Claimed By Silver

Chapter Four: Marked

Freya’s POV

I take the new route home, the one Sterling told me to take, and I hate that some part of me is following instructions from a man who won't even tell me what he is.

The new way is longer by two blocks and darker by half a dozen streetlights, cutting behind the old textile building where the city keeps promising renovation money it never spends. I almost turn back twice. Almost. Some stubborn, tired part of me keeps walking instead, because I'm done rearranging my whole life around a threat I can't even name.

I hear them before I see them. Three voices, low and loose with drink, spilling out from the mouth of the alley I have to pass to get home. I slow my pace, calculate distance, do the math I've done a hundred times before — cross the street now, add four minutes, avoid whatever this is.

I don't move fast enough.

"Hey. Hey, slow down." One of them steps into my path, close enough that I can smell the liquor coming off him in waves. Two more fall in behind me, boxing me against the alley wall before I fully understand what's happening, before my brain catches up to the fact that this is real and not some worst-case scenario I've rehearsed in my head on lonely walks home.

"I don't want any trouble," I say, keys already between my knuckles, heart slamming so hard I can feel it hit my ribs.

"Nobody wants trouble, sweetheart." A hand closes around my wrist, too tight, pulling me off balance, and every self-defence class I've ever half-listened to evaporates out of my head at once, replaced by pure animal panic. "Just want to talk."

I don't get the chance to fight. I don't get the chance to scream properly, either, because the sound barely makes it past my teeth before something happens that I can't fully track — a blur of movement, a sound like a fist meeting bone except wrong, too fast, too hard, and then the man holding my wrist is simply gone, thrown sideways into a dumpster with a crash that should have killed him and somehow doesn't.

I press myself against the wall, and I watch Sterling take the other two apart.

It isn't a fight. Fights have some rhythm to them, some exchange, give and take. This is something else — something closer to what happens when a large animal decides a smaller one isn't worth the effort of mercy. One man goes down and doesn't get up. The other tries to run and doesn't make it three steps before Sterling is simply there in front of him, silver eyes catching the one working streetlight, and whatever he says to that man — too low for me to hear — empties the fight out of him completely.

Then it's just Sterling, breathing hard, knuckles split and already healing in a way I don't let myself look at too closely, and me, shaking against a brick wall in an alley that smells like garbage and adrenaline.

"Freya." His voice cracks on my name, the first crack I've ever heard in it.

"I'm okay." I'm not sure that's true. My legs don't feel like they belong to me.

He crosses the distance between us before I finish the sentence, and then his hands are on me — really on me, for the first time, palms against my face, tilting my head like he's checking for damage he can't quite believe isn't there. His skin is too warm, feverish almost, and where he touches me something happens that has no business happening in an alley full of unconscious men. A spark. Something electric and low, curling under my skin like static finding ground.

He feels it too. I watch it hit him, watch his whole body go rigid, silver eyes going wide and then dark, pupils swallowing the colour whole.

"You're hurt," he says, though I'm not, not really, just bruised at the wrist and shaking everywhere else.

"I'm fine, Sterling, I just need—"

I don't finish. He picks me up like I weigh nothing at all, one arm under my knees and one across my back, and every rational part of me knows I should fight this, should demand to be put down, should not feel as safe as I suddenly, treacherously do, folded against a chest that doesn't feel like it belongs to anything human.

"I've got you," he says, and it isn't a question.

I don't remember most of the walk home. I remember his heartbeat against my ear, too slow for how hard he'd just been fighting. I remember the smell of rain and something darker underneath it. I remember thinking, somewhere in the fog of adrenaline crashing out of my system, that I should be more afraid of him than I am of what almost happened in that alley, and that the fact that I'm not is its own kind of danger.

He doesn't put me down until we're inside my apartment, door locked, and even then his hands linger on me longer than they need to — checking my wrists, my shoulders, the side of my face, like he's cataloguing every place those men touched me so he can remember it later. His jaw is tight. Something is working behind his eyes that I don't have a name for yet.

"You're shaking," he says.

"I just got attacked, Sterling. I think I'm allowed to shake."

"You should sit."

"I don't need to sit, I need you to tell me what the hell is happening to me, what you are, why—"

"Freya." My name again, quieter this time, and something in his voice stops me cold. He's looking at me the way he looked at those men in the alley right before he took them apart — focused, absolute, like the rest of the world has stopped existing outside the shape of me. "Take off your jacket."

"Excuse me?"

"Your shoulder. I need to see it." His hand is already at my collar, and I should stop him, should tell him this is insane, except my body isn't listening to the part of my brain still trying to object. He eases the jacket down, exposing the curve of my shoulder, and his fingers trace over skin that's unmarked, untouched, nothing wrong with it at all.

"There's nothing there," I say. "Sterling, there's nothing wrong with my shoulder—"

"There will be."

I don't understand what he means until I see the knife.

I don't know where it comes from — some sheath at his hip I never noticed, materialized between one second and the next — and by the time my brain catches up to what's happening his hand has already closed around my arm, firm and immovable, and the fear that floods through me is entirely different from the fear in that alley. That fear was about strangers. This is about him, about the way his silver eyes have gone distant and certain, like a man executing a decision he made a long time ago and simply never told me about.

"Sterling, what are you doing—"

"Hold still."

"No — Sterling, wait, wait—"

The pain is immediate and blinding, a hot line drawn into the curve of my shoulder, and I scream before I can stop myself, some animal sound I don't recognize as my own voice. He doesn't stop. His grip on my arm doesn't loosen, doesn't shake, precise even as I fight against him, even as tears blur everything into smeared light and shadow.

"I know," he says, low, almost gentle in a way that makes it worse, not better. "I know. Almost done."

"What are you doing to me—"

"Making sure every man who ever looks at you again knows exactly what he's looking at." He says it like an explanation. Like comfort. Like something he genuinely believes I'll thank him for eventually, once the shock wears off and I understand the gift he thinks he's giving me.

When he finally lets go, I stumble back against my kitchen counter, hand flying to my shoulder, blood warm and unfamiliar under my fingers. I don't look. I can't make myself look yet, not at whatever he's carved into my skin, not while my whole body is still shaking from the violation of it.

"You had no right," I say, and my voice comes out wrecked, smaller than I want it to be. "You had no right, Sterling—"

"I know." For the first time since I've known him, something that might actually be regret moves through his expression — there and then gone, buried the way everything about him gets buried, under stillness and control. "I couldn't mark you the way I needed to. This was the only way I had left."

"Mark me. Like I'm — like I'm yours to mark at all—"

"You are." He says with no hesitation. No apology. Just the same terrible certainty he's had since the night on my doorstep, like nothing that just happened requires him to reconsider a single thing about how he sees me. "You've been mine since before either of us had a choice in it. I'm sorry it happened like this. I'm not sorry it happened."

He's gone before I can find a response ugly enough to match what just happened to me, the window swinging shut behind him like he was never there at all.

I stand alone in my kitchen for a long time afterward, blood drying against my collarbone, and finally make myself look in the mirror above the sink.

The letter carved into my shoulder is small, precise, already scarring over faster than any wound should. An S, clean-edged, undeniable.

I don't cry. I think I'm too far past crying for something this large. I clean the wound with shaking hands, wrap it the best I can, and sit on my bathroom floor until the sun starts to come up, turning one word over and over until it stops sounding like a question and starts sounding like the only true thing I have left.

Mine.

I don't know yet whether I'm going to survive being that.