There was so much disbelief and sheer shock in his voice that it set off a violent, internal tremor within me. Acid burned in the back of my throat—there was an unbearable mix of tenderness and raw agony in his tone, so intense it threatened to tear my soul apart.
Because it was a lie. It couldn’t be real... No, no!
A deafening dissonance shrieked through my mind, every warning siren blaring at once. Anything but this.
He couldn’t possibly be speaking to me with such tenderness... I refused to believe it.
The ache in my chest intensified with every passing second, an agonizingly sweet grief. My soul felt split between two polarized extremes, stretched to the absolute breaking point. How could I ever trust his voice then? After everything...
Magnus crashed his lips onto mine, a kiss so searing it completely obliterated what little remained of my sanity. His lips tasted like sin itself—there was no other word for it.
Scorching. Dominating. Intolerably sweet. His hands roamed across my body, pulling me against his frame with such crushing force I could almost hear my bones creak under the pressure.
Deep within me, my mate instinct purred, basking in the suffocating warmth of his scent, melting as his Alpha aura softly caressed every single cell of my body. It enfolded me, lulling me, whispering: You don’t need to run anymore. You are home.
I couldn’t make sense of what was happening. This had to be a dream. It had to be—it was impossible for reality to feel this intoxicatingly sweet...
I fought to cling to a single coherent thought, but the air was ripped from my lungs. My vision dimmed. I was suffocating, on the verge of collapsing right on top of him.
"Jane... my Jane... you taste so sweet."
His hand tangled into my long braid, winding the dark hair around his fist with slow, absolute command. He arched my body over his, forcing me to expose the vulnerable line of my neck to his lips. He was an untamed, ravenous beast then.
No human could ever exert such power over another... His wolf was calling to my breeder gene, summoning it alive. And it answered without hesitation, trampling every defense my mind tried to erect. It didn’t care about the past. It didn’t care about reason. It was ready to surrender completely, to drown in him until nothing was left, stripping away every last shred of human restraint.
The moment his tongue and warm lips traced over the broken mark on my neck, all resistance vanished. The ruined mark sparked under his touch, responding with surges of pure heat. I realized with sinking dread that in just a few seconds, I would lose the ability to think entirely—consumed only by the fire pooling everywhere he touched me.
"Jane... my girl..."
"Mmm... no... Magnus!"
"Yes... Say it again. Say my name."
"Magnus..."
The sound of my own voice terrified me. It sounded fractured, heavy with a helpless, aching desire—as if my very soul were using my lips to chant his name like a prayer. His caresses grew wilder, hotter, and through the hazy veil of intoxicating bliss, making every nerve sing, I felt his fingers find the tactical zipper of my suit.
Slowly, deliberately, he began to draw it down.
No. Goddess, no... What was I doing? What was I letting him do to me?
I had come there for his blood! I had come there for Matthias—to save my son’s life, so he could live to see his whales in the ocean. And there I was, dissolving in his father’s arms because my traitorous heart had abandoned me completely.
"Unfasten the cuffs, Jane."
He snarled the command, pulling back from my neck just far enough to lock his gaze with mine. That single instant of eye contact was all it took—he pounced on my lips once more with a guttural growl, crushing them in a feverish kiss that consumed me like fire devours dry leaves.
Through the haze, the splintering crack of wood echoed right beside us. He was straining against his bindings, attempting to shatter the second wooden armrest and free his other arm...
I grabbed for the last remaining shards of my self-control, sweeping them together like broken glass.
That tiny piece of my mother’s wolfish nature was ready to tear my human mind to pieces for stopping this. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t let it happen. I wouldn’t surrender to him. Not then. Not there. No matter how much my body melted under his hands, no matter how deeply my mark sang at his touch, no matter how his scent carved through my sanity.
Contorting my body, I planted my foot against the base of his chair and pushed off with every ounce of strength I had, tearing myself from his grip in one violent burst. I scrambled back a few paces, gasping for air as I desperately tried to gather my thoughts.
The sight of him in that moment stunned me into a brief freeze, even though my instincts screamed at me to run—to run right then. He looked drunk on my scent, his eyes filled with a raw, agonizing intensity that struck a sharp chord deep within me. He blinked rapidly, his gaze sharpening as reality took hold. He looked at me as if testing whether I was real.
"You’re not a dream..." he whispered softly, incredulous. As if only then was the truth sinking in.
I was alive.
I was real.
I was standing right in front of him, inside his parlor, within this estate in the Upper District—a place I shouldn’t have been, because on paper, I had been dead for five years. The sheer weight of his voice tore through my chest—not clean, but jagged and painful, as if something had been ripped from my ribs.
In the very next second, the room flooded with pressure.
It was wild, suffocating, and heavy—like the dense air right before a thunderstorm, magnified a hundredfold. His Alpha aura stripped away its warmth, transforming into a massive, crushing weight that crashed down on me.
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