Chapter 30
CHAPTER THIRTY
MAGNUS
The wolf rose before I could leash him. Amber flooded my vision.
The wolf pressed against the inside of my skin.
Claws ripped through flesh. Every instinct I had — every old, pre-civilized, non-negotiable thing that lived underneath the suit — rose to the surface simultaneously and pointed at the same thing.
Her throat.
I was going to snatch her to me. I was going to bite her. I was going to mark her. So that she and everyone would know that she was mine. Because knots don't lie.
"I don't want to get married. I don't want to move.
I bought this apartment with my own money.
I'm not interested in your protection or your ring.
I like my independence and I'm not giving it up for some dick, not even grade-A dick that knots.
What I am willing to do is try a relationship.
Date. Work up to being your girlfriend."
I curled my fingers into fists. My claws pricked my palms. Four sharp points on each hand broke skin. I scented the metallic tang of my own blood. Felt the warm, slippery proof of it against my fingers.
Better my skin than hers. Even though I wanted to break her skin. Wanted to leave something permanent on it. Soon, I placated the wolf.
The logical side of me knew that would push her away.
That would never happen. Nell was caught in my gravitational pull now.
A moon that had found its planet and didn't yet know that moons didn't get to leave.
So I would stand here like a civilized man and listen to her baseless claims of independence.
She could burn through every last drop of fuel trying to escape, and she still wouldn't break free.
"I want to be with you. I want to date you.
I want to figure out what this is. But I am not going to be managed into a quickie marriage for the look of things.
If someone thinks I slept my way to the top, they're an idiot.
I don't need your protection from idiots.
Or a ring on my finger to prove what I've built.
" She took a breath. "Those are my terms. Date me. Don't manage me."
She crossed her hands over her chest, which only propped up those lush breasts.
I reached for one of them.
She gasped, swatting away my hand.
I took her face in my hands and kissed her. Biting, nipping, suckling her. Not giving her space to breathe. I bruised her lips with mine. I let the tips of my claws graze her chin, her cheek, the spot behind her earlobes.
She felt the threat, but she didn't pull away from me. She kissed me back.
Her hands came up to my chest. She leaned into it, giving me all of her weight as though her legs were jelly.
"Wait? Are you bleeding?"
"Take off my shirt."
Her eyes had gone warm; the argument still present in them but a lower priority now. She reached for the hem with a smile that told me exactly what she thought was about to happen. She pulled it over her head and let it drop to the floor.
I bent to pick it up, taking great pains not to lick her bare cunt on the way back up. When I slipped first one arm and then the other into the shirt, her smile flickered.
"You're taking the day off," I said, working the buttons with the calm efficiency of a man who was already past the part of open discussion. A trickle of blood from my fingertips dotted the collar of the shirt.
"I'm not—"
"Your meals will be delivered. I'll have your assistant cancel your meetings." I reached for my jacket from the chair where I'd left it. "Come to your senses about the apartment. About all of it. I'll be back this evening."
"Magnus. You cannot—"
I walked to the door, muffling her protests in the process.
"Nobody in or out," I ordered the enforcer on the other side.
The man nodded.
I turned and walked toward the elevator.
The door to Nell's apartment rattled as the elevator dinged its arrival.
Behind the door, Nell's voice rose with the full force of a woman who ran companies and dismantled empires and was not accustomed to being ignored.
I stepped into the elevator and hit the button for the ground floor.
As the doors closed, an unwelcome memory rose.
I heard another voice. A teenage girl standing in the snow outside a small house in a suburb.
She wasn't screaming at me. She was sobbing.
Nell was screaming, which was fury with teeth in it.
The girl had sobbed the way people did when something had been taken and there was nothing to be done about it.
The broken, inconsolable sound of a girl who had just been told her father was not coming home.
I had been the one to tell her.
I had stood in the snow with my hands clasped behind my back, mimicking the way my father had dealt with her father. I had watched her face fall, her knees hit the ground, and then I'd walked away.
It wasn't the same with Nell. I'd be back for Nell. I would give Nell everything. She would come to understand that soon enough.
Behind me, I was leaving a woman who was furious and contained and alive and fighting. Which was the only version of Nell that existed, and the version I intended to come home to tonight. Not a girl in the snow. Not a broken thing.
Nell was fine.
She was better than fine.
I was the one about to blow up my life.
I was going to go tell my father what the knot had declared and what it meant for the Lobo arrangement and what it was going to cost the Blackwood pack.
I was going to do the necessary and difficult thing the way I had always done the necessary and difficult thing — cleanly, without flinching, with my hands folded and my chest out. Because it was the right thing to do.