My stomach clenched. My center ached. My mind emptied of everything but the hollowing desire to be filled. I wouldn’t say it. I refused to.

I didn’t need to.

“Have I kept you waiting?” Scythe purred and returned his touch between my legs. The merest skim of his finger over me evoked a moan. My stomach tightened, the wood of the bed protesting beneath my squeezing fingers. “Drenched.” Lips pressed into my shoulder, then cold air washed in as I felt him sit back to study me. “Need me, don’t you?”

When I didn’t answer, he grunted, “Say it, Aster.”

“I need you,” I growled.

A chuckle unlike any I’d heard from him made my heart seize and my spine lock. His weight left the bed, and when I turned with my mouth agape, I found him buckling his pants and on the cusp of disappearing. “Remember that next time you think to try to forget me.”

“I never forgot you. Not for a moment.” I lowered to the bed, both cold and unbearably hot. “Where are you going?” He couldn’t mean to leave me. Not like this—tied to his bed naked and aching with need. “Don’t leave me.”

The wolf tensed with his back to me. “I’ve got shit to tend to.” The shadows stole him, and left me with his chilling threat, “Run from me again, mate. I fucking dare you.”

The heat of his gaze pulled me from the waking tendrils of sleep.

The drapes were closed, the sun gliding through the sliver between to dance with the dust motes over the bedding.

In the armchair by the window, Scythe reclined with an ankle over his knee. His large booted foot bounced slowly. Fingers at his chin and lips, he stared. I stared back, my chest tightening at the sight of him.

This wasn’t a dream. It was real. It had all been real. I was here.

With my mate.

The tension within me eased the longer I studied him. The longer I marveled at his heavy gaze, the bright emerald of his eye, and the stillness of his fierce features. Every part of me relaxed more with each breath as I let myself believe, however fleetingly, that I was right where I needed to be.

His forefinger brushed his upper lip, and he murmured with brutal softness, “Drunk bumblebee.”

Sheepish, I smiled and curled into the bedding.

He bit his thumb, his focus moving to my mouth. “He knows you’re here?”

I swallowed, not wanting to think about it, and clutched the pillow beneath my head. “I think so.”

A moment passed, carrying with it the desire to ask him to join me, when he stated more than asked, “So he knows about me.”

I licked my lips. “He knows enough.”

Scythe stared again. Tension returned to my limbs when he concluded, “And he didn’t just let you leave, did he?”