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“I never meant for any of this,” I whisper.
His arm tightens around me. “I know.”
There’s no edge to it. No resentment.
I close my eyes again as my head fall back against his shoulder.
And for once, I let myself go. I let myself believe that I’m not a mistake. That I’m not broken.
That I don’t have to earn being held.
And when sleep finally finds me, wrapped in a bond I didn’t ask for but couldn’t survive without, it feels like coming home.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Rhea
The light through the curtains is gold-soft. The kind of light I haven’t woken up to in…years.Maybe ever.
I blink against it, half-expecting a voiceover to whisper something aboutdesireoruntamed instinct.
Instead, I get Lucian. Which, honestly, might be the same thing.
He’s still behind me, warm and massive and inexplicably comfortable for a guy who’s mostly made of jaw tension and trauma. His arm is slung around my waist like it belongs there - likeIbelong there - and for the first time in actual years, my body isn’t fighting itself.
No heat. No ache. No panic. Just… calm.
I try not to overanalyze it. I try not to ruin it.
And then, predictably, he shifts.
He moves like I’m a sleeping bear he doesn’t want to startle. His arm untangles slowly, and he edges toward the side of the bed with the kind of careful silence that screams military extraction instead of just getting up for tea.
I stir anyway, because my omega instincts are nosy and emotionally codependent now, apparently. He pauses, turning halfway, and we do the world’s weirdest half-eye-contact dance.
“I didn’t mean to wake you,” he says.
I blink at him, hair sticking to my face. “You didn’t. I was just... pretending to be a person.”
He doesn’t smirk, exactly. But there’s a ghost of one, and I take it as a win.
He grabs a bundle of clothes off the dresser and walks back over like he’s handing me classified documents instead of a pair of sweatpants and another black T-shirt that is 100% his and 1000% going in my bag the second I get a chance.
“You can wear these,” he says, holding them out.
I accept the offering like it’s sacrament.
“Thanks. Very casual-chic. Murder-your-father-in-court-core.”
That earns a real smile - brief, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it, but it’s there.
He lingers for a second too long. Not like he’s trying to intimidate me. Just… watching. And not in that hypercritical,what-are-you-hidingway he usually does. No, this is different.
Like he’s trying to memorize something about me before I disappear.
“How are you feeling?” he asks, and the question is so normal I almost short-circuit.
“Oh, you mean emotionally or, like, vaginally?”
