“Not until I remove it.” His paw slid from her hip to her stomach, pressing flat. Holding her against him. “You’ll wear itin public. In private. In my nest, where you’ll stay until I decide otherwise.”
“And if I refuse?”
The question was almost academic. They both knew she wouldn’t. Couldn’t. But he answered anyway.
“Then I collar you anyway, and you learn what happens when pets disobey their masters.”
Her breath caught. Not fear. Something else.
“You won’t refuse,” he added, quieter now. “You’re too smart for that. Too practical. You’ll wear it because it keeps you alive, and you’ll hate me for making you, and you’ll plot escape routes that don’t exist while I lick the taste of rebellion off your skin.”
“You think you know me.”
“I know you survive.” His tongue found her throat again—the pulse point, the vulnerable hollow. “Whatever it takes. Whatever it costs. You bend so you don’t break, and you hate yourself for bending, but you do it anyway.”
She was silent. He’d hit something true, and they both knew it.
“Sleep.” The command came out softer than before. “Tomorrow will be difficult. You’ll need strength to endure it.”
“I’m not tired.”
“Then lie still while I—” He didn’t finish. Didn’t need to. His tongue was already tracing patterns across her skin, mapping territory, claiming what the collar would make undeniable.
She didn’t fight him. Didn’t encourage him either. Just lay there, small and warm andhis, while the Alpha King of the Yzefrxyl used her body to keep the madness at bay.
The Moon Tear energy hummed through his veins—present but manageable. A background noise instead of a screaming demand. All because of the human in his arms.
Pathetic, he thought again.
But he didn’t stop.
Hours later, when sleep finally claimed him, his muzzle was still pressed to her throat, his tongue resting against her pulse, his beast purring with a satisfaction that had nothing to do with logic and everything to do with need.
He dreamed of Frosted Tears blooming across frozen fields.
And beneath him, Elsa lay pressed against his chest in the darkness, the taste of a monster’s obsession still drying on her skin.
16
Elsa
The collar was lighter than she’d expected.
Elsa’s fingers brushed the silver circlet around her throat as they descended the fortress’s central staircase, the metal cool against her pulse. Thin as a promise. Delicate as a threat. It caught the blue light from the wall crystals and threw it back in fractured gleams that probably looked beautiful from a distance.
Up close, it felt like a brand.
Sylas walked beside her—not ahead, not behind, butbeside, his bulk taking up most of the carved stone corridor. His paw rested at the small of her back, claws pressing lightly through the formal gown they’d dressed her in. Gray silk this time, the color of storm clouds, fitted tight through the bodice before flowing into layers that whispered against her ankles with every step.
She looked like something out of a fever dream. A human woman wrapped in alien finery, collared and claimed, walking toward a court full of creatures who wanted her studied or dead or worse.
Breathe. You’ve survived worse than a party.
Had she, though? The crash felt distant now—a memory of fire and fear that belonged to someone else. This slow dissolution of selfhood, this careful erosion of everything she’d been before Sylas decided she washis...that felt more dangerous than any impact.
“You’re quiet.” His voice rumbled low, pitched for her ears alone.
“I’m thinking.”