Page 37 of Curvy Sold Mate

Olivia’s eyes cut to him. “You’re hovering.”

“I’m standing.”

“You’re hovering while standing. It’s a talent.”

“Ready?” Caitlynn said, interrupting the banter seamlessly.

Olivia turned her face to the ceiling. “Ready.”

Caitlynn’s hands moved over the shard, golden light pooling in her palms, sinking into Olivia’s forearm with focused precision. The light met the shard and the shard answered—that sullen purple flare Viktor could feel in the bond, a frequency designed to grate against everything natural, everything warm.

Olivia’s breath changed. A sharp intake, held, released through her teeth. Her free hand gripped the table’s edge, and the tendons in her wrist went taut.

He felt it.

The pain arrived through the bond the way a sound arrived through. A bright, threading agony that started at the inside of his left elbow and radiated upward into his shoulder, into his chest, wrapping itself around his lungs and squeezing. His vision narrowed, and his wolf surged forward hard enough that his teeth ached with the urge to shift.

Caitlynn’s magic pressed deeper. Olivia made a sound—low, bitten off, the truncated cry of a woman refusing to scream—and his hand moved toward her before the conscious mind caught up, fingers reaching for her shoulder. He caught himself mid-reach, his arm suspended in the space between them, and the effort of pulling it back left a tremor running through his forearm that he couldn’t control.

She saw it. Her eyes, still fixed on the ceiling, cut sideways, and she saw his hand hanging in the air between them, the fingers extended, the tremor visible, and something crossed her face that was fiercer than the pain—the recognition that his control was fracturing in front of her.

“The filament is releasing,” Caitlynn murmured, sweat beading at her temples. “Viktor, don’t fight the bond. Let it reach her.”

He didn’t know what that meant until it happened—a loosening in his chest, a release of the clamp he’d been holding over the bond since the day their names were drawn, and the connection widened like a river breaking through a narrowed channel. It poured from him, and he felt it reach her, felt the moment it arrived in her system and met the pain and began to absorb it.

Olivia gasped. Her eyes turned to him, and what was in them held him in place with a force that had nothing to do with magic.

Caitlynn pulled.

The shard came free.

The sound Olivia made was beyond pain—a wrenching cry that came from the place where her wolf had been caged for weeks, and then the cry broke apart and reformed, because the cage was open, and the wolf came flooding back.

The bond detonated.

It hit Viktor like a wall of sound at close range—Olivia’s wolf, returned, surging through the connection with the force of an animal that had been starved and was now gorging on everything it had been denied. He felt her—all of her, every layer, the anger and the relief and the sharp, aching joy of being whole again, and underneath all of it, the thing she’d been keeping sealed at her end of the bond for weeks: the want, raw and terrifying, aimed at him with a precision that knocked the breath from his lungs.

Their eyes locked.

For a single, annihilating second, there was nothing between them—the walls he’d maintained for a decade, the armor she’d built from rejection and loss, the careful distance they’d negotiated across briefing tables and shared silences, all of it stripped away by the bond’s full force, and what remained was two people looking at each other without a single defense standing.

He was vaguely aware of Caitlynn saying something, then leaving the room. He couldn’t turn his head toward the slamming door. Olivia was sitting up on the table, her forearm bleeding where the shard had been, her chest heaving, her eyes still on his, and the air between them was.

She reached for him.

Her hand closed on the front of his shirt, fingers twisting in the fabric, and she pulled him forward, and his mouth found hers with the desperation of a man who’d been holding his breath for eight years and had finally been given permission to exhale.

The kiss was graceless, urgent, her teeth catching his lower lip, his hand cradling the back of her skull, her fingers still knotted in his shirt. She tasted of adrenaline and copper and the salt of tears she hadn’t shed, and he kissed her the way he’d wanted to kiss her since she was eighteen.

He pulled back enough to see her face—his forehead against hers, their breathing tangled. Her eyes were wet, her mouth swollen, and the bond between them was roaring, a sound that wasn’t a sound, a pressure that lived behind his sternum and pressed outward against everything he’d spent his life containing.

“Viktor,” she said, her voice loaded, and when she kissed him again, he lifted her off the table. She wrapped her legs around his waist, and he carried her out of the infirmary and down the corridor and into that which had become theirs, and the door closed behind them.

***

He set her down, and she pulled him with her, both of them stumbling, her back hitting the wall. Her fingers were already dragging at his shirt, pulling it over his head. The moment her palms flattened against his bare chest, he felt it through every nerve—her hands, spread across muscle and scars, hot with the blood that was rushing beneath her skin, and the touch burned through every wall he had left.

It was months of restraint cracking at its foundation—every careful distance he’d kept, every night lying on the other side of a wall tracking her breathing, every briefing room where her mind had pressed against his and the intellectual intimacy had fed the physical want until the want was so large it had its own gravity. It came out now in the way he kissed her—hard, deep, his hands gripping her hips and pulling her flush against him, and the sound she made when she felt him hard against her stomach sent his blood south so fast the room tilted.