Bought By The Beast

CHAPTER 27: Territory

I woke to Caspian's mouth on my neck.

Not gentle and not asking. His teeth dragged across the claiming mark and my whole body arched off the mattress before my brain had time to catch up. Heat flooded through me so fast it felt like being poured into, like my skin was a container and he was filling it with something molten from the inside out.

"What are you doing?" I managed, though the words came out breathless and half-formed.

"Reminding you." His voice was rough against my throat, heavy with sleep and something darker underneath. "Reminding myself."

His hand slid under the shirt I had slept in, palm flat against my stomach, fingers spread wide. He pulled me back against him and I felt how hard he was through the thin fabric between us, and something deep in my chest flared hot enough to steal what was left of my breath.

"Reminding yourself of what?"

"That you're here. That you're mine. That yesterday I sat in a room full of people who want to take you from me and I smiled through every second of it." His teeth found my earlobe and bit down just hard enough to make me gasp. "I'm done smiling."

His hand moved lower, fingers tracing the waistband of my pants, taking their time, and I felt him smile against my neck because he could feel exactly what that teasing was doing to me.

"We should talk about yesterday," I tried, though my voice carried no conviction whatsoever. "The Council, Morgessa's proposal, the marriage..."

"Later." His fingers slipped past the waistband and I stopped talking because he found me already wet, already aching, and the sound he made against my throat was pure satisfaction. "Right now there's no Council. No Morgessa. No politics. Just us."

He touched me slowly, deliberately, with the certainty of a man who had memorized what I liked and intended to use that knowledge ruthlessly. I could feel his desire pressing against mine, his need amplifying my own until the edges blurred between what I wanted and what he wanted and the distinction stopped mattering.

"You're mine," he said against my ear, low and absolute. "Say it."

"You're being dramatic."

His fingers pressed harder and my hips rocked into his hand before I could stop them.

"Say it, Rielle."

"Yours," I breathed. "I'm yours."

"Good girl."

He turned me onto my back and kissed me deep, his tongue sweeping into my mouth with the kind of authority that reminded me exactly who had claimed me. This was not the man who had sat through Council meetings while Draven questioned his judgment. That this was the beast who had bought me at auction and told me my pleasure belonged to him.

I had missed this version of him, and how much I had missed it scared me.

His mouth moved down my throat to the claiming mark and he bit down again, harder, and something inside me cracked open in response. My wolf surged forward with a force that shocked me, not fully but more than she had in weeks. She pressed against the inside of my skin like she was trying to surface, and for one disorienting second my senses sharpened beyond anything I had experienced before.

I could smell everything.

Caspian's arousal like smoke and heated metal. The unfamiliar scent of expensive sheets and polished surfaces. The faint trace of coffee from somewhere downstairs.

And underneath all of it, something cold and sharp that did not belong here.

I went rigid.

Caspian pulled back immediately, reading my body with an accuracy that had nothing to do with our connection and everything to do with the predator he was.

"What's wrong?"

"Do you smell that?"

He went still. His nostrils flared, testing the air with slow precision.

"Lavender," he identified quietly. "And something metallic underneath."

"That's not the room."

"No. It's not."

He was off the bed in one motion, moving to the walls, running his hands along the surfaces with the focused intensity of someone who knew exactly what he was looking for. I watched his face darken as his fingers found something near the window frame.

"What is it?"

"Ward marks." His voice had gone flat and dangerous in a way that made the hair on my arms rise. "Fresh ones. Placed within the last few hours."

"Morgessa."

"She was in this room while we slept." He traced the symbols and I saw something flicker beneath his touch, a faint shimmer of green light that vanished as quickly as it appeared. "She didn't wait for permission. She changed the wards and put her own magic into these walls."

I remembered his words from last night. She doesn't get access to where we sleep.

And she had walked in anyway. While we were unconscious, while we were vulnerable, while we were six feet away with the door locked.

"Can you remove them?"

"Not without knowing what they do. If they're designed to trigger something when tampered with, tearing them out could be worse than leaving them." His fist pressed against the wall and I could see his arm trembling with the effort of not putting it through the surface. "The whole conversation last night was performance. She was never going to ask. She just wanted us to know she could."

My wolf was still pushing against my skin, agitated and restless, and I realized something that made me go very quiet inside.

I could feel the wards.

Not just smell them, I could feel them. A cold pressure against my senses like standing too close to something electric. My wolf could sense the magic embedded in the walls, could feel its shape and its wrongness, and that had never happened before.

I had never been able to sense magic.

I stored that realization carefully and turned my attention back to the immediate problem, because right now Caspian looked like he was about to find Morgessa and do something the court would not forgive.

"Don't," I said.

He turned and his eyes were pure silver, no pupil, no warmth, just flat metallic sheen that meant the beast was barely leashed.

"She was in our room," he said, each word sounding like it was being pulled from somewhere deep and violent. "She stood over our bed and put magic into the walls around us while we slept."

"I know."

"And you want me to do nothing?"

"I want you to be smarter than she expects." I crossed to him and placed my hand against his chest where his heart was slamming hard enough that I could feel it through his skin. "She wants you to react. She wants you to storm into her quarters and make a scene so the Council sees an unstable King who cannot control himself. That is exactly what she's counting on."

He stared down at me, breathing hard, every muscle wound tight.

"She violated our space."

"Yes. And we are going to make her regret it. But not the way she wants us to."

The silver in his eyes receded slowly, the darker gray surfacing beneath it. The beast pulling back by inches, not retreating but choosing to wait.

"Your way then," he said.

"Yes, my way."

"And what is your way?"

I looked at the ward marks glimmering faintly on the wall. At the evidence that Morgessa was already three moves ahead of us.

"We need someone who understands magic and isn't loyal to her," I said. "Someone who can tell us exactly what she put in these walls and how to use it against her."

"That is a very short list in Thorncross."

"Then we start looking today." I held his gaze. "And while we're looking, we let her think she won. Let her think we didn't notice. Let her get comfortable."

Something shifted in his expression, a flicker of dark appreciation.

"You want to trap her."

"I want to understand her. Trapping her comes after."

He studied me for a long moment, and I felt something move between us that was not the bond exactly but lived in the same space. The understanding that I was not just someone he needed to protect but someone who could stand in this war beside him and think clearly while he wanted to tear things apart.

"Tonight," he said quietly.

"Tonight what?"

"What we started this morning." His gaze dropped to the claiming mark on my neck and the hunger in his expression was so raw it made my skin flush. "Before the wards interrupted us. We finish that tonight. And I don't care if Morgessa is listening through every wall in this building."

"Tonight," I agreed.

And the way his eyes darkened told me that whatever happened between now and then, he was going to spend every hour thinking about exactly what he planned to do to me.

I walked toward the bathroom to get dressed and felt the cold trace of Morgessa's magic brush against my senses with every step, faint and sharp and wrong.

My wolf growled inside my chest.

She didn't like Morgessa.

She didn't like Morgessa's magic in our space.

And she was getting stronger.