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Some equations you leave open on the page until they’re ready to be closed in person.

“But you came,” I say slowly, “and fucked her instead. Wild.”

“In the grand scheme of it,” he admits, “that part really wasn’t planned.”

“That’s how life is, isn’t it. Full of surprises.”

“Essentially.”

I let the confession settle, turning it over the way I turn over everything—for edges, for leverage, for the lie that usually hidesin the seams of a too-clean truth. There isn’t one. He hands me the knife of it freely, my own assassin, narrating the contract on my life with the same low calm he’d use to discuss the weather, and the absence of any angle is itself the most disarming thing he could have done.

“Did you mark me,” I ask. It’s not idle. The night is a blur of heat and knot and blackout; I genuinely don’t know.

“No.”

“Did you want to?”

“Yes.” No hesitation. No softening. Just the bare true thing, laid down between us in the cooling water.

I tilt my head against his shoulder, considering him. “For a killer,” I muse, “you’re one who actually enjoys consent. That’s odd. Most of your profession finds it an inconvenience.”

He’s quiet for a beat, and when he answers his voice has dropped into something older and rawer, a register I haven’t heard from him before.

“I was conceived out of rape,” he says. “So it only makes sense, to me, to ask. To make sure the future’s yours to be in charge of. Marking you while you’re blissed out and blacked out—that’s not a claim. That’s a theft. I’d be stealing a forever from you for a few seconds of feeling good, and I’ve spent my whole life being the consequence of a man who took what wasn’t offered. I won’t be that. Not with you. Not with anyone.”

I sit with that admission far longer than the conversation strictly requires.

Because it costs him something to say it, and I have spent my entire life around men who paid for nothing—who took the stage, the pole, the deed, the body, and called the taking love.

This one carries the weight of his own origin like a stone in his chest and has decided, against every brutal thing the world made him, that he will not pass the weight along. It rearranges him in my estimation. It rearranges, dangerously, a great deal.

“I can’t like you,” I say, which is the most honest thing I’ve managed all morning and also a complete lie.

“You’re using the wrong words,” he notes, mild as anything.

I huff and refuse to dignify it. He chuckles, the bastard, the sound rich with the certainty of a man holding a winning hand.

“You already like me,” he says. “Next predicament.”

So I give him the next one, because apparently this is a game now, and I have never in my life been able to resist a game.

“I can’t have a pack.”

“And why not?”

I open my mouth to tell him exactly why not—and find, to my genuine irritation, that I have no answer. The reasons are all there, surely, an entire architecture of them I’ve built over years, and yet when I reach for a single load-bearing beam, my hand closes on air.

Because a pack is a leash.

Three more people to disappoint or bury.

The last time I belonged to anyone he turned the belonging into a cage with my name engraved on the bars. None of it will come out of my mouth, because none of it, sitting in this warm water with his heart drumming steady at my back, feels true enough to say aloud.

“Next,” he concludes, far too pleased.

“You wouldn’t love me,” I say, and that one comes out smaller than I intend, the armor slipping for half a syllable.

“And what,” he says, dipping his head so the words land warm against my ear, “is there not to love, Pretty Darling?”