Page 45 of Knot Their Safe Haven
I’m so fucking done with men who loved me in shadows but couldn't claim me in light.
No more fucking cowards.
"We're here," someone announced, and the movement stopped. Bright lights penetrated even my closed eyelids. The surgical suite, probably. Where they'd try to put me back together, to fix what the fall had broken.
"You'll have to wait outside now, Mr. Devereaux."
Devereaux. Alessandro Lucien Devereaux.
The name echoed through my consciousness like a bell, confirming what I'd suspected. The boy who'd looked at me like I was worth wanting had become a man who claimed me without hesitation.
"Velvet." His voice was close to my ear again, just for me. "I know you're stubborn enough to die just to spite someone, but if you die on that table, I'll find you in whatever afterlife you believe in and drag you back. You're mine now. Act accordingly."
The audacity of it—the sheer, breathtaking arrogance—should have infuriated me.
Instead, something else bloomed in my chest.
Something that felt dangerously like hope.
His lips pressed to my forehead, lingering just long enough to be a promise rather than a goodbye. Then his hand slipped from mine, and I was being wheeled away, into bright lights and medical voices and whatever came next.
But his words followed me into the darkness that rose to claim me again.
"You're mine now."
Not maybe. Or eventually. Not after twenty more years of careful dancing.
Now.
As consciousness fled, as drugs pulled me under into nothingness, I held onto that word like a lifeline.
Now.
Present tense.
No conditions, hesitation, or fear.
When I woke up—if I woke up—things would be different.
The men who'd circled me for decades without landing would find themselves on the outside, looking in at something they'd been too cowardly to claim. And Alessandro Devereaux, who'd waited seventeen years to make his move, would learn exactly what kind of woman he'd claimed.
The kind who didn't forgive cowardice.
Who didn't accept half-measures.
One who’d been dying slowly for twenty years and had just been given a reason to live.
The anesthesia mask covered my face, and someone was counting backward from ten. But all I could think about were emerald eyes in dark water, and how sometimes salvation came from the most unexpected places.
"You're mine now."
Yes, I thought as darkness claimed me completely.
But more importantly?—
You might be mine too.
The last thought before nothing was of French conjugations, dangerous smiles, and a boy who'd grown into a man who did what needed to be done.
