Chapter 10
Alexander
For the night? Oh, baby…You really think you’re leaving this in the morning like it meant nothing? Like you can just slip out of my bed, out of my arms, out of my system—as if you didn’t just turn my entire world into a compass pointed at you?
You have no idea what you’ve started. I watched you come apart beneath me—your breath catching, your voice breaking, your body trembling in my hands. Each moan carved itself into my bones. Each plea rewrote something inside me. And when I finally pushed into you, it wasn’t need anymore.
It was claiming. It was marking. It was a branding iron pressed to the deepest part of me. But then…the aftermath.
When your breathing slowed, when your lashes fluttered against your cheeks, when your body softened and curled instinctively toward mine—That’s when I felt it.
Not lust. Not conquest. Fear. Not because I intended to hurt you, but because you felt something you didn’t have a name for yet.
Something you weren’t prepared for. Something you didn’t want to admit to yourself. And you think I didn’t recognize it?
You weren’t the only one afraid.
I lay there in the dark, staring up at the ceiling as if the expensive plaster had answers for men who never learned how to want something quietly.
My arm tightened around your waist, holding you to me like I expected you to turn into smoke and escape. Because women always left. Always slipped through my fingers the minute they realized what loving a man like me would cost them. But not you.
I didn’t want it to be you. For the first time in years, the thought of someone leaving felt like a threat.
I stayed silent. I didn’t beg. I didn’t confess.
I didn’t tell you that your scent was still on my tongue, that your warmth was bleeding into my chest, that I hadn’t felt this alive in a decade.
I let you breathe. I let you sleep. I let you think you still had the upper hand. I let you think you won. Because the truth?
The moment you fell asleep on my chest, body trusting mine in a way that had nothing to do with sex—You were already mine. And tomorrow, you’ll start to realize that too.