She didn't know how long she sat there, back against the bedroom door, knees hugged to her chest.
Long enough for her pulse to crawl down from sprinting-animal to cornered-animal.
Long enough for the adrenaline to burn off, leaving behind a hollow ache and the persistent throb in her skull from the little cheat at the keypad.
The carpet under her legs was too soft. The room too quiet. The entire floor had that muffled, insulated silence of rich people and secrets.
Amara wiped at her nose again. The smear of dried blood on her wrist looked like ink.
"Perfect," she muttered. "On brand."
She'd almost convinced herself she could spend the rest of the night exactly like this—just her, the door, the feeling of gravity tilted wrong in her chest—when the bond twitched.
It was small. A tug behind the breastbone, like a muscle remembering how to spasm.
Someone was getting closer.
She felt him in the hall before she heard the footsteps.
"No," she whispered. "No, no, no—"
A soft knock at the door, knuckles against wood.
"Amara."
His voice was low and controlled, but underneath it she heard what the wolves always heard: the rumble of something that could shake walls if he let it.
She squeezed her eyes shut. Didn't answer.
Another knock. Not harder. More deliberate.
"I know you're awake," he said quietly. "You're loud in my head."
"Get out of my head," she snapped, before she could stop herself.
Silence. For a heartbeat, she thought maybe he'd walk away. Respect her space. Give her time.
The handle turned.
The latch clicked.
She spun around on the floor, back slamming harder into the wood.
"Don't you—"
The door opened inward.
Lucian froze in the doorway, hand still on the knob, like he hadn't expected her to be literally on the door.
For a second, they just stared at each other.
He'd changed out of the black dress shirt. Now he wore a plain dark T-shirt and sweatpants—the kind of domestic, human outfit that should've made him look less terrifying.
It didn't.
Bare arms. Bare throat. Wolf in casual wear.
His hair was a mess, like he'd dragged his fingers through it too many times. There were dark smudges under his eyes. His jaw was tight enough to crack.
He took in the picture: her on the floor, her scraped wrist, the faint rust of blood near her nose.
His eyes flashed gold.
"Zara's guards brought you back," he said. "I felt you moving down and up like a bad elevator ride, then nothing. Were you going to tell me you tried to leave?"
The rage hit her so fast it made her dizzy.
"Oh, I'm sorry," she said, voice sharp. "Did my unscheduled attempt to touch grass inconvenience your omniscience?"
His jaw clenched.
He stepped inside and shut the door behind him with infuriating calm.
The quiet click sounded final.
"Don't do that," she bit out, scrambling to her feet. "Don't close the door like this is some little performance review. You don't get to HR me right now, Lucian."
"I'm not HR," he said. "I'm the man who woke up to a call saying his guards intercepted his mate in the lobby at two in the morning while she was apparently trying to walk out into a war zone alone."
"Don't call me that." The word scraped along her nerves like a blade. "I told you not to."
His gaze flickered, pain cutting through the anger for a moment.
"You can reject the title," he said quietly. "You can reject me. You can walk out of my life when this is over and never look back. But you can't reject what you are to my wolf. That's not how it works."
Her laugh came out high and brittle. "You hear yourself, right? That sounds exactly like a guy saying 'we're meant to be' while holding a knife."
His eyes darkened.
"You're not a prisoner," he said. "You're protected. There's a difference."
"You had me physically escorted back upstairs," she snapped. "By wolves I didn't even know were wolves, by the way, so thanks for that fun little jump scare. You locked me in a building. You won't let me leave without permission. That's what prisons are, last I checked."
His temper flared, wolf-fast.
"If this were a prison," he said, advancing a step, "you wouldn't have a bedroom door that locks from the inside. You wouldn't have your tablet. You wouldn't have guards apologizing to you while they do their jobs. You'd have a cell in the basement and chains."
"Wow," she said. "Gold star for the low bar."
"Do you have any idea," he snarled, "what happens if you walk out of this building and one of my enemies catches your scent? Forget the wolves. Humans watch you. They know your face, your handle, the way you draw. The second a rival realizes that the girl behind the panels can rip their plans apart with a few lines, they will not try to recruit you. They will cut you open and see if they can bottle the magic."
"Stop," she said, flinching.
"No," he said. "You don't get to pretend this is just about me being controlling. I am controlling. Because you are sitting on the kind of power empires have killed continents for, and your first instinct with it is to sneak into service corridors and bleed in stairwells."
"Well excuse me," she shouted back, "for not wanting to spend the rest of my life as your loyal little nuke on a leash."
Something like hurt flickered in his eyes.
"I don't want a nuke," he said, quieter. "I want you alive."
"Funny," she said, "because it feels a lot like you want me contained. Like a dangerous pet. Or a girlfriend you can't admit you want, so you call it destiny and act like your hands are tied."
His head snapped up.
"This is not about want," he said. "If it were just attraction, this would be simpler. I could lock it down. I've done it before."
"Then what is it?" she demanded. "The mate bond? Fate? Your inner beast's favorite chew toy?"
"It's the fact," he ground out, "that when you rewrote that keypad code, I felt your migraine hit like a punch, and I didn't know where you were. It's the fact that every time the world stutters around you, my wolf claws at my ribs because it thinks you're in danger. It's the fact that my life, my pack, this entire territory just got permanently rewired around you and you think I'm doing this for fun."
Her temper flashed so bright it almost covered the dart of fear at the mention of the keypad.
"How did you—" she started, then stopped. Of course. The guards had told him. The bond had tattled. Pick your poison.
She lifted her chin.
"Maybe I was in danger," she said. "Danger of suffocating in your designer terrarium."
His nostrils flared.
"You want to go back to your old life?" he asked, suddenly too calm. "To the cramped apartment with the leaking ceiling and the neighbors who slammed the wall when you cried at night? You want to go back to posting comics for free until some scam company sues you into oblivion? You want to handle this power alone, with no one who understands it, no one with teeth to stand between you and the people who want to own you?"
"Yes," she lied. "I want choice. I want the option to slip out for ice cream without asking the Alpha for a hall pass."
"You had the option," he growled. "You used it to run toward the door at two a.m. when half my security was off-rotation and my enemies don't sleep. That's not choice, Amara. That's suicide dressed up as independence."
"Oh, I'm sorry," she exploded. "I forgot that for wolves, protecting someone and owning them is the same thing!"
"It is not," he snapped. "Owning you would be putting a mark on your neck and a collar on your power and telling you exactly who to save and who to sacrifice. I haven't done that."
"Yet," she hissed.
"Ever," he shot back.
They were close now.
She wasn't sure when that happened. The room had shrunk around them, the air thick with anger and something else, something hot and electric under the words.
She could feel his body heat, the rise and fall of his chest. His eyes were more gold than brown again, pupils narrow slits ringed with molten color. A faint trace of fur bristled along his forearms where his control frayed.
"Admit it," she said, voice low and shaking. "You like having me here where you can see me. Where no one else can touch me. Where you can pretend this bond thing is noble instead of creepy."
"Do not mistake terror for enjoyment," he said through his teeth. "Do you think I like feeling you scramble down six flights of stairs in the middle of the night while your heart tries to beat out of your chest?"
"Maybe," she snapped, "if you trusted me, you wouldn't feel like you had to monitor me all the time."
His laugh was sharp and humorless.
"Trusted you?" he echoed. "You, who just admitted you rewired a security keypad because you didn't like the way a conversation went downstairs?"
"I rewired it because I wanted to leave," she shouted. "Because you dropped the word mate on me like a bomb and then told me it didn't matter whether I consented to it. You chained us together and then acted surprised when I tried to saw through the links."
His expression shuttered.
"Don't you dare," he said, voice low and dangerous, "pretend I chose this any more than you did."
"You're the one using it," she fired back. "Every time you say 'bond' and 'mate' and 'fate' you're reminding me that if I walk away, it hurts you. That's not just information, Lucian. That's leverage."
For a second, she thought he might shout.
Instead, his anger dropped suddenly into something colder.
"If I were using leverage," he said, each word precise, "I would have told you that if you die, I don't. The bond collapses on my side. It burns. It scars. And then I go on."
She blinked.
The room tilted.
"What?" she breathed.
"If I die," he continued, "you live with an echo. A phantom. An ache that never quite leaves. But you live. The bond doesn't drag you down to the grave with me. There is no magical Romeo-and-Juliet fail-safe. There is just pain and survival."
He held her gaze.
"So do not stand there and tell me I'm chaining you with this when the truth is the opposite. You could walk into traffic tomorrow and the universe would shrug and leave me breathing. I am not holding your life hostage, Amara. I am trying to stop you from throwing it away."
Her throat worked.
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
The anger didn't vanish. It just… shifted shape. Less pure rage, more something heavy and knotted, tangled through with fear and something that hurt to look at directly.
"You still locked me in," she said finally. Her voice had dropped. "Whatever your reasons, whatever the war, whatever the bond—you still took my choice to walk out of that building."
He closed his eyes for a beat.
"Yes," he said. No excuses. No softening. "I did."
"And that makes you what?" she asked. "My protector? My jailer? My kidnapper with good PR?"
His eyes opened.
"Monster," he said quietly. "You called me that earlier. It's not wrong."
The honesty of it threw her.
"Then why should I trust you?" she demanded, because if she didn't keep throwing words, she was going to drown in everything else between them. "Why should I trust a man who admits he's a monster and then stands there telling me what's good for me?"
"Because every monster you don't know is worse than the one standing in front of you telling the truth," he said. "Because I will always tell you exactly where I'm putting the bars and why. Because if I wanted you as a prisoner, you'd be in the basement already."
She almost laughed. Almost cried.
"Not reassuring," she said, voice cracking.
He stepped even closer.
Close enough that if either of them leaned forward an inch, they'd touch. Close enough that the mate bond thrummed loud in her bones, hot threads pulling tight.
"Do you want me to let you go?" he asked, very softly. "Right now. Tonight. No guards. No warnings. I'll call the elevator. I won't follow. You can walk out that door and find whatever life is waiting for a girl who bends time and pisses off wolves."
The air thinned.
She stared up at him, chest tight.
"Don't," she whispered. "Don't dangle freedom like that."
"I'm not dangling anything," he said. "I'm asking. Because if you really want that, if you'd rather face what's out there with no pack at your back and no one who understands what's happening to your brain, I will stand aside. It will be the worst decision I've ever made, but I'll make it."
It sounded… true.
That was the worst part.
She could picture it: elevator doors opening, lobby lights, real night air. Her, walking away. The bond pulling, pulling, but not breaking. Lucian standing in a doorway somewhere, fists clenched, letting her go anyway.
Her breath hitched.
"Could you?" she asked, quietly. "Really?"
His eyes were all wolf now, gold and slit, the beast right under his skin.
"No," he said, just as quietly. "But I'd try. For you."
Something hot and sharp twisted inside her.
Anger. Affection. Panic. All tangled.
"This is why I called you a monster," she said. "Because you say things like that and my brain doesn't know whether to kick you or kiss you."
His nostrils flared.
"Try kicking," he said, voice rough. "The other option is… not safe."
The air between them crackled.
Her hands were shaking. With rage, with fear, with the bond humming like an exposed wire.
"You don't get to decide what's safe for me," she said. "You don't get to decide who I become, what I do with this power, who I love, where I live—"
"I'm not trying to write your story," he said. "I'm trying to keep the book from catching fire."
"You're holding the lighter," she shot back.
"So are you," he snapped. "Every time you reach for that tablet. Every time you think about redrawing a conversation because it hurt too much. Every time you stand on a rooftop and think about whether a fall would be easier than facing all this. You think I don't feel it when you flick that switch in your head?"
Her breath stopped.
She hadn't said anything about the half-second on the rooftop, palms pressed to glass, wondering how far it was to the street.
His voice dropped.
"I will protect you from them," he said. "The enemy packs. The humans who want to dissect you. The corporations who would sell your blood in vials to the highest bidder. That's the easy part."
He took another half-step, erasing what was left of the distance.
"If I have to," he said, "I will protect you from me. From my wolf. From the part of me that wants to lock you in the safest room I own and throw away the key. I will fight that part every day."
His hand twitched at his side, like he wanted to touch her and forced himself not to.
"And yes," he went on, voice low and fierce, "I will protect you from yourself when you're about to make choices you can't survive. Even if that means you hate me. Even if that means you call me monster and kidnapper and every other name you can think of. I would rather you hate me and live than love me and die."
The words hit her like something physical.
Heat roared up her spine. Not just anger. Something else. Something wild and terrified and hungry that recognized its own reflection in him.
For a heartbeat, they were just… there.
Breathing hard. Too close. The bond singing high and thin between them. Her magic buzzing under her skin, eager to draw, to edit, to do something with this unbearable pressure.
She stared at his mouth. At the tense line of his jaw. At the vein beating in his throat.
His gaze flicked to her lips and away, jaw tightening further.
"Don't," she whispered, she didn't even know to which of them.
"I'm not going to kiss you," he said, and it sounded like a threat against himself. "Not like this. Not when you're thinking of me as your jailer."
"Good," she lied. Her voice shook. "Because if you did, I'd—"
He leaned in, slow, until his forehead almost touched hers.
Not touching. Barely.
The heat of him sank through the last inch of air.
"You'd what?" he murmured.
Her heart slammed.
She hated him. She wanted him. She wanted to run. She wanted to grab his face and see if kissing him made the bond shut up or scream.
She wanted choice, and the universe had offered her art and war and a wolf instead.
Her hands curled into fists at her sides.
"I'd probably rewrite the room," she said, voice tight. "And I'm already bleeding for tonight's edits."
His throat bobbed.
"Then don't," he said. "No more rewrites. Not for this."
She made a choked sound. Half laugh, half sob.
"You're really going to stand there," she said, "with your stupid pretty wolf face and your destiny speeches and tell me you're going to protect me from me."
"Yes," he said simply.
"Even if I hate you for it," she whispered.
"Especially then," he answered.
Her eyes burned.
"You can't protect me from everything," she said. "Not from the bond. Not from the headaches. Not from the fact that my power might eat me alive before your enemies get a chance."
He drew in a slow breath, like he was steadying himself.
"I can try," he said. "I can make rules with you instead of for you. I can be there when you test your limits so you're not alone on the floor when the universe punches back. I can take the fallout from your choices in boardrooms and battlefields so it doesn't fall on your head alone."
His voice softened.
"And when you break," he said, "because everyone does, I can be the one holding you together instead of the one who let you shatter."
A tear slipped down her cheek.
She swore at it, furious at her own body for betraying her.
Lucian's hand lifted, almost of its own accord.
He caught himself just before his fingers brushed her skin.
He let his hand fall, fingers curling into a fist.
"I am a monster," he said quietly. "And I am your mate. Those things are both true. You get to decide if I also get to be your jailer. Or your ally."
Her voice was hoarse.
"And if I decide I want you to be nothing?" she asked. "No mate. No ally. No monster. Just… gone."
Something flickered in his eyes.
"Then," he said, just as quietly, "I will give you as much distance as I can stand without ripping the city apart. I'll assign you your own guards who answer only to you. I'll stay off your floors. I'll pretend I don't feel every time you get a paper cut."
He exhaled slowly.
"But I will still protect you," he added. "Even if you never see me do it."
The room felt too small for all of it.
Her anger. His desperation. The bond, humming like a live wire. The war waiting outside. The power curling under her skin, hungry for lines and panels and edits.
"Mate or prisoner," she whispered. "Those are my options?"
His jaw clenched.
"No," he said. "Mate or nothing is an option. Prisoner is not. I will never cage you, Amara. I will only ever hold you back from the edge."
"How is that different?" she demanded.
"Edges move," he said. "Cages don't."
It was infuriating and maybe, possibly, a little bit true.
She leaned her head back till it thumped against the wall, breaking the almost-touch of their foreheads. The tiny shock of losing that warmth made the bond whine like a wounded thing.
He stepped back a fraction, just enough for the electricity in the air to thin.
Her lungs worked again.
"I still hate you," she said weakly.
"I know," he replied. "I still want to throw you over my shoulder and lock every door in this building. I'm not going to do it."
She snorted, a broken little sound.
"Congrats on being slightly less terrible than you could be," she said.
"I aim for progress, not perfection," he said dryly.
Silence stretched between them.
This time, it wasn't the heavy, suffocating kind. Just exhausted. Raw.
He glanced at the clock on her nightstand. 03:19 now. The night not yet done. The war not paused because two impossible people were arguing in a bedroom.
"Sleep," he said, softer. "If you can."
"And if I can't?" she asked.
His gaze flicked to the tablet on her desk, then back to her.
"Call Zara," he said. "Or Adrien. Or… me, if you're desperate." A corner of his mouth twitched. "But don't draw to fix it. Not tonight. We've torn reality enough for one day."
She swallowed.
"And if I try to sneak out again?" she asked.
His eyes met hers.
"Then," he said, "I'll stop you. Again. Gently if I can. Less gently if I have to. And you'll hate me a little more, and I'll still keep doing it until you can do it yourself."
"Protect myself?" she asked.
"Know the difference between freedom and self-destruction," he said.
She looked away.
"Get out," she whispered. "Before I punch you. Or kiss you. Or both."
For once, he didn't argue.
He stepped back fully, hand finding the doorknob. He opened it, then paused, looking over his shoulder.
"I meant what I said," he told her. "I will protect you from everyone—including myself, including you—even if you spend the rest of your life screaming at me for it."
She wanted to tell him that was arrogant. Controlling. Unfair. She wanted to tell him she didn't need protecting.
Instead, what came out was a rough, exhausted: "We'll see."
Something like relief flickered in his eyes at the we.
He nodded once.
"Good night, Amara," he said.
"Go away, Lucian," she replied.
He slipped out, closing the door softly behind him.
She sagged against the wall, chest heaving, knuckles pressed to her mouth.
The room hummed faintly, the bond buzzing like a bruised nerve.
She didn't feel free.
She didn't feel safe.
She felt… held. On a ledge between two futures: one where she ran and burned, one where she stayed and learned to live with the monster who insisted on standing between her and the cliff.
Mate or prisoner.
Monster or protector.
She didn't know yet which words would stick.
All she knew was that when she finally slid into bed, the darkness behind her eyelids was full of gold eyes and the echo of his vow.
And that, somewhere in the building, a wolf lay awake with his heart beating in time to hers, ready to be hated if that's what it took to keep her alive.