Chapter 16: I Do

He didn't speak in the elevator, and he didn't speak in the hall.

He shut his bedroom door behind us and stood with his back against it.

He was breathing hard, as if he'd run up all thirty-nine floors.

"Say it," I said.

"Say what?"

"Whatever you've been holding. You've had it in your mouth since the Hall."

He looked at the grey bed. He looked at the window.

"At the wedding," Torin said, "you looked at the floor."

"What?"

"The whole ceremony. Three hundred people, and the Elder reading the vows, and you looked at the floor."

His voice was rough.

"When he asked if you took me, you said I do to the room. You never once said it to me."

I stared at him.

"That's your wound? Four years, and that's what you kept?"

"I stood at the altar and waited for you to look up. You didn't."

He shook his head.

"I thought, she's paying a debt. She'd rather be anywhere."

"Torin."

"I thought that every day."

He swallowed.

"I thought it even when you walked into my study and told me to touch you."

"I didn't look at you," I said, "because I couldn't."

He frowned.

I crossed the room and put my hands flat on his chest, where the wolf had always gone quiet.

"I was twenty-four, and you were the best-looking man I had ever seen."

I pressed my palms harder against him.

"Your mother was watching me, and the Elder had told me not to look at the Alpha until the vows were done."

"Orla..."

"I looked at the floor because if I looked up, you would have seen it on my face."

"Seen what?"

"That I would have married you for nothing," I said. "No land, no pack, no debt."

I almost laughed.

"I'd have said I do to you in a ditch."

His whole body went still under my hands.

"I wanted you from the first day I came into that tower," I said.

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