Chapter 2 — Found You (2)

He took my hand off his chest — gently, which was somehow worse — and turned it over. My palm. The lines of my lifeline. His thumb dragged across the center of my palm, and something in me thrummed, a wire pulled taut from my palm to my sternum to a place I didn’t have a name for.

“Rule one,” he said. “You can calm every beast in this world. You cannot command them. That’s a trick of touch, and it works — but it’s shallow. It’s a Band-Aid on an ocean.”

“Great pep talk.”

“Rule two.” His thumb pressed harder. The thrum became a pull, and I felt his rage — the whole burning ocean of it — touch mine, taste it, and I gasped. “You and I are not a Band-Aid. We are a blood contract. Older than your city, older than your bloodline, older than the moon I answer to.”

“We’ve known each other for four hours.”

“I’ve known you for a thousand years.”

The room went quiet. My heart was going to come out of my chest, and I hated him for it — hated the way his voice did things to my spine, hated the way my body recognized him, hated that my stupid hand was still pressed against his and neither of us was letting go.

“Let me guess,” I said, and my voice shook, and I hated that too. “Rule three is ‘you belong to me now’.”

He smiled. It was the first real smile I’d seen on him, and it was wrong — beautiful and terrible, like watching a sunrise that burned the sky.

“No,” he said. “Rule three is the one you don’t want to hear.” He leaned down — close, so close I could count the silver threads in his eyes — and his breath landed on my mouth like a promise. “You can calm my rage. You can bind my blood. You can make a thousand-year-old monster kneel in the street. But you cannot make me do anything, Lila. I am the one beast in this world that your power will never, ever command.”

My mouth went dry.

“And the inverse,” he said, “is that I am the one beast in this world that can’t stay away from you. So here we are. Me, a monster with a thousand years of blood on his hands. You, a girl who can’t stop feeling everything. And a bond neither of us gets to choose.”

The door — the ajar door — slammed itself shut.

I didn’t jump. I was too busy trying to remember how to breathe, and whether the heat crawling up my spine was anger or something considerably more stupid.

“You can’t keep me here,” I said.

“I can’t force you to stay,” he agreed. “That’s the infuriating part of you. The bond only works if you want — if your blood wants. And yours wants. You felt it the second you touched me in the street; you’re feeling it now, standing there telling yourself it’s fear.”

“It is fear.”

“Fear,” he said, and his voice dropped into something darker, silkier, “doesn’t make a woman’s pulse sing.”

I slapped him.

It was a good slap. It rang out in the penthouse like a gunshot. His head turned with it, slowly, and I stood there breathing hard, my palm stinging, absolutely certain I had just ended my own life.

He turned back. And the smile was still there.

“Good,” he said. “I was hoping you had teeth.”

“I have teeth,” I said. “I have an entire dental plan. I also have pepper spray, a phone with your face on a missing-persons report, and the ability to make every beast in this city take your side against you if I feel like it — which I will, the second you try to lock me in a tower like some fairy-tale princess with a budget.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“Try me.”

We stood there, two feet apart, and the air between us was so thick I could have written my name in it. His power pulled at my blood like a tide. My power pushed at his like a hand on a door. And neither of us was giving an inch, and I realized — with a clarity that should have scared me more — that I hadn’t felt this alive since I was six years old, calming a werehound in my yard and understanding, for the first time, that I was something.

Something happened in his eyes.

The black receded. The silver came back. And the monster — the ancient, burning, murderous thing that had been about to erase the Hollow — looked at me like I was the first thing he’d seen in a thousand years that wasn’t a target.

“There’s a feast tonight,” he said. “Every clan lord in Umbra City will be there. They heard what happened in the Hollow. They heard there’s a Handler who can make the Wolf King kneel.” His mouth curved. “They’re going to want to meet you.”

“And if I don’t go?”

“Then they’ll come here,” he said, “and I’ll have to explain why a human girl is sleeping in my tower, and the city will go to war over you before dessert. I’m told that’s bad for the catering.”