Finally Found it 60

POV: Isla

The door closed with a quiet finality and the fire was the only sound left in the room.

Draven had not moved toward me yet. He stood where he had stopped, amber eyes taking me in with the attention he used when he had decided how this was going to go and was waiting for me to catch up.

The silver dress caught the firelight. My hair was loose. I had done nothing to manage either of these things and I was not pretending I had.

“You’ve proven yourself to them.” His voice was low and rough, each word deliberate. “But tonight, you’ll prove yourself to me.”

“I thought I already had.” The words came out level. Not quite a challenge. Close.

He crossed the room slowly, every step measured, the unhurried approach of a man who knows the distance is not the point.

When he reached me, his hand lifted and brushed a strand of hair from my cheek, his thumb grazing my jaw as he tilted my chin upward. The touch was precise. Intentional. The kind of contact that held a decision behind it.

“You have.” He held my chin upward. “But I want more. Tonight, you’ll prove what I’ve always known. You’re mine.”

My breath hitched at the raw hunger in his tone. I was aware of the heat of him, the specific gravity of his attention, the way he used it the way other men used force. I was also not ready to give him the easy surrender.

“Am I?” My voice came out light, deliberate, making him work for the answer. “Do you want me to remind you?” His voice dropped on the last word.

His lips found mine before I had finished forming the answer, demanding and firm.

I melted into it, which had always been the specific problem with Draven — that my body responded to him with the complete disregard for strategy that he had no equivalent of.

My hands slid up to his shoulders and his grip tightened on my waist, keeping me exactly where he wanted me, which was where I wanted to be.

He broke the kiss abruptly and stepped back, and the deliberateness of that was as much a statement as everything that had preceded it.

His gaze moved over me with the specific combination of possessiveness and barely restrained desire that made thinking difficult. The fire crackled. I held his gaze.

“On your knees,” he commanded, the tone leaving no room for anything except the decision of whether to comply.

The heat that moved through me at the authority in his voice was not obedience. It was want, the specific deliberate want of a woman who has chosen this and knows the difference.

I held the hesitation for exactly one fraction of a second, then sank to the floor, my hair falling over my shoulders, the firelight catching my eyes as I looked up at him.

“Eyes on me.” The rough edge of his voice sent a shiver through me that started at my spine and did not stop.

I let my lips part. I held his gaze with the steadiness I brought to everything I chose. “Yes, Alpha.” Barely audible. Carrying, underneath the compliance, the faint note of defiance I could not have removed from my voice if I had tried.

“You’re dangerous when you’re like this.” His lips moved, not quite a smile, not quite not one.

“Then maybe you should be careful.” I moved with the confidence of a woman who has earned the right to take what she wants, deliberate and certain, my hands finding him, taking him into my mouth.

His sharp inhale cut through the silence. His jaw tightened. His head tipped back, the rough exhale breaking the quiet with a low, feral sound that I felt in the base of my spine.

“Isla.” My name slipped past his lips as warning and prayer together. His grip in my hair shifted as I pulled another groan from him, raw and unguarded, the sound of a man who is no longer entirely in control of what he is producing.

I glanced up at him and met his eyes. “I think you like this.” I held his gaze and let the words land.

“You’ll pay for that,” he growled, strained but laced with amusement, and then he pulled me back to my feet with a rough tenderness that left me breathless.

His hands moved over me, sliding the straps of my dress down, the fabric pooling at my feet. His lips followed the path of his hands, tracing my skin as though committing it to memory.

I stood in the firelight and let him, because letting Draven do this was different from needing him to do it, and I knew the difference.

“You’re too damn good at that.” He muttered it against my neck, and I felt the words as much as heard them.

“Maybe you just bring it out of me.” His answering growl sent a shiver through me as he guided me onto the bed, his body pressing against mine with deliberate weight. I arched into him.

My breath came faster as his lips found my collarbone, then lower, and the fire burned and the room contracted to the specific dimensions of his hands and his mouth and the weight of him against me.

“You’re mine,” he murmured against my skin, low and firm. “And I’ll remind you of that every night if I have to.”

I found his eyes in the firelight and held them. “I’m yours,” I whispered, and I meant it in the way that was also mine, that was also my choice, that no chain or door or sister had been able to take from me.

I was enough. I did not need rescuing. I was here because I had chosen to be here, and the choosing made everything that followed mine.

I did not need anyone. I wanted him, and the distinction was the thing I had spent a year learning and had finally earned the right to hold.

We moved together and the world outside the room did not exist. The bond between us ran clean and total, deeper than the pack bond, deeper than the ceremony, rooted in every fight and every near-miss and every night I had spent at the end of the chain knowing he was looking for me.

Later, the fire burned low and the night had deepened. We lay tangled together, our breaths steadying.

Draven rested his hand over my stomach, his amber eyes softer than I had seen them outside of this room. He looked at me the way he always looked at me when the performance of being Alpha was not required.

“And now.” His voice was quieter than everything that had come before it. “We’ll create something that’s ours.” I kept his gaze and held the words in my chest the way I had learned to hold the things that mattered: with both hands, without flinching from the weight of them.