The air outside the motel tasted like impending violence and sugar.
Dimitri stood on the gravel lot, a statue carved from obsidian and pure, unadulterated possessiveness. Inside that thin-walled room, the rhythmic thrum of his world, Felicity was finally waking from deep sleep.
His jaw was set so tight it threatened to crack. He wasn't a husband. Not yet. But in this twisted, hyper-focused landscape of his mind, the technicality was a mere delay in the inevitable. She is mine, his thoughts hissed, a dark, repetitive mantra. They are the prologue. I am the endgame.
He would wait. He was a master of the long game. If another man so much as breathed her in, Dimitri would erase them from the map he had already cleared.
Felicity woke in layers first the ache, then the heat of bodies pressed around her, then the steady drums of heartbeats that weren't hers. She stretched, arching her back until her joints popped, and her fox ears flattened with satisfaction.
