Chapter 3
Wren
He leaves.
He says those impossible things about knowing me and choosing me and then he just leaves, walks down the hallway and closes the door behind him with the same quiet control he does everything, and I'm standing in the middle of the bedroom holding a bloody washcloth with my heart in my throat and his words still ringing in my skull like a bell struck too hard.
I will be the first person in your entire life who chose you first.
I sit on the edge of the bed and press the heels of my hands against my eyes and try to breathe.
He wants to marry me. He wants to get me pregnant. He's known me for eight days and he wants to fill me with a baby and tie me to him with the one kind of rope that I would never be able to cut.
He knows that. He's counting on it.
And the horrifying thing, the thing I'm going to lie awake thinking about until my brain burns itself out, is that when he said it, my first thought wasn't no .
My first thought was: he wants to keep me that badly?
Like the wanting itself is the thing I can't resist. Like a girl who spent twenty-three years being disposable has such a deep, desperate hunger to be wanted that a man can stand in front of her with blood still under his fingernails and say I want to put a baby in you and the part of her that should be screaming is quiet, and the part that should be quiet is screaming yes .
I know you hum songs from the eighties in the shower.
He heard that. Standing somewhere in this apartment while I stood under scalding water and hummed songs my mother used to play on the kitchen radio before she died, he heard me, and he filed it away, and he held it in his mouth tonight like a jewel he'd been saving for the right moment.
The next three days are different.
Not in the obvious ways. He still cooks.
He still comes home in the evening and takes off his jacket and rolls his sleeves and moves through the kitchen with that quiet efficiency.
He still feeds me, though now it's always the fork beside the plate, always my own hand lifting the food to my own mouth, and I think that's deliberate too.
Everything is deliberate with him. He's giving me autonomy in small, measured doses, the way a doctor increases a medication.
Gradually. Carefully. Watching for a reaction.
But the air has changed.
There's a charge in it now, a current that wasn't there before or that was always there and I was too busy being terrified to feel.
When he looks at me across the island, his eyes stay a beat too long.
When he walks past me in the hallway, the space between our bodies feels electric, humming with the potential energy of something that hasn't happened yet but is going to.
He still goes down on me every night. But that's different too.
Before the breeding conversation, his mouth on me felt like a claim. Like a man planting a flag. Like the sex equivalent of the jacket on my shoulders and clothes that smell like him: another layer of him being applied to my body, another coat of paint on the walls of the cage.
Now it feels like worship.
He's slower. He takes longer. He doesn't dive in with that devastating efficiency that used to shatter me in minutes.
Instead, he starts at my ankles, his mouth traveling up the inside of my calf, the hollow behind my knee, the sensitive skin of my inner thigh, kissing a path toward the center of me so slowly that by the time he arrives I'm arching off the bed and gripping the sheets and saying his name in desperation.
He spends more time with his fingers, and I realize he was always learning me. Learning what makes me gasp versus what makes me moan versus what makes me grab his hair and pull and forget every reason I am trying to resist him.
On the third night after the conversation, he does something new.
He makes me come with his mouth, the way he always does, but when the aftershocks are still trembling through me and my body is boneless and liquid and my brain is that blissful, empty static that only he has ever produced in me, he doesn't leave.
He stays between my legs, his chin resting on my thigh, his eyes looking up at me through the mess of dark hair that's fallen across his forehead, and he says:
"Ask me to stay."
It's a request, and there's something in his voice that I haven't heard before, something raw and unvarnished, like the lacquer has been stripped off and what's underneath is just a man.
A man who wants to be wanted.
The recognition hits me so hard that I lose my breath.
Because I know that feeling. I know it the way I know my own heartbeat, the way I know the particular shade of lonely that comes from being in a room with someone who doesn't see you.
The wanting to be wanted. The terrible, aching need to have someone look at you and say, yes, you, I choose you, stay .
"Stay," I say.
He closes his eyes. Just for a second. And when he opens them, the thing I see in them makes my chest crack open.
He climbs up my body slowly. His hands on either side of me, his weight settling over me but not on me, holding himself above me with those arms, and his face is inches from mine and I can smell myself on his mouth and his cologne on his skin and underneath both of those things, the warm, clean scent that is just him, just Dominik, the scent that I breathe in when I bury my face in his sweater at night and pretend I'm not doing exactly what he designed me to do.
He looks at me.
We've never been face to face like this. We've been predator and prey, captor and captive, mouth and body, but never this. Never two people looking at each other in the dark with the city burning quietly outside the windows and the question between them not will you but are you ready .
"I'm going to kiss you," he says.
My heart slams.
Eleven days of his mouth between my legs and he has never once kissed me on the lips.
Never once pressed his mouth to mine in the most basic, the most human, the most intimate gesture two people can share.
He's had his tongue inside me but he hasn't kissed me, and the absence of it has been louder than its presence would have been.
"I'm going to kiss you," he says again, "and then I'm going to ask you a question, and you're going to answer honestly."
"Okay," I whisper.
He lowers his head.
The first touch of his lips on mine is so soft it almost isn't there.
A brush. A suggestion. The ghost of a kiss that's asking permission even as it's taking it, and the tenderness of it is so at odds with everything I know about this man, everything I've seen him do with those hands and that mouth, that it breaks something open inside me that I've been holding shut for a very long time.
I make a sound. It’s smaller than a gasp or a moan. It’s something that lives in the back of my throat and sounds like the noise a person makes when they've been cold for so long that the first warmth actually hurts.
He pulls back. Looks at me. His eyes are searingly pale this close, and there's a tremor in the arm holding him above me that I would never have noticed if my hand weren't resting against his bicep, feeling the tension vibrate through the muscle like a plucked string.
"Wren."
"Yes."
"Do you want me?"
I could lie. I could say what a smart captive would say, the calculated yes that buys time and preserves options, the strategic surrender that keeps the predator calm while you look for an exit.
But the exit has been right there all along. The lock on the door that I stopped using. The fork beside the plate that he stopped wielding. The nightly ritual where he waits for me to stop him, and I never do.
I have been choosing him for days.
"Yes," I say. "I want you."
The sound he makes is not human.
It comes from somewhere deep in his chest, a low, raw, fractured thing, and his mouth is on mine before the last syllable leaves my lips.
Not the gentle brush from before. This is the real kiss.
The one he's been holding back. His hand comes to the back of my neck and his fingers tangle in my hair and he kisses me like I’m his salvation.
I kiss him back, and the last wall I have comes down with a sigh.
His hand slides down my body. Along my ribs, over my hip, down the outside of my thigh, and then up, pulling my leg around his waist, and I can feel him through his pants, hard and thick and pressing against me, and my hips roll toward him without my permission, chasing the pressure.
"Wren." My name in his mouth like a prayer. Like a vow. "Tell me to stop and I'll stop."
"Don't stop."
He pulls back long enough to take off his shirt, and I see his body for the first time.
I've felt his forearms, his hands, his jaw, his mouth.
But I've never seen him like this. Broad chest, tapered waist, the kind of body that's been built through violence and discipline rather than vanity.
There are scars. A long one across his left ribs.
A puckered circle on his right shoulder that I recognize from television as a bullet wound.
A scatter of smaller marks across his abdomen that tell a story I don't know yet.
I reach for him. My fingers find his chest and he goes still under my touch, absolutely still, like a wild animal being touched for the first time, and I feel his breath catch and his heart slam and I realize with a clarity that makes my eyes sting:
Nobody touches this man.
People fear him. People obey him. People step out of his path and lower their eyes and do what he says because the alternative is unthinkable.
But nobody touches him. Nobody puts their hand flat against his chest and feels his heart beat and traces the ridge of a scar with their fingertip.
Or watch his eyes close and his jaw clench and his whole body vibrate with the effort of not falling apart.
I'm the first.
He chose me because nobody had ever chosen me.
I'm choosing him because nobody has ever touched him.
His pants come off, and then there's nothing between us. His weight settles over me, and the full-body contact of skin on skin sends a shock through my nervous system so intense that I arch into him and gasp and he catches it with his mouth.
"Look at me," he says.
I open my eyes.
He's right there. Close enough that I can see the individual shards of color in his irises, silver and ice blue and something darker at the center.
His face is stripped of everything I've seen him wear in the last eleven days.
In its place is need, raw and enormous and terrifying.
The need of a man who has told himself for too long that he doesn't need anything and has just discovered that he was wrong.
He pushes inside me.
Slow enough for me to feel every inch, and there are a lot of inches, and my body stretches around him with a burn that tips over into something else, something deeper and fuller and more overwhelming than anything his mouth has ever done to me.
He watches my face while he enters me, watching for pain, watching for resistance, watching for the thing that would make him stop.
But there isn’t anything because the fullness of him inside me doesn't feel like invasion.
It feels like arrival.
Like something that was missing has been returned to a place it was always supposed to be, and my body recognizes it the way it recognized his scent, his voice, the weight of his jacket on my shoulders. Instinctively. Cellularly. With a certainty that bypasses thought entirely.
He bottoms out and stops. Breathes. His forehead drops to mine and his eyes close and his whole body trembles with the effort of being.
"Keep going," I whisper, the pain of my virginity tearing becoming sharper the longer he stays still. "Please."
He moves and the world narrows to the place where our bodies meet, to the rhythm he sets, slow at first and then building, his hips rolling into mine with a precision that finds every nerve ending I have and lights them up in sequence.
One of his hands is braced beside my head.
The other slides under my lower back and lifts me, tilts my hips, changes the angle, and the sound I make when he hits that place inside me, the deep, dark, secret place, is a sound I will never be able to unhear or unmake or pretend didn't come from me.
"There," he says against my mouth, and he does it again, and again, and his voice is wrecked, absolutely wrecked, the voice of a man who has lost every war he's been fighting with himself and doesn't care. "Right there. That's mine, Wren. Say it."
"Yours."
The word comes out of me without thought, without calculation, without the careful risk assessment that has governed every word I've spoken since the van.
It comes from the place where his body is meeting mine, from the heat and the pressure and the impossible fullness of him inside me, and it's true.
It's the truest thing I've said in my life.
He picks up the pace. Harder now. Deeper. His hand fists in my hair and tilts my head back, his mouth finding my throat. He presses his lips to my pulse and I feel him groan against my skin when he feels how fast my heart is beating.
"You're safe," he whispers into my throat. "You're safe, and you're mine, and I will never let anything touch you."
The orgasm builds from somewhere I didn't know existed.
Not the sharp, focused detonation that his mouth produces, the kind that centers between my legs and explodes outward.
This is deeper. Wider. It starts in my chest and radiates downward, a slow-building wave that picks up everything in its path.
I cry out into his shoulder as my body locks around him and my nails dig into his shoulders and I feel him follow me over the edge, his hips slamming into mine one final time.
His groan is a sound I feel in my bones, low and shattered and triumphant, and I feel him pulse inside me, hot and deep and possessive, claiming me from the inside out.
He doesn't pull away.
He stays inside me, stays over me, stays everywhere, and his weight settles as his breathing slows and his hand loosens in my hair. His fingers stroke through the strands, gentle now, as I lie beneath him with my face pressed into his neck and my body still clenching around him.
"Wren," he says, and his voice is quiet, raw and unguarded in a way I've never heard it. Like the sex stripped him as bare as it stripped me. "Please stay?"
Not a command.
A request.
I press my mouth to the scar on his shoulder, the bullet wound, the puckered circle of tissue where someone once tried to kill him and failed. I kiss it because I can't find the words and because the gesture says what language can't: I'm here. I'm not leaving. I'm choosing this. I'm choosing you.
"I'm staying," I say.