The morning sunlight filtered through the canopy, soft and indifferent. Ivy shifted against the moss-padded forest floor, her body protesting with every movement.
A dull ache throbbed along her thighs, her knees, the tender side of her stomach. She reached for her neck and winced. Her fingertips grazed over the bruises—faint and blossoming like violets beneath her skin.
Memories from the night before surged in fragments—heat, pressure, hands that gripped too tightly, and the haunting sound of his mouth splitting open, just before he whispered to her like a beast marking its territory.
It should have frightened her. It should've driven her away.
But it didn't.
Thorne crouched nearby, his form hulking but eerily still, like a sculpture carved from flesh and shadow. The golden glow in his eyes hadn't dimmed—it had intensified. He watched her move, his stare focused, ravenous.
When she sat up and the blanket slipped off her shoulder, exposing a pale purple bruise along her collarbone, his body twitched—barely restrained hunger laced with a sick kind of awe.
To him, the bruises were not wounds.
They were proof.
Proof that she was his.
Thorne's POV
She was soft and ruined in all the right places. Not broken—never broken—but marked. Her flesh now bore the aftermath of his love, painted in shades of midnight bloom. He knew her body wasn't meant to bruise like that. It wasn't a thing of battle or war. It was soft, human, beautiful.
And yet the sight of those marks stirred something dangerous in him. Reverence, perhaps. Obsession, definitely. Control? That had left him the moment she said yes, the moment her fingers dug into his skin and she whispered his name with trembling lips.
Thorne moved closer. She tensed, just a little, but didn't shy away. She never did.
"I hurt you," he said, not quite regretful.
"You didn't mean to," Ivy replied, her voice quiet.
He tilted his head. His voice slid out like silk twisted with barbed wire. "No… I meant every second."
Her eyes widened, but not with fear. She didn't understand what that meant to him. How restraint had been a leash choking his instincts. How her surrender had broken that leash entirely.
Now, he would not hold back.
Not with her.
Not with the world.
She was his, and that meant the world had two choices: bow—or burn.
He knelt in front of her, fingers brushing the bruises on her knees like a sculptor studying his work. "They suit you," he whispered. "They're beautiful."
Ivy flinched at his words. Not because of pain, but because of how tenderly he spoke them. As if her pain was precious. Sacred.
"I didn't want to hurt you," he added. "But I love what it means."
A cold wind rustled the branches above. Ivy shivered. He wrapped her in the fur-lined cloak he often wore, draping it over her shoulders with a protective gentleness that sharply contrasted the rawness from the night before.
She looked down at herself, at the faint tremble in her thighs, the soreness in her body, and for a fleeting moment, she wondered if she should feel ashamed.
Instead, she felt something else.
Claimed.
"I need to go back," she said softly, though the words felt like betrayal.
His jaw tightened, and his eyes flickered like dying stars.
"No."
"I have to check on the shop—on the people—"
"They want you dead, Ivy," he snarled, voice twisting into something that rumbled low in his chest. "They would have taken you from me."
His claws dug into the earth beside her, not touching her, but close.
"You belong here now," he added. "With me. Only me."
She should've run then.
But the way he said it—like a sacred vow, like he would dismantle the very world if it threatened her—it gripped her heart in a way no gentle word ever could.
He leaned close, pressing his forehead to hers. His smooth face is almost human now, save for the inhuman stillness.
"If they come for you," he said, voice barely above a whisper, "I will feed the trees your village's bones. I will plant their teeth like seeds and watch them bloom."
Ivy said nothing. She didn't know what to say. But a strange calm settled inside her.
She should've been afraid.
But Thorne had a way of making even madness feel like devotion.
And in that moment, in the quiet aftermath, she knew something with sick certainty:
He would destroy the world to keep her safe.
And worse—
She would let him.