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I turn around. He’s still by the door. He’s wearing his brother’s jacket over bare skin and his feet are bare on the hardwood and there’s still blood under his fingernails and he looks nothing like the polished executive who sat across from me in a conference room and told me about my father’s debt. He looks like a wolf in human form, stripped of every mask, standing in front of the woman he loves and waiting for her verdict.

“No more lies,” I say. “About anything. Not about the bond, not about the pack, not about my father. If I ask you a question, you answer it. If the answer is dangerous, you tell me it’s dangerous and then you answer it anyway. I’m not a civilian, Dominic. I’m your partner. Treat me like one.”

“Yes.”

“No more feeding the bond without my knowledge. If there are things you can do that affect my body or my emotions, I need to know about them. All of them. I need a complete inventory of what the mark does, what the bond does, how it works, and what changes it’s making to my biology. I’m not going to be a passenger in my own body.”

“Yes.”

“Viktor.” My voice tightens on the name. “I’m not ready to deal with Viktor. I may never be ready. But I need to know that you’ve dealt with him. That he can’t make decisions about who lives and dies in your territory without your knowledge. That what happened to my father can’t happen to anyone else.”

“It’s done. His authority is over. Completely.”

“And one more thing.” I walk toward him slowly, closing the distance in the same deliberate increments he used with me. “The mark. The bite. You took that choice away from me and I can never get it back. The bond is permanent, the mark is permanent, the changes to my body are permanent. I can’t undo what you did.”

His jaw tightens. Something hard moves through his expression. Not regret for the mark. I know him well enough now to recognize the difference. Regret for the way he took the choice from me.

“But I can choose to accept it,” I say. “I can choose, right now, to accept the mark and the bond and the man who put them there. And I’m choosing that. Not because the bond compels me. Because I love you, and the love was mine before the bite and it’s still mine after. The volume was wrong. The feeling was right.”

He makes a sound. Low, broken, from somewhere deep in his chest.

I close the distance. I put my hands on his face. I feel his jaw under my palms, the fine grain of stubble, the heat of his skin.

“I’m choosing this,” I say. “Don’t ever take that away from me again.”

His eyes hold mine. “Never.”

I kiss him.

This kiss is mine. Not the desperate collision of the first night in my apartment. Not the urgent hunger of the office or the car or the kitchen counter. This kiss is deliberate, controlled, paced exactly as I want it, because this time I’m the one setting the terms. My mouth on his. My hands in his hair. My body pressing forward, pushing him back against the door, and the reversal of the usual dynamic, me advancing, him yielding, makes something shift between us that needed to shift.

“Bedroom,” I say against his mouth.

“Sophia, you were just—“

“I was just kidnapped and rescued and I’m standing in our apartment and I want my mate to take me to bed. Is that a problem?”

“No.” His hands find my waist. His forehead drops against mine. “No, that’s not a problem.”

We walk to the bedroom. I push Roman’s jacket off his shoulders and it falls to the floor, then push his sweatpants down. He’s naked again, the way he was in the warehouse, except the bullet wound is already a memory and the violence has drained out of his eyes. The wolf isn’t hunting now.

He’s waiting. Waiting for me to tell him what I want.

I undress. Slowly. My jeans. My bra. My panties. I stand in front of him and let him look at me, the silver scar visible on my neck, the marks on my wrists from the zip ties, the body he knows as well as his own.

“Lie down,” I tell him.

He lies down on the bed. On his back, arms at his sides, eyes gold and fixed on mine. I’ve never seen him like this. Passive. Yielding. The alpha, the predator, the man who commands rooms and kills with his hands, lying still because I told him to.

I climb on top of him. I straddle his hips and feel him hard beneath me and I take my time, rolling my hips slowly, dragging myself along the length of him without letting him inside. He groans. His hands come up to grip my thighs and I catch his wrists and pin them against the mattress.

“Not yet,” I say. “My terms.”

His eyes flare gold. His jaw clenches. Every muscle in his body goes taut with the effort of not moving, not taking, not flipping me onto my back and doing what the wolf demands. He’s fighting his own nature because I asked him to, and the cost of that fight is visible in every straining tendon and every controlled breath.

I lean down and kiss his chest. His sternum. The place where his heart beats, where my heart beats alongside it. I kiss the spot where the bullet entered hours ago and find nothing but smooth, hot skin. I kiss lower, my mouth tracing the ridges of his stomach, and lower still, and his hips thrust upward involuntarily when my lips brush the base of his cock.

“Sophia.” His voice is wrecked. “Please.”