CHAPTER FOUR _ I Want a Divorce[ Part 2]
1076 Words
Convenience,” he echoed, almost to himself, like he was tasting the word and finding it bitter.
His grip on my wrist tightened further, enough that I hissed. Pain speared up my arm.
Before I could yank back, something surged up from the place under my ribs where the cold of death still lurked. A bright, hot pressure raced down my arm and into the point where his skin met mine.
A spark snapped between us.
Lucian froze.
His breath hitched; his pupils blew wide. For a heartbeat, his eyes went almost black, gold swallowed by shadow. Veins at his throat and temple bulged, darkening beneath his skin.
I felt it under my hand—beneath his shirt, the faint buzz of something wrong over his heart. The curse mark.
It pulsed.
So did whatever was waking inside me.
The air between us thickened. The candle flames on his desk guttered, then flared higher.
Then, slowly, the hardness in his face eased.
The dark veins receded. The wildness in his eyes dulled back to sharp, wary gold.
His fingers slackened on my wrist.
He looked down at where we touched, then back up at me, confusion flickering across his features.
“What did you just do?” he asked, voice rough.
I swallowed, pulse rabbitting.
I had no words for what had just passed between us. For the way my skin still tingled where it had met his, the way that wrong hum in his chest had softened under my palm.
“I reminded you how to breathe,” I said, because the truth—that I had just reached into the heart of the curse that bound him and nudged it aside by sheer stubborn will—was too big to say.
His gaze lingered on my face, searching for something I wasn’t ready to let him find.
His thumb stroked, absent, over the inside of my wrist.
“Don’t touch me like that if you intend to walk away,” he said quietly.
I yanked my hand back.
“How I touch you,” I said, “will be my choice. Just like whether I stay.”
His expression hardened again, but there was something wild under the ice now. Something almost… I panicked.
“By contract, by mark, by law,” he said. “You will not walk out of here and pretend we were nothing.”
A humorless laugh escaped me. “We are nothing, Lucian. That’s the problem. You’ve never touched me like a wife. Never looked at me like anything but a duty.”
His jaw flexed.
“You don’t know what I look at you like,” he said.
“Don’t I?” I asked softly. “Because from where I’m standing, all I see is a man who signed for a body and hoped it came with silence.”
Color flared in his cheeks. His wolf pressed closer; I could feel it, restless, under his skin.
“Careful,” he repeated. “You’re not as untouchable as you seem to think.”
*Never beg again.*
I straightened as much as the desk behind me allowed.
“I don’t need to be untouchable,” I said. “I need to be free.”
His eyes burned.
“My answer is still no,” he said. “You want freedom? You can have it. Within these walls. Under my name. Under my protection.”
“Protection?” I echoed. “From who? My father? My sister? The curse you refuse to talk about? Or from you, when your control slips and someone always dies?”
His hand shot out again, palm slamming down on the desk beside my hip with a force that rattled the inkwell and made the pen jump.
He was breathing harder now, chest rising and falling.
“I have never laid a hand on you in anger,” he said.
“No,” I agreed. “You saved that for the wolves.”
Something flickered in his eyes—pain, sharp and quick, there and gone. A headache line cut between his brows.
He pushed past it.
“You are not leaving this marriage,” he said. “You are not leaving this pack. And if you attempt to,” his voice dropped to something dangerous and low, “you will discover exactly how far I’m willing to go to keep what’s mine.”
The words should have chilled me.
They did.
They also sent a different, traitorous shiver down my spine.
For a second, my body forgot the night in the forest and remembered only long, lonely months lying two feet away from a man who never reached for me. I remembered how I had once wanted to be anything—prettier, stronger, better—if it meant he would look at me the way he was looking at me now: like I was the most important, infuriating thing in the room.
I shoved that memory down.
“I am not yours,” I said quietly. “I was never yours. I belonged to my father’s debts and your convenience. I won’t belong to anyone again.”
His gaze dropped once more to the line of my throat, to the faint scar of his incomplete mark.
“I should’ve finished that mark,” he said, almost to himself.
“Maybe,” I replied, “you should have learned how to treat a wife before you took one.”
His head snapped up.
We stared at each other.
The tension in the room was a living thing, pacing between us.
After a long, brittle moment, he stepped back.
“Go,” he said, voice clipped. “Get out of my sight before I say something I can’t take back.”
“Already done,” I murmured.
My legs prickled as the blood rushed back into them. I slid along the desk and walked to the door on unsteady knees, refusing to let him see the shake.
His voice reached me as my hand closed on the knob.
“This conversation is not over, Aria,” he said.
“It is for me,” I answered, without turning. “I told you what I want. You told me what you won’t give. That’s all there is.”
“Don’t test me,” he growled.
“Don’t ask me to be grateful,” I shot back.
I opened the door and stepped out before he could reply.
***
- Writer
