Chapter Twenty-Eight
Marius
She steps back first. Not abruptly. Not like fear.
Like control. That is what nearly undoes me.
The distance she creates is small, but it is enough to shift the room, enough to remind me that the moment we just stood inside is not something either of us can pretend away now.
Her breathing is steadier than it was a minute ago.
Her posture has gone careful again, reassembled piece by piece into something she can stand inside without losing ground.
She is reclaiming herself in front of me, and I know exactly what I should do with that.
Let her go. I do. For one step. Maybe two.
She turns toward the door, toward the hallway beyond it, toward distance and air and the thin illusion that leaving the study now would return this to something manageable.
I watch her move, watch the line of her back, the set of her shoulders beneath the low lamplight, the way she is holding herself too tightly for this to be anything simple.
The correct choice is to let her leave. The problem is that I no longer want the correct choice as much as I should.
“Leona.”
I say her name low enough that it does not carry past the room.
She stops. Doesn’t turn immediately. That matters.
Every second tonight has been a line, and this one is no different.
If she kept walking, I would let her. I know that.
I know it with the same cold certainty with which I know where the men at my perimeter are standing, which gate reports first when something breaches the line, how quickly pressure turns men careless.
She doesn’t keep walking. Slowly, she turns back toward me.
The fire is low now, the room thrown more into shadow than light, and she looks different in it.
Less like something I am trying to protect and more like something I am trying not to want in the way I want anything else.
That is the truth underneath all of this.
Not that I am softer with her. That would be easy.
I am not soft. I am trying, with increasing difficulty, not to become exactly what I am by nature when I decide something in front of me matters.
She looks at me, waiting.
“What?” she asks.
The word is steady. Too steady. I move before I have fully decided to.
Not fast enough to startle. Not slow enough to pretend caution is the whole of it.
I cross the room with all the control I can still make myself use, and the closer I get, the more aware I am of the fact that I am no longer letting the moment leave with her.
Her gaze lifts a fraction as I stop in front of her.
Too close now. Close enough that I can feel the heat still held in her skin, close enough that if she breathes any deeper the air between us changes with it.
I brace one hand against the doorframe beside her head.
Not touching her. Not yet. But the shape of the room changes anyway.
There is nowhere for her to look that is not me.
“You don’t get to do that,” I say.
Her brows draw faintly. “Do what?”
“Stand there like that. Step back like that. Leave me in the middle of it like nothing happened.”
That lands. I see it in the way her breathing changes. Not fear. Awareness. The same sharp awareness that has been building between us for days, fed by too much restraint and not enough distance and every question she should stop asking but doesn’t. Her chin lifts slightly.
“And what exactly happened?”
The question is deliberate. So is she. I lean in just enough that there is no mistaking the answer.
“You know.”
Her breath catches. Small. Real. Not panic.
Not retreat. That catches low in me and pulls harder than it should.
She is still trying to hold the line between us with calm.
Still trying to make herself something steady and chosen inside this.
I respect that. I want that. And at the same time, the part of me that knows exactly how to take control of a moment, how to dominate it so completely that the other person forgets what resistance felt like before it began, keeps pressing at the inside of my skin like a fist against a locked door.
Normally I do not question that part of myself. With her, I question every inch of it.
She looks at my hand beside her head, then back at my face. “You’re blocking the door.”
“Yes.”
The single word settles between us. Dark. Clean. Her pulse jumps at her throat. I watch it. She knows I watch it.
“You said I had a choice.”
“You do.”
“That doesn’t look like one.”
My other hand flexes once at my side. A warning. To myself.
“It is one,” I say. “If you want me to move, say it.”
There. The line is laid down between us.
Not soft. Not kind. But clear. I watch her take it in.
The room goes very still around the silence that follows.
The study behind me, the fire, the desk, the maps and papers and the remains of everything else that mattered before she stepped into the doorway and stood there refusing to back away from me, all of it falls behind the fact that she has heard the choice and not used it yet. She swallows once. Doesn’t look away.
“That’s not fair.”
“No,” I say. “It isn’t.”
The answer comes rougher than I intend. Because she is right.
It is not fair. Nothing about this is fair.
Not the timing. Not her body still carrying what another man did to it.
Not the fact that every instinct in me wants to take hold of this moment and direct it until there is nothing uncertain left in it, while another part of me knows that if I do not keep dragging those instincts back through the narrow gate of her choice, I become too close to something I would kill for.
She searches my face. I do not let her find softness there.
What I let her see instead is worse. Effort.
Restraint. The fact that I am holding myself in place with both hands and not doing it effortlessly.
Her eyes change. Not with fear. With understanding.
That is what pushes me closest to losing the line.
“You should move,” she says.
The words come so softly they almost do not register. But she does not tell me to. That matters too much. I lower my head just enough that my mouth is near her ear, near her jaw, near the place where the scent of her skin cuts through everything else in the room.
“Then tell me to,” I say.
Her hand lifts. Hesitates. For one brutal second I think she is going to push me back.
I am ready for it. I will take it. I will move if she tells me to, because anything less would poison this before it even begins.
Her fingers don’t push. They settle, light and uncertain at first, against the front of my shirt.
Not distance. Not refusal. The contact lands like a strike.
Every part of me goes harder, tighter, more focused.
My hand comes off the doorframe and I catch her jaw with it before I have time to think better of that, fingers spread carefully, thumb beneath the line of her chin, not forcing her head where I want it, only holding her there so I can feel whether she stays or not.
She stays. Her breath has gone shallow now. Mine is worse.
“You are making this very difficult,” I say.
A ghost of something moves through her expression. Not a smile. Too unsteady for that.
“You followed me.”
“Yes.”
“That sounds like your problem.”
“It is.”
I do not recognize my own voice for a second.
It is darker than before. Lower. Less contained.
The kind of tone I would normally use only when I had already decided who owned the next minute of someone’s life.
I should hear that and step back. Instead, I slide my thumb once along the edge of her jaw, slow enough that there is no disguising it as accidental.
She shivers. The response goes straight through me.
“Last chance,” I say.
Her eyes lock on mine. “For what?”
“To stop me.”
The truth of it hangs there between us. Hard.
Unadorned. She could. Right now. She could say move.
She could press her hand flat against my chest and make me remember exactly why I should not have followed her to the door in the first place.
She could turn her face away from my hand.
She could step sideways. She does none of those things.
Instead, her fingers curl more tightly in my shirt.
“No,” she says.
That is all it takes. I kiss her like I have been denying myself the right to for too long already.
Not soft first. Not tentative. Controlled, yes, but only in the way a drawn blade is controlled.
My hand stays at her jaw, holding her steady, and I take her mouth with all the restraint I can still force into the act and none of the gentleness a man might mistake for safety.
There is nothing safe in this. The darkness of it is exactly that I know how much more I could do to the moment and choose, second by second, not to.
Her breath catches sharply against my mouth, then breaks again when she does not pull away.
That is the second thing that drives the control thinner.
The first was her choice. The second is her response.
She is not frozen. Not enduring. She is there in it, hand tightening against my chest, body held still for one impossible second and then leaning the smallest amount into me, just enough to change the entire shape of the kiss.
I deepen it immediately. Not carelessly.
Not with the blind greed that tears moments apart.
With intent. My thumb slides beneath her chin.
My mouth presses harder to hers. I let her feel the dominance in it, the fact that I am directing the pace, the angle, the claim of it, and at the same time I read every answer she gives me.
The slight parting of her lips. The change in her breathing.
The absence of recoil. The fact that when I push, she meets it instead of folding under it.
That should not affect me as much as it does. It does.
My other hand comes to her waist and stops there, fingers closing just enough to feel her through the fabric, enough that she knows exactly how easily I could pull her flush against me and enough that I do not.
The restraint matters. It matters because without it, I do not trust where this ends tonight.
Not with her. Not with the way my body is already reading her as something it wants to master and protect and ruin itself over all at once.
She makes a small sound into my mouth. Not fear.
Not pain. Something worse. Something that nearly snaps what is left of my discipline.
I break the kiss before it turns into something I cannot stop.
Not far. Not fully. Just enough to drag breath back into my lungs and keep my forehead near hers while I hold myself in place with the same violence I would use to keep a man from bleeding out under my hands.
Her breathing is uneven. So is mine. Neither of us moves.
The room has narrowed to almost nothing now.
Fire. Shadow. Her mouth still close enough to take again.
My hand still at her jaw, the other still locked at her waist. Everything else is gone.
“This,” I say, and have to stop there for a second because my voice has gone rough enough to betray me outright.
I try again.
“This is why you should have kept walking.”
Her eyes open slowly. She is shaken. I can see it. Not shattered. Not lost. Shaken in the way a struck wire keeps singing after the touch is gone.
“You were the one who followed me,” she says.
I almost laugh. Almost. “That is also true.”
I do not let her go. Not yet. The darkness in me is too close to the surface now, and I know it.
If I kissed her again like this, I would want more than another kiss.
I would want her against the door, her wrists in my hands, her head tipped back because I put it there, every answer she has refused to give me finally torn out of her mouth in a way that would feel too good and too wrong at once.
That thought hits me with enough force that I step back on instinct.
My hands leave her immediately. Too quickly.
The cold air that returns between us is its own kind of violence.
She feels it too. I see the moment it lands. Good. Because if I stay any closer, I am not certain I keep being careful. Her lips part slightly as if she means to say something, but I get there first.
“Do not look at me like that unless you plan to stay where you are when I come for you.”
The words are out before I can cut them back. Dark. Possessive. Too honest. They strike the room and stay there.
Leona goes very still. Not frightened. More aware than before. Her gaze stays on mine, and whatever she sees there is enough to keep her silent for one long second. Then two. I drag a hand through my hair and force myself another step back.
“Go,” I say.
The command lands harder because I make it. She doesn’t move immediately. Of course she doesn’t. That almost undoes me all over again.
“Now,” I add, lower.
This time she steps away, slowly, eyes still on me, every inch of distance feeling like something being torn rather than given.
She reaches the doorway and stops there, one hand grazing the frame, her breathing finally starting to steady.
The study is wrecked now. Not physically.
Worse. There is not a surface in it that does not still know what just happened.
Neither of us speaks. At last, she turns and leaves.
I listen to her steps fade into the hall, and only when I can no longer hear them do I let myself close my eyes.
My control did not break.
That would be easier.
It bent.
And now I know exactly how little more it would take.