Page 64 of Ruthless Bond

Her hand touches my fur.

The contact sends a shockwave through the bond. I feel it in both bodies, the wolf’s and the man’s, a surge of recognition so powerful that my legs nearly buckle. Her fingers curl into the thick fur at my neck and I feel her grip tighten and I hear her breathing change, the fear dissolving into something else. Wonder. Grief. A complicated, layered emotion that has no name but that I can taste in her scent like salt and copper and rain.

“There you are,” she whispers.

I press my muzzle against her palm. She makes a sound that isn’t quite a laugh and isn’t quite a sob. Her other hand comes up and she’s holding my face in both hands, the wolf’s face, and her thumbs trace the line of my jaw and her forehead tips forward until it rests against the bridge of my muzzle and we stay there, human and wolf, kneeling on the floor of a room built for difficult truths.

Then she pulls back. She stands. The grief is still there but the anger is returning, the slow resurgence of fury that the wonder of the shift temporarily displaced.

“Shift back,” she says. “I’m not done.”

I shift. The return to human form leaves me naked and gasping on the floor. I dress quickly, and when I’m standing again she’s watching me with eyes that have gone flat and hard.

“Do you regret it?”

I know exactly what she’s asking. “Hurting you? Yes.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

No. It isn’t.

Her fingers touch the mark again. “Do you regret claiming me?”

“No.”

The word lands hard.

Her eyes flash. “Of course you don’t.”

“I won’t lie to make this easier, Sophia.”

“You didn’t have much trouble lying before.”

Fair.

“If you’re asking whether I wish the mark were gone, I don’t. If you’re asking whether I would rather have never found you, never touched you, never made you mine, the answer is no.”

“You don’t get to call me yours right now.”

The wolf objects violently. I ignore him. “Fine.”

Her eyebrows rise, like she didn’t expect that. “Fine?”

“You don’t want me to call you mine, I won’t.”

“That’s it?”

“No. I still think it.”

“You’re unbelievable.”

“I’ve been called worse.”

“I need to leave.”

“Sophia.”

“I need to leave this apartment, Dominic. Right now. If you have ever meant anything you’ve said to me, if any part of what you told me tonight was true, you will let me walk out that door without following me.”