Claimed By Silver

Chapter Nine: Nothing Will Take Her From Me

Sterling’s POV

I'm not going anywhere.

The words follow me the whole way home, looping without mercy, and I've fought wars that left less of a mark on me than four syllables spoken by a woman who has every reason to want me dead.

I sit on the roof of my own building afterward, elbows on my knees, and let myself replay the taste of her mouth because I've stopped pretending I have the discipline not to. Sweet isn't the right word. Sweet is what humans say about sugar, about fruit, about things that don't rearrange the entire architecture of a man's control with a single kiss. What she tastes like doesn't have a human word attached to it yet, not one I've found in six years of trying. Something like the first clean breath after drowning. Something like a hunger I didn't know existed until I got a single taste of what satisfies it, and now can't stop returning to the memory like an addict circling the one thing that will finally end the craving.

I've had a hundred years to develop restraint. I've buried it in three seconds against her mouth.

I should be more troubled by how close I came tonight. That's the honest accounting of it, sitting up here with the city spread out under me, indifferent to whatever's happening in my chest. I had her pinned against a wall, her wrists in my hand, her mouth open under mine, and for one full second — maybe two — I wasn't thinking about Elena, wasn't thinking about her heart failing under a mark she never should have carried. I wasn't thinking at all. I was simply a body answering another body, an animal finally getting what it's been denied for years, and if I hadn't pulled back when I did, I don't know what would have stopped me from finishing what my teeth have wanted to start since the day I first saw her.

I want to be inside her. I'm done pretending that thought is anything other than exactly what it is — not some abstracted longing, not poetry, just the plain animal truth of it. I want her under me, want to feel her come apart the way I imagine it every night I stand outside her window instead of going in. I want to bury myself so deep in her that neither of us remembers where one of us ends and the other begins, want to make the bond into something physical instead of the ache it's been for six years, invisible and constant and slowly driving me toward exactly the kind of man Grant keeps warning me I'm becoming.

I want to make her mine in every way that isn't a blade.

The thought arrives with its usual weight, Elena's face right behind it, the sound my brother made when her heart stopped. I let both sit there together, side by side, the wanting and the warning, because that's the only way I've survived this bond for six years — never letting myself have one without the other close enough to touch.

My hands still remember the exact give of her wrists in my grip, delicate in a way that should have been warning enough on its own. I could have snapped bone without meaning to if I hadn't been careful, and some nights that thought disturbs me more than any of the killing — that my desire for her comes wrapped in the same capacity for damage as everything else about me, that there's no version of wanting her that doesn't carry risk stitched into it somewhere.

She heard everything tonight. That's the part I keep returning to, more than the kiss, more than the taste of her still sitting on my tongue like something I refuse to let fade. I told her what I am. I told her about the killings, about Elena, about the knife instead of teeth, laid all of it out with no softening, no argument for my own defence, because some old stubborn part of me decided she deserved the truth delivered without decoration even if the truth damned me completely.

And she didn't run.

I've turned that over more times than I can count since I left her apartment, trying to find the flaw in it, the moment where I misunderstood what she actually meant. She sat curled into the corner of her own couch, looking at a man who confessed to nine murders without a flicker of remorse, and instead of calling the police, instead of screaming, instead of doing any of the things a sane woman should do, she asked me to come back tomorrow. She told me she wanted to understand what she was choosing.

I'm not going anywhere.

I don't know what to do with a sentence like that. I've spent six years building an entire structure of restraint around the assumption that she would run the second she understood what I am, that the truth itself would be the thing that finally kept her safe from me without my having to be the one to push her away. I never planned for her to hear it all and stay anyway.

It should terrify me more than it does. Instead it settles into my chest like something molten, spreading heat through places that have been cold since the day Elena's heart stopped, and I sit on this roof turning the sentence over and over the way I imagine she turned over that forum thread, unable to stop, unable to fully believe it, wanting it to mean exactly what it sounds like it means.

Mine. She heard what that word costs, and she stayed anyway.

I think about the version of tonight where I told her everything and she looked at me the way every reasonable person should look at a confessed killer — horror, revulsion, the particular fear that ends in a locked door and a phone call to someone who could never actually help her. I built myself for that outcome. I rehearsed the version of myself who walks away afterward and lets her hate me from a safe distance, protected by disgust instead of ignorance.

I didn't build anything for this. For her staying. For her asking to understand instead of asking me to leave.

Grant finds me there an hour later, because my brother has an unerring instinct for exactly the moments I least want company.

"You look different," he says, studying me with the particular scrutiny he's perfected over decades of watching me make bad decisions.

"I told her."

Whatever he expects me to say, it isn't that. He goes very still, some old grief moving behind his eyes — the same grief that colours every conversation we have about bonds, about mates, about the particular cruelty of loving something the world hasn't built you to keep. "All of it?"

"All of it. Elena. The killings. The reason for the knife instead of a bite." I don't look at him while I say it, keep my eyes on the city instead, on the ordinary lights of ordinary lives that don't know what walks among them. "She didn't run."

"Sterling—"

"She kissed me." The words come out rougher than I intend, thick with everything I'm still holding back. "I had her wrists pinned above her head and her mouth open under mine and I have never in my life wanted anything the way I wanted to finish it right there. I pulled back because I had to, not because I wanted to, and she looked at me afterward like I'd hurt her by stopping."

Grant is quiet for a long moment, weighing something, and when he finally speaks his voice has lost its usual edge. "What are you going to do?"

"I don't know." It's the most honest answer I've given him in six years. "I've spent this whole time building my life around a single plan — keep my distance, kill anything that threatens her, never let this become something either of us actually gets to choose. That plan didn't survive her telling me she wants me anyway."

"So you're considering it. Completing the bond."

"I'm considering everything." I finally look at him, and whatever he sees in my face makes something in his own expression soften, old brotherly worry bleeding through decades of practiced distance. "I don't have an answer that keeps her safe and gives either of us what we actually want. But for the first time since this started, I'm not certain keeping my distance is the safer option anymore. Watching her get closer to the truth on her own, unprotected, not knowing what she's dealing with — that has its own risks I haven't been weighing properly."

"That's not the same as deciding to mark her."

"I know." I say it quietly, honestly, because Grant deserves that much even when I can't give him certainty. "I'm not deciding anything tonight. I'm just telling you that the ground I've been standing on for six years doesn't feel as solid as it did yesterday."

Grant is quiet for a long while, looking out at the same skyline I've been staring at all night. "I watched you after Elena died," he says finally. "I watched what it did to you, second-hand, just from loving your brother and having to witness what he became afterward. I don't want that for you. But I also watched what six years of this has already done to you, Sterling. You're not the same man who started this. Starving isn't a neutral choice either. It costs something too."

"I know that better than anyone."

"Then stop pretending there's a version of this where nothing costs anything. Pick the cost you can live with. That's all any of us actually get to do." He claps a hand once against my shoulder, brief, uncharacteristically gentle. "Whatever you decide, decide it because it's actually right. Not just because a beautiful woman said four words that undid six years of your resolve in one sentence."

I don't have an answer for that either. Grant doesn't wait for one. He leaves the way he always does, and I sit alone with the city and the ache and the sentence still looping, unresolved, refusing to let me settle into any version of certainty at all.

I go back to her window before dawn, though I don't go inside. I don't trust myself inside yet, not after tonight, not with her taste still sitting on my tongue and her voice still looping in my chest. I stand on the fire escape instead, close enough to hear her heartbeat, slow and even, asleep, unafraid in a way she has no business being with everything she now knows about me.

I'm not going anywhere.

She said it like a fact, the same way I say things I've already decided are true regardless of argument. Maybe that's what unsettles me most — not that she said it, but that some part of me believes her completely, has already started building a future around the assumption that she meant it.

I don't know yet what I'm going to do with that. I only know that something shifted tonight that I can't shift back, some tectonic plate finally settling into a new position after six years of holding perfectly, agonizingly still.

She's mine. She's always been mine, since the day the bond found her crossing a street with coffee in one hand and no idea what was about to orbit her whole life. But tonight, for the first time, being mine wasn't just something I decided for her.

Tonight, she decided it too.

I stand outside her window until the sky starts to lighten, listening to her breathe, and let myself imagine, just once, a version of this that doesn't end with either of us buried.

I don't know if I believe in it yet. I know I want to.