The air inside the room had grown heavy, thick with the smoke leaking from the hearth and the steam rising from our soaked bodies. In the center of that massive bed, after Varg's lethal whisper of "Mine." the world turned upside down.
Varg flipped me over as easily as if I were a mere object.
When my face was buried into the silk pillows, the contact of my porcelain skin with the cold texture of the sheets made me shiver for a fleeting second; but that tremor was instantly silenced by the massive, scarred, and burning shadow of Varg collapsing over me.
This was not lovemaking.
This was a declaration—the most savage wolf in the world reclaiming his property, a rebellion against his own laws.
Varg pressed his knees into the mattress on either side of my hips, pinning me down with a force that felt like it would crush a pearl into a thousand shimmering shards.
Behind me, he loomed like a colossal mountain. He didn't look at my face; he didn't seek my eyes.
It was as if looking at me would make him lose the last fragment of his ferocity, or force him to admit to himself that he, the Alpha, was surrendering to the one he called a "freak."
He gripped my waist with his rough, calloused hands. His fingertips pressed so hard into my hip bones that I knew, by morning, his fingerprints would remain on my marble-white skin like purple medals of honor.
He pushed my head harder into the pillow, stealing my breath.
"Don't look at me." he growled against my ear. His voice was a muffled, furious echo from the deepest caverns. "Don't turn those freak eyes toward me. Tonight, you will feel nothing but my touch and your own f-cking helplessness."
"Varg..." was all I could moan, my voice muffled by the pillow. "Is this how you... do you only want me as a corpse?"
A low rumble spilled from Varg's throat. He leaned down, gripping my damp hair firmly and pulling my head back to leave my neck utterly defenseless.
"Corpses don't feel, Vespera." he said, pressing his teeth just millimeters away from my carotid artery.
"But you... you are burning with every cell right now. You're burning for me. Do you feel that weight in your bones—the weight those pathetic city Alphas could never give you? No one ever dominated you like this in your fancy world, did they?"
"You're hurting me..." I whispered, a single tear sliding onto the pillow. Strangely, even this pain felt like it was nourishing my soul.
"It should hurt." Varg replied, increasing the pressure.
"It should hurt so that when you try to leave this house, when you try to leave me, you remember this agony."
As Varg bore down on me with that raw, crude strength, I felt my ribcage being crushed like a wave breaking against marble.
I had nowhere to run, and no soul that wished to flee...
Varg grazed the faint purple glow on my back with his teeth. He wasn't biting yet, but by dragging those sharp tips across my skin, he kept me teetering on the edge of a cliff, as if I could be torn apart at any second.
He was thrashing through my narrow corridors. In my heat, in the waterfall flowing between my legs, he was invading the place where he belonged.
His movements weren't fast, but they were meant to hurt. It was heavy and jolting, like a sledgehammer carving into marble, determined enough to displace a piece of my soul with every strike.
With my back turned, he was imprisoning me in his own darkness.
"Tell me!" he commanded, digging his fingers into my collarbones. "Whose are you under right now, Vespera? What's left of your glittering world?"
"Only... only you..." I sobbed, lost in the chaos of the heat and his raw power. "There is only you, Varg."
"Good." he said, his voice trembling for the first time with a mixture of pleasure and savagery. "Then enjoy the darkness. Because when the sun rises, nothing will be left of you but my fingerprints."
He marked me into that bed so firmly that all the wolves of Alberta combined couldn't have pulled me away.
There was only his breath on my neck and his sweat on my back. And he continued to crash against the walls he invaded amidst the cloud-like swelling of my femininity.
This was the harsh nature of wolves; you either adapted and were crushed, or you vanished within the storm.
I chose to be crushed; I chose to shatter into porcelain pieces beneath his weight.
By the end of the night, when the storm finally settled but the room was still thick with our sweat and burning breath, Varg pulled away from me.
The bed looked as though one of Alberta's most brutal battles had just taken place. Breathless, my face still buried in the pillow, I heard him rise. The heavy thud of his bare feet on the stone floor created a deathly silence in the room.
Without looking at me, without showing a single shred of tenderness, he walked toward the window.
His scars shimmered like a heroic epic in the pale glow of the moonlight. While the snowstorm outside hammered against the glass as if to break it, the ruler of Alberta watched the darkness, leaving behind the porcelain doll he had melted in his lap.
I remained in that mangled bed, with a body that bore his fingerprints, every cell screaming his name.
Living as an ordinary human under the city lights was a dream now; Varg was the only and absolute truth—the one I could not escape, the one I didn't even dare to look in the eye.