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"I didn't tell you the whole truth."

"Yeah? No duh."

"Last night, what happened when I was inside you…"

I pressed my legs together, remembering the delicious pressure as his knot swelled inside me. That alone was almost enough to make me want to take vows. Almost.

"Wolves only knot one woman. Their fated mate. Once it happens, there is no other choice. Not for the wolf. Not for the man. If I had married Rosalind before I met you, if I had given the wolf no other option, eventually it would have knotted her. Because she would have been its only outlet. But I was with you first. My wolf chose you that first time. There will be no other woman for me."

I sat with the full weight of what he had just said. The biological permanence of it was one thing. But I wasn't a wolf, so that didn't resonate with me. What did was the choice. I had been chosen.

Not because I was useful. Not because I was the best available option, or the most competent person in the room, or the woman who kept the infrastructure running while someone else got the credit. Because his wolf had decided I was the only one for him. Full stop. No asterisk.

I took a deep breath, filling my nose with his scent. Then I reached out and patted him on the shoulder. "Good luck in your life as a monk."

Magnus’s hands caught me. He pulled me to him in one motion. Off my feet and into his chest. I did not fight it. My body made several decisions about Magnus Blackwood that my brain was pretending to debate. I knew I wasn't going anywhere. I'd known it before the call with Elias dropped, and I hadn't asked him for a rescue.

For the first time in my life, I understood the fairytale. I understood why the princess didn't pick up a sword and fight her way out of the tower. With Magnus Blackwood towering over me, there was nowhere else I wanted to be.

His hands snared around my waist. My hands found his heartbeat, strong and steady. Both of us were breathing faster than the exertion of simply holding each other warranted.

Neither of us moved. The moment stretched. The city outside held its breath.

"Tell me no." His voice was low. Something more careful than a command. "If you're telling me no, say it."

I parted my lips. Nothing came out. Because I wanted it. I wanted to belong to this man.

And that was the problem. It was dangerous to belong to a man. To give your whole heart to him. My mother had belonged to my father — completely, without reservation, with the kind of wanting that reorganized everything around itself and left nothing untouched.

I had grown up in the wreckage of that wanting. I was not going to be half a person. At the same time, I knew that stepping away from Magnus would not leave me whole.

I stood there between the step back I had taken and the step forward I couldn't stop wanting to take. And it pissed me off.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

MAGNUS

"Fuck you, Magnus."

"That's not a no, Petronella."

I took the opening. My hands found her face. I kissed her the way the wolf had been demanding, which was not softly, and not carefully, and not with any of the restraint of the last ten minutes. I kissed her like a claim. Because that's what this was.

Her gasp arrived against my mouth; the sound of a woman whose body had answered before her mind could object. She was vanilla and heat and mine. She didn't say no as I walked her backward toward the bedroom.

"You're an asshole," she said as I reached beneath her shirt to unsnap her bra and found a sports bra. The bane of men's existence.

Lucky for me that I had claws. I let her feel them against her spine before the tip of my index finger against the band. "Tell me not to."

"You're a cheater."

Snap. My hand snagged under the loosened material and found her breasts. "I will lie, cheat, steal, and start a war when it comes to you, Nell. When I officially call my wedding off, I will lose allies. There will be a target on my back. My family will be in danger. The woman I love will be in danger. But there is no way in this world that I will not have you, unless you tell me no."

Nell threw her head back, arching her chest into my hand. "I didn't ask for any of this."

Figure out what you cannot live without; that's what my father had said. I could not live without this woman.

She wanted me. That much was not in question. I could read it in everything: her scent, her pulse, the way she had looked at me in the living room when I told her there would be no other woman. Something had moved in her face in that moment, something she had not let herself show for long, but I had seen it.