Page 45 of Owned By the Hvrok

But she wasn’t hurt.

Her breath caught in her throat as she stared down at his hands—hisrealhands—holding her like something precious instead of dangerous.

The heat of his skin soaked through her own.

The strength in his grip wasimmense. She couldn’t even twitch.

But it was thegentlenessthat undid her.

He wasn’t crushing her. Not even close. He was… restraining her. Quietly. Calmly.

And for the first time…

She stilled.

She stopped screaming.

Her fury collapsed in on itself, folding beneath the shock, the exhaustion, the weight of too many feelings she hadn’t had time to process.

That was a breakdown for the ages. Considering everything she’d gone through, it was perhapstootame.

She should have been wilder, more furious.

If not forhim.

She looked up at him.

He still hadn’t moved.

He didn’t utter another word.

But his touch…

It said more than his silence.

And Sylvia, for the first time since she’d been taken, felt…

Strange.

And it occurred to her that he might not beallbad.

CHAPTER 27

He held her until the storm passed.

Until the trembling in her limbs faded. Until her breathing slowed from panicked gasps to shallow, ragged exhales. Until her fists, so pathetically small against his chest plate, stopped trying to strike him and simply… hung there, limp and useless.

Such anextremereaction.

It was almost disturbing to witness.

He had seen fear before—had smelled it, tasted it in the air of battlefields and auction houses alike. But this—this messy, unfilteredrelease—was something else. Something uniquely, maddeninglyhuman.

A collapse of control.

At first, he was repulsed. Disgusted, even.

That a being could come apart so easily. That she had so little mastery over her own emotions. Over her own mind.

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