sum that refuses to total correctly.
"I expected to find you smaller by this hour," he says. "Hollowed out. Grateful for a wall to lean against. Instead you fall asleep like you aren't in danger."
"Terrible host." My mouth is dry, my voice a scrape. "No pillow. No coffee. I'm leaving a review."
His thumb presses into my cheekbone, slow, testing where I'll crack. I don't give him the satisfaction of flinching.
"You think defiance is the same as strength," he says. "It is only noise. When the noise stops, there's nothing underneath."
"You'd know all about nothing underneath."
"Watch your mouth."
"No," I say, and I smile at him with a split-second of pure spite. "You're the one who should be careful. You took me to break him. He won't break. You're a sorry excuse for a man."
The blow comes fast and open-handed and snaps my head sideways. Heat blooms across my mouth, then I taste copper. I work my tongue against my teeth, feel the split in my lip, and turn back to face him with blood on my chin.
His hand draws back again—and the wall comes in.
Brick and old mortar tear inward with a sound like the building is falling down, and then dust and concrete and a flood of dirty morning light pour through the breach.
I twist away from the spray of grit. When it clears, Sebastian is standing in the gap.
He isn't wild. That's the first thing I understand, and the thing that makes my chest go still.
He's calm. Suit ruined, knuckles raw, eyes so fixed on Cyrus with the certainty that he already knows how this ends and is only here to confirm it.
Behind him the depot is full of motion I can't track—bodies moving faster than bodies should, impacts I feel in my teeth, the floor shuddering, somebody's shape thrown into a stack of pallets that explode into kindling.
Cyrus' people, falling. Cyrus' order, coming apart in fragments at the edges of my sight.
"Sebastian." Cyrus' hand finds my hair, then my throat, fingers spread along my jaw and the back of my skull. "One more step and I snap the neck. You know how little it takes."
Sebastian goes statue-still. "Let her go."
"You'll want to negotiate."
"No," Sebastian says, very quietly. "I won't."
I never see Gideon. He comes from behind Cyrus out of the dust, broad as a door, and the hand at my neck is simply gone—wrenched up and back.
Elias is there in the same breath, a coil of restraint already moving, and between the two of them Cyrus is forced down to one knee against the concrete, snarling, his control collapsing into something ugly and human-sized.
Then Sebastian is knelt down at my wrists. He frees them, and I'm shaking.
"I've got you," he says. "Don't move yet."
I rise to my feet and that's when he sees the blood on my mouth.
Something goes out of his eyes like the light he saw is gone.
He crosses the floor before I realize it and drives Cyrus down hard, cracking the ground on impact.
His forearm bars across Cyrus' throat, his other hand drawn back, and for one breath I see exactly what he is. The predator under the suit.
"Sebastian." Gideon's voice, a hand on his shoulder that doesn't try to pull, only to remind. "Breathing. Gregory's order. He goes back alive."
Sebastian doesn't move. The whole room waits on the line of his shoulders.
I'm not afraid of him. I see his fury and I see what's under it. Love with nowhere safe to put it, and then he decides. The drawn-back hand lowers. He stands, and the violence goes out of him by choice, not exhaustion.
"You know what to do," he says to Gideon and Elias.
They take Cyrus up off the floor between them, cursing, and move him out. The last of his people are down or scattered into dust. It's over—the loud part of it, the part with bodies.
Sebastian comes back to me slowly, approaching me like he's afraid I'll walk away again.
"Are you alright?"
"Erm."
He sweeps me up and carries me like a baby, gently placing me in a car. I brace for the drive to his fortress, instead he takes me to my apartment. The apartment is exactly as I left it. Nothing's been searched. Nothing destroyed.
He helps me lay on my bed. Then he crouches beside me, a clean cloth in his hand, but he waits before touching me.
"Your lip," he says. "May I?"
It's a small word, may. I nod a yes. He cleans the split with a care that has nothing predatory left in it, his touch so light I have to hold still to feel it at all.
"I confused protecting you with owning the decisions of your life," he says, not looking up, working the cloth along the cut.
"I paid your mother's debt without asking.
I made your world safe by making it smaller, and I told myself fear gave me the right.
It didn't. Love is not meant to be like that, I realize that now. "
I'm shocked at what to say. He continues, "I'm not asking you to call it even."
"Good. Because it isn't." I take the cloth out of his hand so he has to look at me.
"I ran from every bit of you because some of it scared me, but running didn't make the danger smaller.
It just meant I faced it without you. I thought boundaries meant distance.
They don't. I should be able to hold a line and still let you stand on the other side of it. "
"Jazz—"
"I'm not finished." My voice steadies. "I'm choosing you.
Not the bond. Not fate. Not because you tore a wall down to get me.
Because of who you are when you put your hand back down.
I saw you decide earlier, and that's the man I want.
But choosing you does not erase what happened, we work on fixing that. "
He's very still. "I don't want your obedience," he says. "I don't want the bond to choose for you. If it's doing that, I'd rather lose you than have it."
"Then keep proving that after today," I say. "Now come here."
He rises slowly and I rise with him, but I am the one who closes the distance.
I curl my fingers into his ruined collar and bring his mouth to mine, careful of the split in my lip.
The kiss is not hungry. It is slow, testing, both of us learning a language our bodies had spoken before either of us had the courage to admit it.
His hands settle at my waist and remain there, open, waiting, until I slide one palm to the center of my back and let him understand that he is allowed.
A low sound leaves him then, not quite a groan, not quite relief, but something pulled from the deepest part of him. It vibrates against my mouth and makes my stomach tighten.
"Tell me if anything feels wrong."
"I will, and I want you here."
The words steady something in him. We undress each other without urgency.
My hands find buttons, torn fabric, cool skin beneath the ruined elegance of him.
His mouth moves over my shoulder, my collarbone, the curve of my breast, never taking more than I offer, never pushing past the pace I set.
I try to swallow my moan but it comes out softly, and his answer is a rougher sound against my skin, restrained but unmistakable.
Every place he touches feels claimed only because I choose to give it.
I guide him down onto my bed. The ordinary gray afternoon presses against the curtains, and somehow that makes this feel more intimate than the storm, more dangerous than the office, more honest than anywhere built to impress.
There is no desk between us, no glass, no hidden machine humming with decisions I did not make.
Only Sebastian above me, holding himself on his forearms, watching my face as though permission is a living thing he must keep earning.
I draw him closer with my thighs. His cock presses heavily against me.
My body answers before thought can catch up.
I am wet already, aching with a want that has survived fear, anger, separation, and every ugly thing between us.
When his fingers slide between my legs, he does it slowly, parting me with care, tracing the slick heat of my pussy until my hips lift.
I move into his hand and let him feel the yes in my body.
His control is different now. It is devotion with its teeth held back, strength kneeling where choice tells it to kneel.
He lowers his mouth to my breast and draws my nipple between his lips.
His fingers keep working my clit, slow circles that turn my breathing uneven, then molten.
I grip his shoulders and feel the power under his skin, the vampire in him listening to me instead of hunger.
When I reach between us and close my hand around his cock, his whole body tightens.
A deep groan tears from his throat, controlled before it turns ragged.
The sound goes through me, dark and intimate, and my thighs tighten around him.
I guide him to me myself, setting the head of him against my pussy.
The bond stirs in my ribs, not demanding, not dragging, only present. Waiting.
I choose before he moves. I tilt my hips and take him in, inch by inch, feeling the stretch, the fullness, the strange tenderness of being entered by someone who could overwhelm me and refuses to.
He shakes above me. I feel it through his arms, through the press of his chest, through the bond that has stopped feeling like a chain and started feeling like something I decided.
My pussy closes around him, and I move slow at first. My hands on his back, my thighs firm around his hips, my body setting the rhythm. We move together in unison.
Every thrust meets me where I ask for it, deeper when I pull him in, slower when my nails press lightly at his spine.
The room fills with the sounds we stop trying to contain: my moans rising with every deeper stroke, his groans pressed into my neck, the bed shifting beneath us in a rhythm neither of us wants to escape.
The pleasure builds in layers, heat and pressure and something beyond the body, something old waking beneath my skin.
Silver-gold light threads along my wrists.
It curls over his shoulders, then spreads across the sheets in delicate branching lines. The air fills with a low vibration.
Sebastian sees it. His eyes flare, not with fear, but wonder.
The light answers him, then me, circling us both in a widening halo.
Tiny marks bloom above the bed, symbols I've not seen and somehow recognize, turning slowly as if the room has become a night sky written in living fire.
The bond is not taking me. It is waiting for my hand. So I give it.
I stop fighting the warmth inside my chest. I let it rush through me, open and unmistakable.
The glow pours brighter, slipping under my skin, under his, joining where our bodies meet.
He thrusts deeper, and the rhythm breaks into something urgent, not frantic, not careless, but honest. His cock fills me again and again, and my pussy grips him tighter with every stroke, dragging both of us toward the same bright edge.
The climax takes us together. My moan breaks high and breathless as pleasure floods through me, and his groan follows, deep and shaken, his control finally undone at the exact moment mine disappears too.
My body locks around him, pleasure flashing through me in waves that make the light burst outward.
Sebastian comes with me, his face buried against my throat, his body shaking as the glow lifts from us in a ring, blooming over the ceiling in a crown of silver and gold.
For one breath, the bond is visible everywhere, wrapped around the bed, the walls, our joined bodies, and I know it has heard me. Not commanded me. Heard me. Accept it.
When the light settles, he lowers himself carefully, still inside me, still trembling, and gathers me close with one open hand at my back.
My room is quiet again, but something beautiful remains under the quiet, alive between us, no longer waiting outside the door.
We lie side by side, locking each other in place.
"I don't have it all fixed," he says into my hair. "The politics. What comes next. None of it's settled."
I tip my face up to his. "Later, Sebastian. I just want to be with the man who finally brought me home instead of caging me."
"Then we build it," he says. "Our future."
"Yes," I agree, and I feel myself smile against the soreness in my lip. "And we'll write the rest as we go."
Inside, for the first time in longer than I can hold, I am exactly where I chose to be. I’ll choose this every day to be with him.