Page 62 of Ruthless Bond

She’s sitting on the couch and a notebook is on the coffee table in front of her. Her eyes are red and her jaw is set and her hands are trembling and she’s holding them at her sides, clenched into fists, willing them still.

The apartment that has been our home for two weeks, the kitchen where I cooked for her, the bedroom where I held her, the windows where I made love to her against the city lights, all of it is the same and none of it is the same because the woman sitting on my couch is not the woman who fell asleep in my arms last night. That woman trusted me. This woman knows better.

“Viktor killed my father.”

The words fall into the room like stones into water. The ripples spread. I feel them in the bond, in the air, in the way her heartbeat accelerates and mine matches it, involuntarily, the paired rhythm that neither of us can control.

I don’t deny it. I don’t deflect. I don’t reach for the careful, strategic language I’ve used my entire life to manage difficult conversations.

“I think he did.”

Her expression hardens. “You think?”

“I’ve suspected Viktor was involved in your father’s death. I didn’t know how or why. And I didn’t have proof.”

“But you suspected him.”

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t ask him.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because I knew there was a chance the answer would cost me you.”

She stares at me. “How long?”

I could soften the answer. I don’t. “Since before I marked you.”

Her hand rises slowly to the silver scar on her neck. Something in her face changes. “Did you know what this would do?”

I don’t pretend not to understand. “Yes.”

“Before you bit me.”

“Yes.”

“You knew I didn’t.”

“Yes.”

The tears are running again, silent, tracking down her cheeks, but her voice when she speaks is steady and sharp and furious.

“The bond,” she says. “Tell me about the bond.”

“Sophia.”

“Tell me. Right now. Everything. What did the bite do? Why can I feel your heartbeat? Why do I ache when you’re not near me? Why is my desire for you so overwhelming that I can’t think clearly enough to trust my own judgment? Tell me what you did to me, Dominic. No more careful answers. No more strategic truth. All of it.”

I tell her.

I stand in the middle of the room and I tell her about being a wolf. About the mate bond. How the wolf recognizes its mate by scent. How the recognition is involuntary, undeniable, permanent. How the bond, once activated through proximity and touch, amplifies the attraction between mates, increasing desire, creating physical need, building a dependency that becomes structural over time.

I tell her about the marking. How the bite during sex sealed the bond permanently. How it connected our nervous systems, our heartbeats, our emotional states. How it altered her biology in ways she hasn’t fully discovered yet. How it was done at the peak of orgasm, when her capacity to resist or refuse was at its absolute lowest.

I tell her about the lifespan. How the mark introduces wolf biology into a human mate’s system. How her aging will slow. How she’ll live far beyond a normal human span. How I changed the fundamental trajectory of her life without telling her it was happening.