She didn’t respond with words. Just leaned forward and pressed her forehead to his, her breath warm against his muzzle, her scent washing over him like a benediction.
The bond sang between them. Steady. Warm. Real.
“Come.” He gathered her again, rising in one fluid motion. “The water will help.”
He carried her to the pool’s edge and descended the carved steps until the heated water lapped at his waist. Elsa gasped at the temperature—too hot for human comfort at first—but he held her steady while her body adjusted, watching her face for any sign of real distress.
“It’s like a bath and a hot spring had a very aggressive baby,” she managed, her voice strained.
“The minerals are healing. Your kind used similar waters in your history, before you forgot what the earth could give you.” He settled her against a smoothed stone shelf that jutted from the pool’s edge, positioning her so she could sit with the water just below her shoulders. “Stay.”
“Is that an order?”
“Always.” But there was no edge to it. Not anymore.
He retrieved cleansing oils from a carved alcove—rich amber liquid that smelled of mountain herbs and something faintly sweet, like the Frosted Tears flowers that bloomed in the fortress gardens. His people had used this blend for generations, a ritual cleansing meant to mark important transitions. Births. Deaths. Matings.
He’d never used it on anyone but himself.
Sylas poured a measure into his palm and stepped behind her, where the water was deeper. His paws—capable of crushing bone, of tearing through armor, of ending lives with brutal efficiency—settled against her shoulders with impossible gentleness.
She tensed.
“Easy,” he murmured, his voice dropping to the low register that seemed to calm her when nothing else would. “I have you. Let me do this.”
“Why?” The question came out breathless, confused. “You have servants. Attendants. You’re the Alpha King—you shouldn’t be...”
“Shouldn’t be what?” He worked the oil into her skin, tracing the line of her shoulders, the curve of her neck, the delicate architecture of her spine. Methodical. Reverent. Like he was undoing every rough-handled moment she’d survived since the crash—erasing the memory of chains and pit darkness andenemies’ hands with the steady pressure of his own. “Caring for what’s mine?”
“Washing me yourself.” Her voice cracked slightly. “Like I’m...like I’m something precious.”
His hands stilled.
The word settled into the steam-thick air between them, heavy with implications neither of them seemed ready to name. Precious. Not valuable—that was politics, calculation, the weight of Moon Tear cores and Lux blessings and political leverage. Precious was something else entirely.
Precious was personal.
“You are,” he said, and the truth of it resonated through the bond with a weight that made her breath catch. “I don’t know when it happened. I don’t know how to stop it. But somewhere between the snow and the throne room and watching you reach into a corrupted core like you didn’t care if it killed you—” His claws traced down her arms, careful not to scratch, the oil making her skin gleam in the blue Lux light. “You became the most important thing in my world.”
She turned in the water, facing him.
Her eyes were wet—not from the steam. The bond trembled between them with something he couldn’t quite name, something that felt terrifyingly close to the word he’d been avoiding since this madness began.
“Sylas.” His name in her mouth, soft and unguarded. “I don’t know what to do with that.”
“You don’t have to do anything.” He cupped her face in his hands, thumbs brushing across her cheekbones, claws carefully angled away from fragile human skin. “Just let me care for you. Tonight, that’s all I ask. Let me prove that my hands can do more than kill.”
She searched his eyes—looking for the manipulation, the calculation, the careful political maneuvering that had definedevery interaction between them since the beginning. He let her look. Let her see whatever she needed to see.
Whatever she found made her exhale, long and slow, and lean into his touch.
“Okay,” she whispered. “Okay.”
He washed her like she was sacred.
No rush. No urgency. The feral edge that had driven him through the tunnels retreated further with every stroke of oil-slicked paws over human skin. He mapped her with his palms the way he mapped territory—learning the topography of her, the places where tension gathered and the places where his touch made her relax.
Her shoulders loosened when he worked the muscles there, kneading away knots that three days of stress had carved into her flesh. Her breathing deepened when he traced the line of her spine, each vertebra a small triumph of gentleness over violence. Her head fell back when he cradled her skull and worked cleansing oil through her hair, his claws careful against her scalp, turning the action into something that straddled the line between care and worship.