Chapter 16
FOR A MOMENT neither of them moved.
“You were the target tonight,” Magnus said at last.
“Because of the contract?”
“Because you’re with me.”
The words settled between them like something irreversible.
Magnus rose from the chair. He stood, broad shoulders and hard chest bared from the waist up, skin marked not only by the fresh wound but by older, paler scars that told stories she had never heard.
There was a thin silver line near one rib.
Another at his shoulder. Across the sleek power of his body ran the unmistakable evidence that he’d belonged to danger long before tonight.
And now he had bled for her.
The air between them tightened, charged with everything neither of them was saying.
He stood a few feet away now, bare skin lit by warm lamps, bandage bright against the hard line of his arm.
He looked just as dangerous in his own house as he had at the gala.
Less polished. More real. The adrenaline still ran through him like a live current, and now that the doctor was gone, it had nowhere left to go.
Elia should have stepped back. She didn’t.
He noticed that too. “You’re staring,” he said. His voice was stripped of its usual polish. Whatever lived beneath the words wasn’t teasing.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
She could have lied. On another night she might have. But there was blood on the discarded shirt, and somewhere out in the city a dead man lay broken because Magnus Severin had refused to let him touch her.
So she gave him the truth. “Because you were hurt saving me.”
“That bastard didn’t hurt me. He inconvenienced me,” he corrected. The answer would have been absurd from anyone else. From Magnus it sounded like a threat aimed at the dead.
Her eyes dropped helplessly to the bandage. “You nearly lost more than an evening’s convenience.”
His gaze sharpened. “No. I didn’t.”
He crossed the space between them with predatory certainty, stopping only when the heat of him brushed her skin.
The difference in their height forced her to tilt her head back.
Candlelight moved over his face, over the hard cut of his mouth and the pale slash of his hair and the terrible focus in his eyes.
Her pulse kicked harder. “What if you had?” she asked.
Magnus looked at her as if the question itself offended him. “I didn’t.” His hand came up and closed around the side of her neck. Not tight. Not painful. Possessive. The touch sent a violent shiver through her.
He felt it. “You’re shaking.”
“Of course I am.” Her voice thinned despite her effort. “A man tried to cut my throat at a crowded gala and you threw him off a balcony.”
Something almost like a smile touched Magnus’s mouth and vanished. “He was offered the chance to leave.”
Elia stared at him. “That was a chance?”
“I’m a generous man.”
A startled laugh escaped her before she could stop it. It broke apart midway through, too ragged to be true amusement, but it loosened something in her all the same.
Then the full consequence of the night came crashing back. Her knees weakened.
Magnus caught the shift immediately, his hand leaving her throat to clamp at her waist and drag her in against him. Elia braced one palm against his chest. His skin was hot beneath her hand. His heart was still beating hard from the fight.
That undid her more than the blood had.
Tears came without warning. Not sobs. Not collapse. Just a hard sting at the back of her eyes and then the betrayal of warmth spilling over. Elia turned her face away at once.
Magnus wouldn’t let her. His fingers caught her chin and brought her back. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t hide from me.”
Magnus watched the effort it took for her to keep her voice steady.
He could see it in the tight line of her mouth, in the way her shoulders held themselves rigid as if sheer discipline might keep the night from catching up with her.
Most people shattered after something like that.
Screamed. Collapsed. She was standing here instead, trying to contain it.
Trying to do it alone.
She gathered herself. “I’m not hiding.”
He knew the difference between defiance and retreat. He had spent his entire life reading men across negotiation tables and battle lines. What he saw in her now wasn’t defiance. It was restraint hanging by a thread.
“You’re holding yourself together by sheer willpower.”
She didn’t deny it. “I’m trying not to come apart in your sitting room,” she confessed.
His thumb brushed one tear from beneath her eye with startling tenderness for a man who had just broken another man’s wrist and thrown him off a balcony. “Then come apart.”
The command broke something fragile and stubborn inside her. “He was there for me.”
Magnus’s hand tightened on her, the grip instinctive, as if some part of him was still braced to pull her out of danger. “Yes.”
The admission came out gruffer than he intended. The image of the blade cutting through the air toward her throat was still burned into the back of his mind.
“He would have killed me.”
Magnus didn’t pretend otherwise. “Yes.”
The word carried a dark certainty that sent another shiver through her. Not fear of him. Something deeper. Something that made the space between their bodies suddenly too small.
“You knew that before he even spoke.”
Magnus’s gaze held hers, steady and unflinching. “I knew the moment he moved.”
For an instant the memory flashed between them without words: the blur of steel, Magnus’s arm rising, her body being swept behind him, the impact of the blade slicing across his skin instead of hers.
His fingers pressed more firmly into her hips, grounding himself in the reality that she was still here. Still alive. Still within reach.
She looked down at the bandage on his arm, at the pale old scars across his ribs, then up at him again. “And you still stepped in front of me.”
Magnus went very still. “There was never another outcome,” he said.
The words settled between them with the heaviness of truth. Something shifted between them. The adrenaline, the rage, the shock, all of it changed shape in the silence. Magnus’s gaze dropped to her mouth. Heat followed it instantly, so sharp and sudden she nearly lost balance again.
“This is a terrible idea,” she whispered.
“Probably.”
“If you kiss me now,” she pressed, “it won’t be because this is wise.”
Magnus’s eyes turned molten. “I don’t remember claiming wisdom.”
That should have warned her. Instead it made her step closer. His body reacted instantly. The shift was slight but unmistakable, satisfaction and hunger and something darker flashing across his face before he crushed it.
“What would it be, then?” she asked.
Magnus bent his head until his mouth hovered a fraction from hers. “Relief,” he said. “Rage.” His hand tightened at her waist. “Possession.”
The last word shot through her like lightning.
Her hand slid from his chest to his jaw. Rough stubble rasped against her palm. Magnus inhaled once, sharply. It was the first truly unguarded sound she had heard from him all night.
“I thought you might die,” she confessed.
Magnus closed his eyes for half a beat. When he opened them, the self-discipline in him looked scorched around the edges. “I didn’t.”
“No.”
“But he did.” There was no triumph in the words. Only fact. Only the cold promise of what happened to men who reached for something under Severin protection.
“You killed him,” she said.
“Yes.”
“And you don’t regret it.”
“No.”
The honesty should have chilled her. Instead it steadied her.
Because there were no lies left in this room.
Not in the blood. Not in the bandage. Not in the heat building between them.
He had killed for her and would do it again if necessary.
That knowledge should have sent her running.
Instead she rose onto her toes and brushed her mouth against his.
Magnus went still. For a single heartbeat. Long enough for her to understand the choice still belonged to both of them. “No one touches what’s mine,” he informed her.
Then his hand came up, sliding into her hair as he pulled her into the kiss. Heat from his skin and the sharp taste of adrenaline still lingered between them. The last fragile thread of control snapped.
Magnus took over.
His mouth claimed hers with a force that sent a shock straight through her body. One hand cupped the back of her head while the rest of him closed the remaining space between them, pressing her against him so completely, the power coiled in every inch of his body.
The kiss was nothing like the careful heat that had lived between them before.
There was nothing restrained about it. Relief and fury and raw male hunger crashed together in the hard seal of his mouth on hers.
He kissed her like a man holding himself together by force and finally running out of reasons to keep trying.
Elia made a sound against his lips that didn’t sound like her own.
Magnus answered it with a groan and dragged her flush against him.
The bandaged arm limited him just enough to make the rest of him more deliberate.
His uninjured hand slid to the back of her head while his body crowded hers into the edge of the table behind them.
Her gown rustled as he pressed her back against the polished wood.
The kiss turned deeper, wetter, more desperate, and all she could do was cling to him and open for it.
She tasted the sharp metallic rush of the fight on both of them. Rage. Male heat. Something dark and consuming in the way he devoured her as though the act of kissing her could erase the image of a blade at her throat.
When he finally tore his mouth from hers, they were both breathing hard.