Page 49 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

I keep my hand in her hair. I leave the rest of it to her.

“Nyxiana.”

“Don’t.” Her breath is coming hard against my neck. “Give me a minute.”

She takes it. Then she takes her mouth off my throat and puts her forehead on my shoulder.

“If I’d gone in I wouldn’t have come off you until there was nothing left,” she says.

“I know.”

“You don’t.”

She gets up off me. She walks the length of the room twice with her arms crossed over herself and her fangs still down, past the window, past the bed, past me.

On the third pass she stops.

“I fucking told you to put me down on the floor.”

“You did.”

“Well, you didn’t.”

“No.”

“God damn it, Valen.” Her voice goes somewhere I haven’t heard it go. “Don’t you understand what I could have done to you?”

“Yes.”

“Then why.”

“Because you’d already stopped. You were holding still with your teeth on my skin and you were the one keeping them out of me. I wasn’t going to throw you on the ground for something you weren’t doing.”

She stands in the middle of the room and looks at me.

“You’d have let me.”

“Yes.”

She goes back to her wall and sits down against it. Her head goes on the stone. Her hands are shaking. She puts them in her lap where I can’t see them.

It’s a while before either of us says anything.

Somebody from the household leaves food outside the door in the middle of the afternoon. She eats a little of it. I eat the rest. We talk about the piece in my pack and where the fourth one has to be. We talk about how long the road runs before it stops being fae ground.

Neither of us brings up what almost happened an hour ago.

“There’s a thing in my chest I haven’t told you about,” I say.

She goes still against the wall.

“It came up the first time I put my hand on that stone in Drakoria. It did it again in the North Range. It did it again downstairs today when I put my hand on that piece.” I keep my eyes on her while I say it. “It hasn’t gone all the way off since Drakoria. It’s going right now.”

“What does it feel like?”

“Warm. Steady. Like it’s waiting.”

She takes a while with it.