“I will always come for you.” The words scraped out of him, raw and absolute. “Whatever it costs. Whoever stands in my way. Do you understand that now?”
She pulled back enough to meet his eyes. Hers were shadowed, bruised beneath with exhaustion, but clear. So terrifyingly clear.
“Yes,” she said. “I think I’m starting to.”
Something cracked in his chest. Not breaking—shifting. The obsession that had driven him since the moment he’d caught her scent in the snow, the hunger to own her light and make it his—it didn’t disappear. But it changed. Deepened. Became less about possession and more about...preservation.
Keep her whole. Keep her safe. Keep her.
The mantra settled into his bones like bedrock.
“Come.” He shifted her in his arms, adjusting his grip so he could carry her deeper into his chambers. “You need to be cleaned. Properly.”
“I can walk—”
“I know.” He didn’t set her down. “You won’t.”
She should have argued. The Elsa he’d claimed in his throne room would have bristled at the command, fought his grip, demanded to be treated as something other than cargo. But this Elsa—the one who had survived three days in enemy hands, who had fought back her captors with nothing but a chain and her own fury, who had bargained for his return like she actually wanted him to come back—
This Elsa let her head fall back against his shoulder and closed her eyes.
“Okay,” she breathed. “Okay.”
The bathing chamber lay beyond the main living space, through a passage carved from the same black volcanic stone that formed the fortress’s bones. Lux Tear veins threaded through the walls here, casting the space in soft blue light that shifted and rippled like water. The air was warm—heated by natural springs that ran beneath the mountain, the same geothermal energy that had drawn his ancestors to build here generations ago.
Steam curled up from the pool’s surface, and the scent of mineral-rich water filled the chamber. No audience. No politics. No calculating eyes measuring his every weakness.
Just the two of them, finally alone in the place where he could stop being Alpha King and simply be...this. Whatever this was becoming.
Sylas set Elsa on the stone bench that curved along one wall, steadying her when she swayed. Her clothes were ruined—torn and bloodstained, smelling of the pit’s darkness and chemicals and fear. He wanted to burn them. Wanted to erase every trace of those three days from her skin, her memory, her nervous system.
Instead, he knelt.
The Alpha King of the Yzefrxyl, on his knees before a human female. If the court could see him now, they would call it proof of everything Vask had accused him of. Weakness. Obsession. Unfitness to rule.
They would be wrong.
This wasn’t weakness. This was the most dangerous thing he’d ever done—choosing her over everything else, knowing the cost, and deciding she was worth it anyway.
His claws made short work of her boots, then the remnants of her outer clothing. He moved with methodical precision, like he was dismantling a complex mechanism rather than undressing a woman. Every piece of ruined fabric went into a pile that he would personally see destroyed. Every inch of revealed skin was catalogued, assessed, checked for injuries that Yarx’s brief examination might have missed.
Bruises darkened her ribs where she’d been handled roughly. Rope burns circled her wrists, raw and angry. A fading mark on her cheek where Vask’s staff had connected.
The feral thing inside him snarled at each one. Every wound a failure. Every mark a reminder that he hadn’t protected her well enough, hadn’t anticipated the threat, hadn’t torn Vask apart before the priest could lay a single finger on what was his.
“Sylas.” Her voice pulled him back from the edge. “You’re growling.”
He hadn’t realized. The sound cut off abruptly, leaving only the soft lap of water against stone and the steady rhythm of their breathing.
“The bruises will heal,” she said, her hand finding his muzzle, tracing the line of his jaw with fingers that should have trembled but didn’t. “The medgun helped. I’m not as fragile as I look.”
“You’re exactly as fragile as you look.” He caught her wrist, gentle despite the anger still simmering in his veins. “Human. Soft. Breakable in a thousand ways my kind is not.” His thumb traced the rope burn circling her skin, and his voice dropped to something rough and raw. “That’s why they thought they could use you against me. Because hurting you would be easy.”
“Was it?” She met his gaze, and he saw something flicker there—not defiance, not fear, but something closer to understanding. “Easy?”
He thought about the chemical dampening that had severed their bond. The three days of hollow silence where her presence should have hummed. The way his control had frayed, hour by hour, until he’d been ready to tear his fortress apart stone by stone to find her.
“No,” he admitted. “Hurting you nearly destroyed me.”