Chapter 25
Maeve
The immediate aftermath of telling my father to get out of my house was not the breakdown I'd spent three years bracing for.
It was lunch.
I sat in the dining room with my hands still faintly trembling and ate roast chicken, potatoes, and half a basket of bread as though threatening a man who'd once locked me in a bedroom for three days had been a form of high-intensity interval training.
Ivan watched like he was witnessing a magic trick. Gregor moved the butter dish closer to my plate without comment. Artem didn't say a word, but every time my pulse kicked up, his thumb stroked once across the inside of my wrist and settled it back down.
The dining room had tall windows facing the south lawn, and the rain was soft and steady against the glass. Outside, my father's tire tracks were still gouged into the gravel. By tomorrow the grounds staff would rake them smooth and nobody would know he'd ever been here.
That felt symbolic. Possibly too symbolic. I blamed the postpartum hormones, which had apparently decided that today's emotional register would be "high drama with a side of butter."
The realization I had nothing left to run from didn't arrive with a choir or a shard of sunlight. It arrived while I was reaching for a second roll.
The knife was in my hand and I wasn't flinching. My hand was steady. My heartbeat was elevated but not panicked. Outside, the rain blurred the windows. Inside, nobody owned me. Nobody expected me to lower my eyes. Nobody was waiting for gratitude in exchange for not being cruel.
I looked around the table and felt the absurdity of my old life pressing against the edges of this one.
The beatings. The locked doors. The other women in my bed while I sat upstairs and pretended I couldn't hear.
My father's voice telling me I was currency, I was an investment, I was disappointing the family.
All of it suddenly seemed like a very badly written play I'd been forced to perform in and could now review with the clarity of distance.
But I wasn't hiding anymore. The door to my past had been closed so hard I half-expected a cartoon puff of smoke.
That night, after the house had gone quiet and Mac had been fed and settled, I stood in my bathroom, brushing my hair.
White marble. Brass fixtures. A freestanding tub big enough to drown in or throw a small party in, depending on your priorities.
Heated floors beneath my bare feet. A mirror framed in antique gold that would probably cost more than my first car, if I'd ever owned a car, which I hadn't, because I'd been too busy running.
Fergus came and sat at my feet. He’d done his final patrol of the nursery. Gregor was teaching him well. He made three circuits of the room, one bark at the curtains, the routine was becoming comical.
I picked him up. “Are you happy, Fergus?”
His tongue poked out of mouth and licked my nose.
“I take that as a yes. Me too.”
Then the lock clicked.
I turned.
Artem was leaning against the doorframe.
He'd shed his jacket and tie, the top buttons of his shirt undone, his sleeves rolled to the elbow.
The way he was looking at me wasn't careful.
It wasn't reverent. It was the look of a man who had spent months holding back a tide and had just decided to let it drown him.
The scent of my pack mates hit me before he moved. Champagne, caramel and storm clouds, thick enough to taste.
Slick ran down my thighs before he'd taken a single step.
I placed Fergus on the floor as Artem walked toward me. Not fast. Not hesitant.
By the time he reached me, I was already reaching for him. He gripped my hips and lifted me onto the vanity like I weighed nothing, stepping between my legs, his chest pressing against mine through the thin silk of my robe.
"You handled him." His voice was low gravel, the register he used for promises and threats and occasionally both at once. "You stood in front of the man who sold you and you broke him in half."
"I did, didn't I." It came out breathless, which was embarrassing, but also honest.
His hands slid up my waist, thumbs tracing my ribs, then fisted into my hair. He tilted my head back and exposed my throat and the scar, the pulse beneath it, everything I'd spent years hiding.
"You're done running."
"Completely."
"You're done hiding."
"I don't even know where my running shoes are. I think Fergus ate one."
Fergus crept out of the bathroom, tail down.
Artem’s mouth brushed my jaw, feather-light. "Good. Because you're mine. Not just on paper. Mine."
"I'm yours." I gripped his shoulders, needing the anchor. "And Ivan's. And Gregor's."
"You are." He kissed me, hard and fast. It was a claiming and was nothing like the careful kisses of the night before. His mouth devoured me and I met him with the same ferocity, my legs wrapping around his waist as he pressed me back against the mirror.
"I need your knot." I didn't recognize my own voice. "I don't need slow. I appreciate you but I need you to stop holding back. I want you to be who you are around me."
He tore the robe off. His shirt followed. His pants. Then he was naked against me, all heat and muscle, and his mouth was on my throat and his hands were everywhere.
"Artem."
He pinned my wrists above my head with one hand, the other sliding down my face, neck, breasts, stomach, through my slit. “So wet.”
“Always ready.”
He held his cock between my spread legs, pressing slowly. Looking at each other, not blinking.
He groaned when he was fully inside me. It was just for a moment and then he pulled out and pushed back inside.
I moaned as his finger slid back up my body, over my stomach, breasts, stopping at the crook of my neck. Right over the scar. Finn’s scar.
He paused. His eyes found mine again.
Even now, completely consumed by the alpha drive to claim, he gave me a heartbeat. A single fraction of a second to change my mind.
I tilted my head further. "Take me. I'm not going anywhere."
He leaned forward, purred around my ear and then he bit down.
Not the tearing violence I remembered from Finn. Something sharper and cleaner and awful in its precision. This pain bloomed instantly into heat, euphoric and blinding, flooding every nerve I had.
And then the click.
That was the only word for it. Something deep in my chest that had been floating, untethered, for twenty-seven years simply dropped into place. An anchor hitting the seabed. The permanent weight of belonging to someone who belonged back.
I gasped, my spine arching off the mirror.
My body sang as the bond flared to life, a tether of champagne, caramel and storm clouds that was mine, and now woven through his.
I could feel him. Not just his body against mine but him.
The depth of his devotion, the immovable wall of his protection, the absolute and terrifying certainty that I was his and he was mine and nothing was taking either of us anywhere.
He kept his teeth in my flesh, his chest heaving against mine, his own body absorbing the bond like a man who'd been drowning and finally found air. When he pulled back, a slow trickle of blood ran down my neck and mixed with his saliva and our scent.
He licked the wound. Tender. Slow. The contrast of it made my eyes sting.
Then his forehead dropped to mine.
"You're mine," he whispered. "Ours."
I reached up and traced his jaw. My fingers were trembling, but not from fear. "I'm forever yours."
Tears slipped down my cheeks before I could stop them. Not grief. Not relief either, exactly. Just the sheer overwhelming weight of finally, finally belonging somewhere that wasn't a cage.