Page 129 of Fractured Loyalties

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She doesn’t flinch. But she doesn’t nod either.

Instead, she whispers, “Then we better get it right.”

And she's right, because next time, there won’t be room for foreplay before the fire.

Just ash.

And blood.

And the two of us standing in what’s left.

Together.

Or not at all.

Chapter 23 – Mara - Tether Points

I wake to heat.

Not sunlight. Not breath. Just him.

Elias, stretched along my back like a second skin, his thigh hooked around mine, one arm slung over my waist, anchoring me. His fingers twitch slightly against my stomach, but he doesn’t stir. Not yet.

The blanket is twisted halfway off the bed. My skin is slick with the aftermath of everything we didn’t say last night. Everything we did instead.

I stay still. I don’t want to move. Not because I’m afraid of waking him. But because part of me doesn’t know what I’ll find in his eyes when he does.

This isn’t peace.

It's a pause.

A fragile kind of quiet, where the sheets are still warm from war and the walls haven’t started whispering yet.

I tilt my head, just enough to catch his profile in the dim light. His lashes are dark against his cheek, jaw slack with sleep, lips parted like they forgot how to hold secrets.

He looks young like this.

Not soft. But unguarded.

It should scare me more than it does.

My body aches in places I forgot I had. My thighs. My ribs. The hollow behind my knee where his hand pinned my legs up, pinned hard enough to bruise.

I can still feel the echo of his mouth between my legs, the scrape of his teeth, the sound he made right before he cameundone inside me like he was drowning and I was the last breath he’d ever take.

I should feel marked.

Instead, I feel claimed.

And that’s the part that unsettles me.

Because it’s not just physical. It’s not about dominance or sex or even violence.

It’s about the way he looked at me after. Like he’d already decided I was his.

Like any threat to me was a threat to him.

I don’t know what to do with that kind of protection. I’ve never trusted it before. Not when it came from a man like Elias Voss.

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