The key scraped against the lock three times before finally catching—a metallic protest that had become familiar over seven years of coming home to him. My arms ached from carrying the grocery bags, heavy with the ingredients for Hyunwoo’s favorite stew, the one his mother used to make before she passed. I had spent three hours selecting the perfect cuts of beef, the freshest vegetables, wanting tonight to be special. I had rehearsed the words in my head a dozen times: I got promoted. We can finally move to a bigger place. We can finally start planning the wedding.
The apartment smelled wrong.
Not of the jasmine candles I loved, or the cedar diffuser Hyunwoo kept by the window, but of something musky and intimate. Perfume that wasn’t mine—something cloying and sweet, like overripe fruit. The sound reached me next: a giggle, high and breathless, followed by the wet, unmistakable collision of lips against skin.
My fingers went numb. The grocery bags slipped from my grasp, crashing to the floor with a sound like breaking pottery. Glass jars shattered. Kimchi juice splattered across the white tiles I had scrubbed that morning.
"Hyunwoo oppa, how could you?!"
The scream tore from my throat before I could stop it, raw and ragged, scraping my vocal cords like sandpaper. I flung open the front door—the one I had painted sage green last spring because he said it reminded him of his grandmother’s house—and the world tilted.
They were on the couch.
Our couch. The charcoal sectional I had saved for eight months to buy, the one with the stain-resistant fabric because Hyunwoo was clumsy with red wine. He was shirtless, his skin glowing amber in the lamplight, his body positioned over hers like a shield. She was younger than me maybe twenty-two, twenty-three—with hair dyed the color of burnt caramel and a face still soft with the roundness of youth. Her blouse was unbuttoned to reveal lace the color of blush, and one of his hands—his hands, which had held mine through my father’s funeral, which had learned the contours of my body over seven years of nights—was tangled in that hair, pulling her head back to expose the pale column of her throat.
They were laughing.
Even as I stood there, trembling in the doorway with broken glass crunching beneath my heels, they were laughing. Her giggle spilled out like honey poisoned with arsenic, and his, his was worse. It was the laugh I had fallen in love with, the one that crinkled the corners of his eyes, the one he used when he was genuinely happy.
His face changed when he saw me.
The unguarded joy drained away like water from a cracked basin, leaving behind something gray and panicked. He scrambled backward, disentangling himself from her with the frantic motions of a man caught in a crime, his shirt still balled up on the floor beside her handbag—a cheap thing, I noticed distantly, with gold hardware that was already tarnishing.
"Krystina," he said. Just my name. Not Krys. Not jagiya. Just my full name, formal and foreign on his tongue.
He moved between us. Instinctively, without thought, as if his body knew before his mind could catch up that he needed to protect her from me. The woman who had learned to make his mother’s stew, who had given up everything.
My heart became a trapped bird, battering against my ribs with wings made of broken glass. The tempest rose in my chest—hurt and anger braided together so tightly I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. I lunged forward, my steps unsteady, my vision tunneling until all I could see was the space between his shoulder blades, the place where I used to rest my head when we watched movies.
The girl saw me coming. Her eyes, wide and dark as wet stones, flicked from my face to the door behind me. She moved with the speed of prey animals, snatching her purse from the floor, buttoning her blouse with fingers that shook. She smelled like vanilla and sweat as she brushed past me, close enough that I could see the mascara smudged beneath her eyes, the hickey blooming like a bruised flower on her collarbone.
Then we were alone.
Just me and Hyunwoo and the wreckage of our life, separated by three feet of hardwood floor that suddenly felt like an ocean.
"It’s not her fault. It’s mine," he said.
His voice was maddeningly calm, the same tone he used when discussing traffic or the weather. He ran a hand through his hair—disheveled now, sex-mussed—and I wanted to rip those strands from his scalp. He positioned himself closer to the door, as if he might need to flee, and the gesture cut deeper than any words could have.
"Seven years, oppa! Is this how you repay my love?"
My fists clenched so tightly my nails drew blood from my palms. I pushed forward, shoving him back toward the threshold, toward the railing that guarded the tenants from three stories to the street below. The girl had vanished—fled down the stairs, probably, her cheap heels clicking against the concrete.
"Stop it!" He grabbed my wrists, his fingers digging into the soft flesh. "You’re going to make us fall down the stairs!"
"Don’t you dare dodge the subject! Screw the stairs!"
But my eyes flicked to them despite myself. The staircase in Hyunwoo’s apartment had always been my nemesis—open-backed, industrial, with railings too low and steps too narrow. I had nearly fallen down them twice in our first month here, and ever since, I had hugged the wall when descending, my heart hammering at the three-story drop to the lobby below.
Why did they have to build apartments this way? Why did the door have to open directly onto the landing?
"Seven years," I continued, my voice cracking like thin ice. "I left my family back in the States. I gave up Thanksgiving and Christmas and my mother’s lasagna. I learned Korean until my tongue ached, until I could dream in your language. I worked sixty-hour weeks to save for our future—for your future! Since I was eighteen! I starved myself because you said I should lose ten pounds!"
Each word was a stone I threw at him, and each one missed. He stood there, impassive, his face settling into the expression I had come to dread—the one that meant he had already moved on, that he was simply waiting for me to finish.
"Krys," he said, and there was something final in the way he said it. "You just don’t do it for me anymore."
The air left my lungs.
"The more you try," he continued, his voice gaining strength, cruelty sharpening its edges, "the more repulsed I become. You’re no longer attractive to me. We should just end this. Now is the perfect time." He gestured vaguely at the broken jars, the spilled food, the chaos of my arrival. "Look around. It’s already embarrassing enough."
Repulsed.
The word echoed in my skull, bouncing off bone, leaving dents. I tasted copper—realized I had bitten through my lip.
"You insufferable jerk," I whispered. Then louder: "How could I ever believe you were a great guy? Repulsive? You’re no god! I’ve been faking my orgasm for years every time we were fucking! Your dick is so small I barely feel anything! And once you reach your peak, you’re done! It’s always been about you, hasn’t it? My God, the signs were all there!"
Tears streamed down my face, hot and humiliating, mingling with the snot that ran from my nose. I was ugly-crying, the kind of crying that contorted the face, that made the throat raw. How had I been so blind? The late nights at the office that didn’t add up. The password changed on his phone. The way he stopped kissing me good morning six months ago.
Adrenaline flooded my veins—a chemical surge that wiped thought clean, leaving only action. I lunged.
I didn’t plan to hit him. I didn’t plan to do anything. I simply needed to make him feel something. To crack that calm, that indifference, to force him to acknowledge that he was hurting me with his selfish decisions.
"Get off me!" he yelled.
His hands came up—not to embrace, not to comfort, but to shove. The force of it shocked me. I had forgotten how strong he was, how the lean muscles I had admired could be weapons when turned against me.
I stumbled backward.
My heel caught on the threshold—the raised lip of the doorway I had tripped over a hundred times before. My arms windmilled, grasping for purchase, finding only air. The world tilted, and I saw Hyunwoo’s face change again—not to panic, not to guilt, but to something worse. Annoyance. Irritation that I was making a scene, that I was falling, that I was an inconvenient.
Then I was weightless.
The walls of the stairwell blurred past me—white plaster and numbered doors, the potted plant on the second-floor landing, the flickering light fixture that had needed replacing for months. Hyunwoo’s face shrank above me, growing smaller, his mouth open in a scream I couldn’t hear over the wind rushing in my ears.
This is how I die, I thought. This is how it ends. Not with a wedding, not with children, but with a headline. "American Expat Dies in Domestic Dispute. Boyfriend Distraught."
I didn’t want to die.
Concrete kissed my skull with the force of a lover who had never learned gentleness. My left arm snapped first—a clean, bright crack that I heard before I felt, the bone shearing through muscle like a branch breaking under ice. Then my ribs, one after another, a xylophone of fractures playing a symphony of agony as they collapsed inward, puncturing something soft and vital.
My lungs emptied. Not a scream—there was no air for screaming—but a wet, choking gasp as blood flooded my throat, copper-hot and thick. I tried to breathe in and found only broken glass where oxygen should have been, each attempted inhalation sending razors through my chest.
My back, I thought distantly, as sensation faded below my waist. I can’t feel my legs.
The pain was everywhere and nowhere, a white-hot sun consuming my nerves, reducing me to nothing but screaming electricity. I could feel my heart still beating—frantic, desperate, confused—pumping blood into spaces where blood didn’t belong, filling my abdominal cavity, spilling from my mouth in a crimson fountain that pooled beneath my cheek.
Hyunwoo’s face appeared above me. He was screaming something, his mouth moving, but the words were underwater, muffled by the roar of my own pulse in my ears. He looked different from this angle. Smaller. Less real.
The sky behind him was gray. Seoul’s perpetual haze. I had always hated that gray.
I wanted blue sky, I thought. Just once, I wanted to see real blue.
My fingers twitched against the concrete, scraping uselessly, trying to find something to hold onto as the darkness crept in from the edges of my vision. It wasn’t peaceful, this dying. It was violent and humiliating and wrong, my body fighting every second, my brain firing desperate signals to limbs that would never move again.
The pain began to fade. Not because it was lessening, but because I was declining, my consciousness shrinking to a pinprick of awareness in a sea of trauma. The last thing I felt was the cold of the concrete seeping into my shattered skull, and the distant, absurd thought that my mother would never know what happened to me. That she would wake up in California to a phone call, and her world would end while mine was already ending.
Then—
---
Chirp. Chirp. Chirp.
Sound returned first. Bird song, but wrong somehow. Too melodic, too complex, like flutes being played in harmony rather than the harsh cawing of city crows.
Woosh. Woosh.
Wind. Moving through leaves. But the rhythm was different—not the rustle of oak or maple, but something denser, more substantial.
My head throbbed. A deep, bass drum ache that pulsed in time with my heartbeat. I tried to swallow and found my throat coated in dust and copper.
I should be dead, I thought. Three stories. Then Concrete. I should be dead.
I pried my eyes open.
Blue. Not the blue of Seoul’s hazy sky, perpetually filtered through smog and neon, but a blue so vivid it hurt to look at—cobalt bleeding into azure, streaked with wisps of clouds that glowed faintly pink in a light that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.
Trees surrounded me. Not the manicured gingkos of the city parks, but giants—trunks wider than cars, bark the color of old pewter, rising into canopies that blotted out the sun. The leaves were wrong. Too large, shaped like teardrops, and when the wind moved through them, they chimed like bells.
I pushed myself up.
Pain lanced through my hip, my shoulder, and my ankle. I was still wearing my work clothes—the pencil skirt I had bought on sale at Zara, the blouse that had cost too much but made me feel professional. Both were shredded, stained with dirt and something darker. Blood. My blood.
My handbag lay three feet away; its contents spilled across moss that glowed faintly silver in the shadows. My phone. My wallet. A lipstick. A tampon. My compact mirror and some aspirin.
I wasn’t in a hospital.
I wasn’t on concrete.
I was in a forest that felt ancient, primeval, untouched by human hands.
Panic set in like frost, crystallizing in my veins. The warm blood pooling beneath my hip was real. The metallic scent filling my nostrils was real. The pain was real. Yet here I sat, alive, in a place that felt like a dream and a nightmare braided together.
I needed to move.
I started moving, limping, half-dragging my injured ankle screaming with every inch of progress. The pain was white-hot, blinding, each step sending jagged lightning up my calf.
Then it came—a roar, deep and resonant, vibrating in my sternum. Close. Too close. Beneath it, the wet sound of something massive moving through underbrush. Branches snapped. Leaves rustled. Something heavy and fast was coming my way.
My phone. I clutched it like a talisman, dialing 119 with shaking thumbs. The emergency number rang once, twice, then clicked to silence. No service. No rescue.
The light was fading. Not sunset—the sun seemed wrong here, larger, more orange—but something was changing in the quality of the air, growing thicker, more dangerous.
Then I saw them.
Wolves. But not like any wolves I had seen in zoos or documentaries. These were massive, their shoulders level with my waist, their coats ranging from charcoal to silver. Their eyes caught the strange light and reflected it back—yellow-green, glowing like foxfire, fixed on me with an intelligence that felt almost human.
The pack leader stepped forward. His lips peeled back from teeth like yellowed daggers, and his tongue—obscenely pink—flicked out to wet his nose. He was licking his chops. At me.
"Oh God," I whispered. "Please."
They advanced as one, a wave of muscle and hunger. I curled inward, making myself small, fetal, my hands over my head like a child hiding from monsters. I could smell them now—wet fur and meat and something else, something wild that had no name in any language I knew.
This is it, I thought. This is how I die. Eaten by a pack of wolves in the middle of nowhere."
I squeezed my eyes shut and waited for the pain.
It didn’t come.
Instead, another roar—this one different. Louder. Furious. The ground shook with the impact of heavy footfalls, and the wolves’ advance faltered. I opened my eyes just in time to see them scatter, tails tucked, whimpers escaping their throats like steam.
A lion stood where they had been.
He was colossal. His mane caught the fading light and transformed it into liquid gold, rippling like fire with every breath he took. His muscles moved beneath his tawny coat with the fluid grace of a creature designed for killing, and his eyes—amber flecked with copper—fixed on me with an intensity that made my breath hitch.
He was beautiful. He was terrifying.
He was looking at me like I was his.
The wolves had fled, but I was still trapped. My ankle was useless, my body battered, and now I faced a predator larger than any I had ever imagined. Would he kill me quickly? Or would he play with me first, batting me around like a mouse?
I waited for death.
"Are you okay?"
The voice was deep, resonant, and distinctly male. It seemed to come from everywhere at once.
I turned my head, searching for the source.
The lion tilted his massive head. "Female. Are you mute?"
I stared at him.
"Can you not speak?" he continued, his tail flicking with impatience. "Or are you simply rude?"
"You’re... talking," I stammered.
"Evidently."
"In English."
He paused, his head tilting with genuine confusion. "English? I speak only Kharanth—the tongue of beasts, the language of this world." He padded closer, each footfall silent despite his size. "What other speech would I use with you?"
"But I understand you perfectly," I whispered, more to myself than to him.
"And I you." He sniffed the air again, his nose wrinkling. "Strange. You’re filthy, bleeding on my territory, and you ask questions any cub would know. Which beast-man clan do you belong to? You smell of nothing I recognize."
"I... I tripped while running earlier," I said, my voice barely above a whisper. A blush crept onto my cheeks, hot and humiliating. "I probably look pretty rough right now."
"Rough would be an improvement," he said, but there was no malice in it—only observation. "You ask no questions. You make no demands. You simply sit there, with blood on you. Are you concussed?"
"If you could help me find a place to clean up, that’d be awesome," I said, the words automatic, absurd in this context. "Oh—what do I even call you?"
"I am Ravin." His head tilted again, giving me a chance to study him. His mane was truly magnificent, thick and full, framing a face that was somehow regal even in animal form. "There is a stream nearby. You may wash there. Climb onto my back."
Every instinct screamed to refuse. He was a predator. He was a lion. But my ankle throbbed with a steady, insistent pulse of pain, and the thought of crawling through the forest alone, with dried blood, was more terrifying than the creature before me.
"How can I get up?" I admitted. "I twisted my ankle. I can’t climb."
He sighed—a remarkably human sound—and lowered himself, belly to the ground, creating a ramp of golden fur. "Use my shoulder. And do not dawdle. The scent of your blood will attract worse than wolves."
I dragged myself onto him, my fingers sinking into fur that was impossibly soft, like silk and sunlight woven together. He rose with a fluid grace that belied his size, and I had to wrap my arms around his neck to keep from sliding off.
"Hold the mane," he instructed. "And try not to fall. I dislike repeating rescues."
We moved through the forest at a pace that should have been terrifying but was somehow hypnotic. The trees here were wrong—too tall, their bark pearlescent, their leaves shimmering with colors I had no names for. The air tasted of ozone and nectar, of growing things that had never known pollution.
"Thanks, Ravin," I murmured, my face pressed against the warm fur of his neck.
"You have a pleasant voice," he said, his voice rumbling against my chest. "Even if you’re not very pleasant to look at."
I stiffened. "Excuse me?"
"Your voice," he repeated, as if I were slow. "It is melodious. Like water over stone. But your appearance—" He paused, considering. "You are covered in filth. And your clothing is strange. What kind of animal skin are you wearing? It looks quite peculiar."
"It’s... fabric," I said, unsure how to explain polyester to a lion. "Not skin."
"Fabric," he repeated, testing the word. "From where do you hail, female? You smell of no clan I know. You ask strange questions. You seem ignorant of basic survival."
I hesitated. "Is that the stream I hear?"
He halted, ears flattening slightly at my evasion, but he allowed it. "Yes. We have arrived."
The stream appeared before us, a ribbon of crystal cutting through violet moss. It sang as it moved over smooth stones, a melody purer than any city fountain. Ravin lowered himself beside a flat rock, allowing me to slide off with a hiss of pain.
"Wash yourself," he said, gesturing toward the stream with his muzzle.
I hesitated, my arms crossing over my chest instinctively. "Please," I said, my voice small. "Turn away. Don’t look at me."
He huffed—a sound of faint amusement—and turned his head, presenting his broad back to me. "I have no interest in watching a female bathe," he said, his voice carrying the distinct tone of a sniff. "Especially not one so unappealing."
"Charming," I muttered, but relief flooded me as I unzipped my ruined blazer. The water was cold—shockingly so—but I splashed it over my face, working the blood from my hair with trembling fingers. I kept one eye on Ravin, but true to his word, he didn’t look. He lounged like a housecat magnified a hundred times, tail twitching, apparently napping.
I worked quickly, shedding my torn blouse and skirt, plunging into the stream up to my waist. The current tugged at me, washing away the grime and the horror of the day. I scrubbed my skin until it pinked, watching the blood and dirt swirl downstream, disappearing into the violet moss.
When I had done what I could—wringing out my hair, dressing again in clothes that were cleaner but still wet and ruined—I cleared my throat. "I’m finished."
Ravin stretched, a ripple of muscle and sinew, and turned.
Then froze.
I stood there, dripping and shivering, water beading on my skin like mercury. I watched the impossible happen. The air around him seemed to thicken, to shimmer with heat. His form blurred, fur receding like a tide, limbs lengthening, rearranging with the wet sound of meat and bone reforming.
The lion vanished.
In his place stood a man.
No—not a man. Something other.
Ravin stood before me in his human form—clad only in a pelt of golden fur draped across his hips, magnificent and terrifying in his fury.
His hair fell in tousled waves the color of wheat and honey, wild and unkempt as if he’d been running through storms. The same rounded ears I had seen on the lion now perched atop his head, furred in tawny gold, twitching with evident surprise. His eyes—amber as molten metal, flecked with copper—fixed on me with an intensity that stole my breath.
He was naked beneath the fur cloak; his body carved from the same golden light that had illuminated his mane. His skin held a faint, sun-kissed warmth, slightly tanned and glowing with vitality. His physique was sculpted to perfection—each muscle defined and rippling, abs that looked carved from marble, shoulders broad and powerful beneath the fur pelt. A tail, long and leonine, swept the ground behind him, the same golden hue as his hair.
A V-line, sharp and enticing, drew the eye downward from his waist, making him appear both majestic and irresistibly alluring. The fur cloak draped over one shoulder, leaving his chest bare, the pelt dusted with the same gold as his mane had been.
He lifted me as if I weighed nothing, cradling me against his chest with an arm beneath my knees and another supporting my back.
"I... Ravin. You’re too close."
"I must be blind," he breathed, his voice dropping to something softer, more intimate. "To have called you unappealing. To have ever thought you plain." His eyes—amber still, flecked with gold—traveled over my face with an intensity that made my stomach flutter. "I’ve never encountered a female who can compare to your beauty."
I felt heat rise to my cheeks, but not from pleasure. Beauty? The word felt foreign, almost mocking. By the standards of the world I’d left behind, I was anything but. In Seoul, I was "fat"—curvy in all the wrong places, with full breasts and wide hips, yes, but also a soft stomach that wasn’t flat, rolls that spilled over waistbands, thighs that touched. I was the girl guys settled for when they couldn’t get the slender, delicate ideal.
I studied his face, searching for deception. Was he truly seeing me, or were the females of this world so different that my ordinary, flawed body seemed extraordinary by comparison?
"If I’m a beauty," I said, the words slipping out before I could stop them, "I wonder what the other females here look like."
He blinked, confused by my skepticism. "They look like females," he said simply. "But none look like you."
He caught my hand, his grip warm and grounding. "Please allow me to be your mate. I promise to care for you for as long as I live."
"Mate? We just met!"
"I am the prince of my tribe," he said, his gaze earnest, filled with a depth of emotion that left me breathless. "I can offer you security and assurance. I vow you will never feel lacking in any way."
"It’s all too sudden. Just moments ago, I was ugly to you, and now you’re showering me with praises. We’re practically strangers. How can you so suddenly promise yourself to me?"
"Should I gouge my eyes out for being so blind?" he asked, his voice serious. "For insulting you?"
"What? No! Why would you say that?"
"You are a female without a visible mate," he said, his voice deep and resonant. "If another beast man sees you, he will undoubtedly try to win your hand. Even worse, he may try to force you to become his." His grip on my hand tightened. "If you don’t despise that prospect, please allow me the honor of protecting you."
I couldn’t fathom the thought of being forced into a bond. But the sincerity in his eyes—the fear there, mixed with hope—made my chest ache.
"Fine," I said, the word escaping before I could stop it. "I’ll accept you as my mate. But I have conditions."
"Name them."
"First, you are not allowed to touch me unless I consent. Second, you can’t force me to do anything unless it’s something I willingly want. And third, you must tell me anything I wish to know without pressing me to explain why I’m asking. Will you accept?"
"Yes," he said eagerly, a glimmer of excitement dancing in his gaze. "I will accept."
"So... how does one accept a mate?"
"Give me your hand."
I hesitated, then extended my arm.
He grasped it gently, his grip warm and surprisingly tender. "It will only hurt for a brief moment. Please trust me."
He brought my open arm to his face, bearing his sharp fangs—still there, even in human form, longer than any human teeth should be. Before I could pull away, he sank them into my flesh.
The pain was bright, sharp, overwhelming. I cried out, but true to his word, it faded quickly, replaced by a strange warmth that spread up my arm like honey.
As he withdrew, a brilliant blue ring flared to life around his neck—glowing, pulsing, alive with light—before dissipating into his skin. A similar glowing circle appeared around my wrist, blue as sapphire, before it too vanished, leaving only a faint warmth behind.
"What was that?" I managed to ask, my voice trembling.
"I don’t know," Ravin said, bewilderment etched across his features. "Normally, the mate contract is black or white. Royal bloodline is silver. But blue..." He touched his throat, his brow furrowing. "I must consult the elder. He will know what this means."
"So are we mates?"
"Yes," he said, his eyes meeting mine, a mix of joy and confusion warring in their depths. "We are truly mates now. The ring around my neck binds me to you as your loyal subordinate. The mark on your wrist signifies that you have accepted a male."
He traced the invisible band at his throat, his expression turning serious. "But I know this much—the color is hidden. Only you and I can see the blue. To others, the bind will appear as a simple mark, a pale band that shows you are claimed. They will know you have accepted a mate, but not what color binds us, however, if you are performing a bond like you just did with me...you mustn’t do it in front of other. The color of the bond will be visible during the bonding process."
I looked down at my wrist, where the sapphire glow had faded into my skin, becoming a subtle shimmer only visible to those who knew to look. "What do the different colors mean?"
"Black and white are common," he said. "Silver is for royals. But blue..." He shook his head, clearly unsettled. "I have never heard of blue. I must ask the elder."
His hand found mine, his grip both protective and slightly desperate. "Until then, keep this secret, my mate. Let the world see only that you are claimed. Let them wonder who holds your bond. For both our safety, speak of the blue to no one."
I nodded.
"The mark remains," he said, touching my wrist where the blue had settled. "Others will see it and know you are not unmated. They will smell my scent on you, feel the weight of the bond. But the color..." He searched my eyes, his own filled with wonder and worry. "The color is ours alone. And I will learn what it means. I swear it."
Then I remember him saying something about subordinate. "Subordinate? I thought we were equals?"
He looked at me strangely. "Where do you come from, my mate? Doesn’t your mother teach you the laws? Female beasts are extraordinarily valuable. You are the mother of all beasts, the being who created us. You can take as many male mates as your heart desires. You can break bonds at will." His voice dropped. "Meanwhile, male beast men can only love one female their entire lives. If she chooses to abandon us, we are left to wither, unable to love again."
He took my hand again, his grip trembling slightly. "My mate won’t be that cruel... right?"
"That’s a very sad way to live," I whispered. "I don’t think I could ever do that to anyone, especially not you, Ravin. I’m so grateful you saved my life. I promise I won’t abandon you."
But even as I spoke, my mind reeled. If he understood this heart-wrenching truth—this terrible imbalance of power—why would he desire a mate at all? It seemed like torment to love so completely while the other held all the cards.
That wasn’t how I was raised. I could never envision having multiple partners, collecting men like trophies while they had no choice but to love only me.
Yes, I decided, looking at this strange, beautiful creature who had saved my life and bound himself to me in the same breath. Having just Ravin by my side would be more than enough. The blue ring on my wrist pulsed once, warm against my skin, as if in agreement.