34. Leo
LEO
There’s a fire in the old hall under the resort, and it’s the first warm thing this place has felt in seven hundred years.
Brynn lit it herself. No staff. No magic. Just her hands and a match and that stubborn set to her jaw.
“You’re staring,” she says.
“I’m allowed to stare. You’re mine.”
“Cocky.”
“Correct.”
She laughs, and the sound goes straight through the bond and lodges somewhere behind my ribs.
I’ve spent my whole life learning to want nothing out loud. Tonight I’m going to do the opposite of that. The thought should terrify me.
It doesn’t.
The hall is small. Stone walls. Old silver runes that woke when she walked in. Evelina says this is where the first bond was sealed, back when it was a gift and not a leash, and that the throne wanted it done here or not at all.
So here. Brynn and I alone.
Brynn turns from the fire. She’s not in red tonight. She’s in something pale and simple, and that wrecks me more than the masquerade gown ever did.
“You okay?” she asks.
“No,” I say. “I’ve never been less okay in my life. In a good way. The way where I have everything to lose now.”
She crosses the floor and puts her palm flat over my heart.
“Then don’t lose me.”
“I don’t plan to.”
I think about the man I was when I got here. Cold. Sealed. Sure that love was a weakness he couldn’t afford.
I’m not going to be that.
“The bond didn’t make me want you,” I tell her. “I checked. You checked. It only ever pointed. I’m the one who walked. Every cold, scared step. I walked to you.”
Her eyes go bright.
“And if the throne never wanted me,” I say, “no crown, no seat... I’d still be standing in this room. I’d find a kitchen with big windows. I’d get you the dog. I’d spend a very long life learning how you take your coffee.”
“Two sugars,” she whispers. “Cinnamon.”
“I know.”
The first tear goes. She doesn’t wipe it.
“Your turn,” I say.
“I spent thirty-one years being everyone’s sunshine so nobody would see the cracks.” She presses harder against my chest. “You looked anyway. I’m not your weapon, Leo. I’m yours because I chose it. And I’m choosing it now, out loud, where the magic can hear me.”
The runes flare silver around us.
“Then choose,” I say.
She does.
I reach for the laces at her shoulder. Slow. Watching her face.
“Yes?” I ask.
“Yes. Gods, yes, stop asking and...”
“I’ll always ask.”
“That’s annoyingly hot.”
The pale fabric slides down her arms and pools at her feet, and laughing is the last thing on my mind.
I’ve seen her. I haven’t seen her like this. Firelight on bare skin. The half-finished mark glowing soft at her collarbone, waiting for me to finish it.
“You’re staring again.”
“You’re mine again,” I answer, and I close the distance.
My hands move over her slowly. The dip of her waist. The full curve of her breast in my palm, the way her breath catches when my thumb drags across the peak of it. I bend and take it in my mouth, and the sound she makes is one I’d burn the whole Covenant down to hear twice.
“The shirt,” she pants. “Off. Now.”
“Bossy.”
“Correct.”
I pull my shirt off over my head and she runs her palms across the scar on my ribs and kisses it like it’s something precious instead of broken. No one’s ever done that.
I lower her to the furs by the fire. Settle between her thighs. And I take my time the way she loves, mouth down her stomach, lower, until I taste her and she arches clean off the floor.
“Ohhh, Leo.”
I lick and circle her clit slowly and then biting gently and sucking. My fingers ease into her while my mouth keeps its rhythm. She’s slick and tight and trembling, her hand fisted in my hair, her hips chasing and grinding against my mouth.
“I need...” She’s panting. “I need you. Now. I’m ready, I swear I’m ready...”
“Not yet.” I curl my fingers and she sobs. “I want you so far gone you forget your own name. Then I’ll give you mine.”
“I will end you.”
“Later.”
I bring her right up to the edge and hold her there, shaking, until she’s begging, and only then do I rise over her and let her feel how hard I am and how much I want this too.
She pushes at my shoulder. “Up. I want... let me.” Her cheeks go pink. “I want to be on top of you. I want to set the pace.”
The wolf in me goes molten at that. “Whatever you want. Always.”
I lean back against the warm stone. She climbs into my lap, knees either side of my hips, her hands braced on my chest, and the sight of her like that, firelit and flushed and choosing this, nearly finishes me before we start.
“Ready?” I ask, one last time, my hands steady on her waist.
“Oh, yes,” she breathes as she hovers over my huge cock and guides it to her wet pussy with her hand.
She sinks down on my cock, slowly, taking me inch by inch, both of us gasping.
She has to stop at intervals so that she can stretch and adjust to me, to let her body learn mine.
I have to grip her hard to keep myself from moving.
When she’s seated all the way, full of me, her forehead drops to mine.
“Oh, my,” she whispers.
“I know. Feels incredible.”
Then she starts to move.
I help her, my hands firm under her ass holding her open, lifting her and guiding her back down.
We set a rhythm that builds slow and gets wild fast. The bond floods with every stroke.
Not magic. Us. Every wall I ever built coming down at the same time and her right there to catch what’s behind them.
“Leo.” She’s riding me hard now, her head thrown back, the mark on her throat blazing. “Don’t stop. Faster...”
“I’ve got you.” I lift her faster and deeper, the fire roaring, the runes gone white around us. “Come on. Show me what you’ve got.”
She tightens around me. I feel her cresting before her body catches up, feel it pour through the bond, and I drop my mouth to her throat. To the half-formed silver waiting there.
“Now,” she gasps. “Leo. The mark. Together. Finish it. I’m about to come.”
“Tell me yes.”
Her hand fists in my hair. “Yes. Yes. Forever yes. Bite me!”
The second I bite into her, she breaks apart on me!
The bite isn’t cruel, because the old magic won’t let it be, and because she’s already flying so high she barely feels the pain of it at all.
Her climax swallows the sting whole. All she feels is the bond slamming shut around both of us, sealing, blazing, and it drags her higher still, a second wave crashing over the first until she’s shaking and sobbing my name.
“Leo! Oh my Gods!”
I follow her over with a groan torn out of my chest, emptying into her as the mark finishes itself in a flood of silver light.
“Fuck! Brynn!”
No longer half a vow. No longer raw.
Whole. Permanent. Sealed.
Hers and mine and no one’s to engineer ever again.
For a long moment neither of us can move. The fire settles. Her heart slams against mine, slowing, steadying, matching beat for beat.
Then I hear her.
Not her speaking to me. Her. In my head.
Oh my god. The thought lands soft and stunned, right inside my own skull, in her exact wry tone.
“Leo. Can you... did you just hear that?”
I go completely still.
I heard it, I think back, careful, disbelieving.
“Brynn. I heard you.”
She lifts her head off my shoulder. Her eyes are huge.
“You’re in my head,” she breathes out loud.
“And you’re in mine.”
And it’s not just words. I feel her now under the surface, a whole second heartbeat tucked behind my own, her wonder and her wrecked exhaustion and the bright fizzing edge of her joy. I feel what she feels. She feels me feeling it. It loops, endless, warm.
“This is amazing!” She laughs, breathless, a tear slipping down. “Leo, this is the bond. The real one. The way it was supposed to be.”
“Try not to think anything embarrassing,” she adds, silent, grinning.
“Too late,” I send back. You’ll never have a private thought again.
“Worth it.”
I kiss her because I can’t not. Because for the first time in my life there’s nothing left between us at all.
The throne stirs once beneath us. Not hungry. Not calling. Just recognizing. A warm, heavy weight settles over me, the thing I spent my whole life dreading, and now I can carry it.
“It took the throne. A true Alpha in a true bond. You did that.”
“We did that.”
The doors open then and my family pours in like a weather system that’s been waiting twenty minutes and isn’t sorry about it.
“Are you decent?” Tristan calls, not looking. “Please be decent. I’ve seen enough of Leo’s life choices for one century.”
Brynn yanks a blanket up, laughing.
Dominic whistles at the blazing mark on her collarbone. “Well. That’s official.”
“Extremely official,” Brynn agrees.
Evelina comes last, and for once the great manipulating matriarch has nothing scheming in her face at all. Just her hand pressed to her mouth and her eyes wet.
“My son,” she says. Then, softer than I’ve ever heard her: “My daughter.”
Augustin, leaning on Dominic’s shoulder, looks at the mark, then the glowing runes, then me. Twelve years buried. And he’s here to see this.
“It chose you,” he says. “Freely. The way it was always meant to.”
“It chose us,” I correct.
He smiles. “Even better. I’m so proud of both of you.”
For one whole minute, everything is right. Brynn’s fingers thread through mine under the blanket. Her thoughts hum against mine, steady and bright and ours.
Then Evander, who came down last and never stopped scanning the room, goes rigid by the far wall.
He’s not looking at us. He’s looking at the runes the bond lit up. The ones dark for centuries. The ones that only woke when the mark sealed.
“Evander?” Brynn asks.
He doesn’t hear her. He lifts one hand to a panel of stone that’s glowing now for the first time in seven hundred years, and his face drains of all its color.
“These aren’t bond records,” he says.
“What?”
“The vault. The archive. None of it was ever about the bonds.” His voice shakes. “It was about what the bonds were hiding.”
He presses his palm flat to the stone, and a hidden seam splits open in the wall, and behind it, row after row after row, are prophecy plates none of us have ever seen.
Thousands of them.
All of them stamped with a single name.
Mine.
Leopold Van Alstein.