That finished it.
A sound tore from him. Low. Fractured. Something between a growl and a groan that reverberated off the chamber’s ancient stone walls and came back to him altered, as if the mountain itself had swallowed the noise and given it weight. His muzzle was still at her throat, fangs pressed against the hammering point of her pulse, and every predatory instinct he possessed screamed to bite down. To mark. To claim what the Blood Moon had promised him and the bond had been building toward sincethe moment her scent had first hit him in his throne room that night she’d crashed in their sacred land.
He didn’t.
Not yet.
First, you worship what you’re about to claim.
The old words surfaced from somewhere deep—his mother’s voice, maybe, or the ceremonial texts he’d memorized as a young prince and tried to forget after he’d buried her. The claiming rites weren’t just about the beast taking its mate. They were about the king proving he was more than teeth and hunger. That the female beneath him deserved reverence before she received his mark.
Sylas lifted his head.
The claiming chamber glowed around them—crimson light fractured through the crystalline windows, painting the ancient stone in shades of blood and fire. Volcanic heat radiated from the vents cut into the floor, turning the air thick and mineral-warm against skin still carrying the cold of the chase. Lux Tear veins pulsed in the walls, slow and rhythmic, and in the strange confluence of red moonlight and teal crystal-glow, Elsa’s skin looked like something carved from alabaster and set aflame.
She stared up at him. Chest heaving. Snow melting in her hair, the silver chains catching light in fractured sparks. Her lips were parted, breath coming fast, and through the bond he could feel the wild tangle of what lived inside her—fear and want and the same stubborn refusal to look away that had made him want her from the very first day.
His hands shook.
Sylas had killed his father with these hands. Had torn through Fallen and traitors and every threat his kingdom had thrown at him for four decades. They had never shaken. Not once.
They shook now.
He started with the boots.
One claw hooked beneath the lacing at her calf and drew downward in a single careful stroke, parting leather and cord without touching skin. The boot loosened. He eased it off, then the other, setting them aside on the warm stone with a precision that felt absurd given the beast snarling behind his ribs. Her feet were small and pink from the cold, and he cupped one in his palm—his paw large enough to engulf it entirely—and pressed his thumb along the arch until she made a sound that wasn’t quite a gasp.
The winter layers came next. He unfastened the clasps at her throat with claws that could gut a Fallen at fifty paces, working each tiny hook with the delicate focus of a male who understood exactly what these hands were capable of and refused to let that be what she remembered. The white outer coat parted. Beneath it, the fitted undershirt clung to her skin, damp with sweat and snowmelt, and he peeled it up and over her head with a care that made his muscles burn from restraint.
The silver chains tangled. He worked them free from her hair one at a time, claws sliding through the golden strands, and the intimacy of it—the smallness of the chains against his rough fingers, the way she tilted her head to give him access—hit harder than the Blood Moon’s pull.
The crimson cape came last.
He unclasped it from her shoulders and paused. The fabric pooled in his hands, heavy with snowmelt and the scent of the hunt—tree resin, frozen earth, adrenaline,her. He brought it to his muzzle without thinking, dragging in a breath so deep his chest expanded against her body, and the beast rumbled with a satisfaction that vibrated through them both.
Then he spread it beneath her.
Lifted her with one arm—effortless, though the gentleness of the motion cost him more than any battle—and laid the crimsoncape across the warm stone, smoothing it flat. When he settled her back down, she lay across the color of the hunt like an offering on an altar he’d built with his own paws.
Elsa watched him with eyes that missed nothing. The navigator’s gaze. Reading him the way she read star charts—with precision, with calculation, with the quiet certainty of someone who understood trajectories and knew exactly where this one ended.
“You’re still shaking.” Her voice came out rough. Chase-wrecked.
“Yes.”
“Are you afraid you’ll hurt me?”
The honesty that left him was brutal. “Terrified.”
Something shifted in her expression. Not pity—she’d never offered him that, and he’d have hated her for it if she had. Something closer to recognition. One predator acknowledging another’s restraint.
She reached up and laid her palm flat against his muzzle.
The touch detonated through the bond like a shockwave. Sylas’s vision whited at the edges, his claws gouging furrows into the stone on either side of her body—not her, never her, he’d claw through the mountain’s bedrock before he marked her skin with anything other than intent. The beast roared inside him, a soundless concussion ofneed-want-now, and only her hand on his face kept him anchored.
Small hand. Warm hand. Hers.
“Then be terrified,” she said. “And do it anyway.”