Chapter 9: The Night Before

Lucan's POV

The knock came an hour after midnight, and I knew it was her before I opened the door.

Stormbrook had put us in the guest hall, three rooms off a stone corridor.

The Healer had the children in the far room with two of my wolves outside it.

Mine was the one at the end, with a narrow bed and a window full of cold moon.

I opened the door in my trousers and nothing else.

Rhea stood in the corridor with her hair loose and her arms wrapped around herself.

"You broke a term," she said.

"I did."

"No declarations. You told forty wolves where your mouth had been."

"That's true," I said. "I'd say it again."

"I know you would."

She walked past me into the room and closed the door.

I did not move.

"So I get one back," Rhea said. "That's how terms work."

"What do you want?"

"Come here."

I crossed the room in three steps and stopped in front of her, close enough to feel her breath.

She put one hand flat on my chest, over the heart that had been trying to leave my body since the yard.

Her palm was hot.

She slid it up, over the scar on my throat, and pressed her thumb into the old tooth marks.

I shut my eyes.

"Ten years," Rhea said quietly. "I told myself I'd forgotten what you felt like."

"And?"

"I lied."

She kissed me.

It was not gentle.

She took my mouth with her fingers digging into my hair.

A sound came out of me that I had not made in a decade.

I lifted her off the floor and carried her to the bed.

She tore at the buttons of her shirt and I helped.

Then it was gone, and her skin was pale in the moonlight in front of me.

I forgot every word I had ever known.

"You're staring," Rhea said, breathless.

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