Time moved with a cruel sort of patience, each day seeping into the next until they were indistinguishable, until the weeks blurred into a fog of longing and regret. Her absence had settled deep inside him, an ache in his bones that turned every breath into a small act of endurance, every waking moment into a slow, unending punishment.
A month passed like that, an unbearable month that seemed designed to taunt him. The hours stretched until they felt endless, each one dragging him further into the hollow she had left behind.
He had lasted less than half a day before giving in. The very next morning, he was already walking back toward Moonbrew, reckless with the kind of desperation that did not listen to reason. It felt like instinct, like something that came from somewhere older and deeper than thought, a pull that cared for nothing but her. There had been no plan, no rehearsed words, no careful approach. Only the need to see her. To make her hear him. To make her understand that whatever she believed she had seen, it was nothing compared to what she was to him, nothing compared to the way she had altered him so completely that he no longer knew how to exist without her.
He felt it before he even saw the door. The magic struck him like a wall of ice, invisible but absolute, its surface thrumming with the steady pulse of her power. It made no sound, yet it screamed at him all the same. The moment he tried to step forward, the spell responded without hesitation, repelling him with a quiet, crushing certainty. It felt deliberate, as though it had been waiting for him. As though she had known he would come and wanted to be sure that when he did, there would be no question of what her choice had been.
This was no hex meant to harm or intimidate. There was no violence in it, no malice. That made it far worse. It was rejection shaped into magic, strong and unmistakably hers, holding him at bay with unshakable resolve. It was the kind of spell that did not bruise the skin but struck deeper, that took root in the chest and made it hard to breathe.
He pressed against it, palms flat against the air, shoulders set as his magic surged and strained in answer. His body behaved as if he could fight it, as if persistence might crack it open, as if sheer will could undo what she had made.
But it would not break. It was her will bound into every thread of the spell, a wall stitched together with something final, something absolute, something that left no room for hope. And it told him with perfect clarity that he was not welcome. That he would never be welcome again.
He had called for her, whispering her name into the stillness of the early morning, his voice frayed and unsteady, stripped of the control he had always worn like armor. The words came out quiet but full of something raw, something close to breaking. He asked for only a moment, a single breath of her attention, enough time to tell her that he was sorry, that he had been a fool, that nothing else mattered but her. He wanted her to know that she had become the center of his world, the point around which every thought and every instinct turned.
But there was nothing. No sound from within, no shift in the curtains, no faint shadow moving behind the glass. The shop stood silent and still, and for all he knew, she was not even there. Yet he waited.
Hours bled away while he stood rooted to the same spot, as unmoving as stone, unwilling to accept what was written so clearly before him. The cold crept into his bones, but he stayed, convinced that if he endured long enough, something might change. Nothing did.
And so it became a pattern, one he could not stop. Every morning, he returned, the act becoming a quiet punishment he inflicted upon himself, a ritual steeped in the stubborn hope that she might falter, that her anger would soften, that the spell would lift.
But the magic never yielded. Each day, he pressed his hands to it, felt the same unrelenting cold, heard only the silence pressing back against him. He knew she was not listening. He knew she would not answer. He knew she had spoken her truth the night she told him to stay away, and that she had meant every word.
Some days, his voice was steady, composed, coaxing, as if he could reason with magic itself, as if words alone could rebuild what had been so violently broken. Other days, he was not so composed. Other days, he shattered. He shouted, slammed his fists against the unyielding force of her spell, let his magic flare wildly around him, let himself break apart in the only place where she had ever felt like home. He let her see it, whether she was watching or not, let her hear the way she had ruined him, let her feel the aftermath of what she had left behind. And yet, no matter how much he burned, no matter how much he begged, no matter how much his magic lashed out against the invisible boundary she had placed between them, it never changed.
She never came outside. She never spoke. She never let him in.
At night, in the vast and suffocating solitude of the manor, grief became a creature with weight and breath, coiling itself around his ribs until he could hardly draw air. The emptiness seemed to expand without end, swallowing him in silence, turning every shadow into her outline, every groan of the old house into the echo of a memory he could not shake.
He had never been the sort of man to cry. Not once had he allowed himself to break in such an unguarded, undignified way; it was not how he had been raised, not what Malfoys were meant to do. But that was before her. Before her laughter had threaded itself through the quietest corners of his life. Before her warmth had seeped into the cold places he had thought would always remain untouched. Before she had become the only thing in his world worth weeping for, the only thing that could keep him awake at night long after the fire had burned down to embers.
He chased oblivion in every form he could find. Gin that burned all the way down, firewhiskey that lit his veins, darker brews that shimmered faintly with the telltale pull of magic. They promised a night without dreams, promised nothingness, promised to quiet the restlessness that clawed at his mind. For an hour or two, they dulled the sharp edges, softened the ache, made his limbs heavy enough to sink into the mattress without thought. But they could not take her from him.
She lingered in the spaces she had once filled, in the scent of her hair that still clung to his pillow, in the ghost of her touch that his skin refused to forget. No potion could drive out the way she had taken root inside him like an unshakable sickness. No spell could silence the sound of her name, low and insistent, whispering against the walls of his mind until the first light of dawn bled into the room.
He had cried to God, to Merlin, to the universe itself, to anything that might take pity on him. He had whispered apologies into the cold sheets beside him, had stared at the ceiling until the first light of morning, aching, suffocating, drowning in the relentless loss of her. More than once, he pressed his palms hard against his eyes, as if he could physically push the memories away, as if he could scrub her from his mind like ink from parchment, as if he could undo the way she had become the first thought when he woke and the final image before sleep.
But there was no escape. He could not will her away. He could not drink her away. He could not even summon the anger to hate her for leaving, because the only person he hated was himself.
When the silence grew too loud, when the manor's walls seemed to lean in on him until he could hardly breathe, he went to Blaise.
Blaise, who had watched the slow unravelling, who had tried to help. Who had shoved drinks into his hands, dragged him to dinners, steered him into rooms full of beautiful, willing strangers in a desperate attempt to distract him. Nothing worked. Nothing could reach into the hollowed, burning wreckage of his chest and make it stop.
Blaise had seen him at his worst before. He had been there in the aftermath of the war, when guilt and self-loathing had nearly eaten Draco alive, when the weight of his father's name had felt like a curse that would never lift. But this was different. This was not guilt. It was not shame. It was not an internal reckoning with sins long past.
It was loss—pure, unfiltered, cruel. It had sunk its roots deep and would not let go. Blaise, who always seemed to know when to leave him to his ruin and when to pull him back from the edge, had tried to haul him out of it. But Draco had no interest in being saved.
He wanted to stay there. He wanted to sink further, to feel every jagged edge of what he had lost, to let it cut him open, to let it bleed him dry, to let it consume every last piece of who he was. Because if he let go, if he moved on, if he dulled the pain enough to breathe again, then what was left of him? What did he become without the part of himself that only existed in her presence?
Blaise told him it would pass, that he had survived worse, that time would find a way to close even the deepest wounds. But Draco did not want this wound to close. He did not want distance from it. He did not want to be okay. He wanted her—her voice, her hands, her laughter, her maddening, impossible, irreplaceable existence. He wanted her in ways he had not understood until the moment she was gone.
The days blurred together, indistinguishable from one another, a loop of pain and longing and self-inflicted torment. His mind never stopped replaying it—the moment she walked away, the moment she disappeared, the moment he knew with absolute certainty that he had lost something irreplaceable. It haunted him, followed him like a specter, like a punishment, like a cruel reminder that he had held something rare, something once-in-a-lifetime, something that could never be replicated, and he had let it slip through his fingers.
He could still feel her, still feel the ghost of her touch against his skin, still hear the softness of her voice curling around his name, still remember the way her lips had felt against his, the way she had melted into him when she kissed him, the way she had made him feel like he belonged somewhere for the first time in his entire fucking life. And now, she was gone, and he was drowning.
He was drowning, and no one could save him.
By the time the second month came and went, Draco had stopped expecting her. The first few weeks had been unbearable, a torment of waiting and hoping, of convincing himself that she would come back, that she would change her mind, that she would give him a chance to explain, to fix what had been broken between them.
Every morning he woke with the suffocating weight of expectation, his ears straining for the sound of footsteps in the hall, his eyes flicking toward the door as though she might appear at any moment. He imagined her walking in as if nothing had happened, imagined her looking at him with the same quiet intensity that had once been enough to undo him, imagined her giving him the chance to make it right.
But the days bled into weeks, and the weeks stretched into months, and still there was nothing. No letters. No whispered rumors of her in the village. No fleeting glimpses of pale hair at Moonbrew. Not a single sign that she had ever been real at all.
The silence pressed in on him, heavy and unyielding, a constant ache that settled deep into his bones. He had told himself he could endure it, that he could bear the emptiness, that perhaps if he suffered long enough, if he repented enough, the universe might take pity and bring her back. But the universe had never done him favors before, and it was not about to start now.
*
When the furious pounding on his front door shattered the dead silence of the night, and the unmistakable sound of her voice, sharp and seething, cut through the corridors of the manor like a battle cry, he did not think. He moved. His body was already in motion, running, taking the grand staircase two at a time, moving with the reckless urgency of a man who had just been given the smallest sliver of a second chance. His fingers clumsily found the lock, his breath lodged somewhere high in his chest, his pulse roaring in his ears so violently he thought he might collapse before he even saw her face.
And then she was there.
The love of his fucking life. The one thing in the world that mattered. The only thing that had ever mattered. She stood in the doorway like an avenging angel, like a storm given flesh, a vision of rage and devastation. Her hair was wild from the wind, her cheeks flushed with fury, her eyes alight with something that made his knees weaken. She was everything. Absolutely everything. And she was here, standing in front of him after all the endless, hollow days without her, looking like she might kill him where he stood.
Draco had never been so fucking in love.
Her hands clutched a thick stack of paperwork, the grip so tight that the edges bent and the pages crumpled under the strain. Her entire body seemed to vibrate with barely contained rage, the air around her alive with the crackle of her magic, as if a storm was about to break. She wasn't just furious. She was wrecked, shaken to her core, and holding herself together by a thread. And every last bit of it was because of him.
"Why would you do that?" she demanded, her voice cutting through the stillness between them with the precision of a blade. "No one asked you to do that. You are just… selfish."
She did not wait for him to speak. Before he could even part his lips, she shoved the papers hard against his chest. The impact landed sharper than the motion should have allowed, as if her rage alone had given it weight. The pages bent under his hands, but he hardly noticed. All he could see was her—the fierce, untamed light in her eyes, the deep flush on her cheeks, the way her fingers trembled as she fought to keep her composure.
"I did it for you." His voice was low and steady, but he knew the instant the words left his mouth that they would never be enough.
Her laugh was short, bitter, and empty, the sound curling through his ribs like a blade meant to wound.
"I would never ask you for money, Malfoy. Never. Why would you pay my debt? And why would you…" She stopped herself, inhaling sharply as though speaking the rest would only make her fury burn hotter. Her head shook, disbelief radiating from her. "Why would you rent it for ten years in advance?"
"Because you care about that place." The words came without hesitation, without thought, because nothing else mattered.
Luna let out another sharp, incredulous breath and shook her head again. Her lips twisted as her hands clenched at the fabric of her coat, as if she needed the anchor to keep from hurling a hex at him then and there.
"It is my decision," she shot back, her voice climbing, her hands trembling under the weight of her fury. "If they take it away, it is fine. Maybe it is not meant to be." Her breath caught, just barely, the smallest hitch, but enough for him to hear it. Enough for him to know she did not believe a single word she was saying. When she spoke again, her voice had dropped, but the softness made it cut deeper. "Sounds familiar, doesn't it?"
Draco froze.
The words struck like a curse, a direct hit to the chest, each syllable carrying the echo of every mistake he had ever made.
"Please stop it." His voice was raw, frayed with something that sounded too close to begging.
Luna let out a sharp scoff, shaking her head and stepping back. It was the kind of step that told him she was finished, the kind that said she was ready to walk away from him all over again, to rip out what little remained of his heart and vanish into the night.
But then her eyes slid past him toward the armchair in the corner, where an oversized bundle of knitted fabric slouched over the side.
"And stop buying sweaters for my cow," she snapped, her frustration breaking past the point of control, spilling over into something ridiculous and so completely her that he should have laughed. He should have found some shred of amusement in the absurdity of it. "She looks hideous."
Draco blinked, momentarily thrown. "She will get a cold," he muttered, and even to his own ears he sounded pathetic.
Her glare was instant and scorching. "She is fine. Just fine." Her hands curled into fists, her breathing uneven and ragged. "We are fine without you."
That was the blow that broke him.
The sentence hit like a punch to the gut, sharp and final, stripping the air from his lungs. We are fine without you. Words so absolute, so irrevocable, that he felt them tear through him in one clean motion. His chest was tight, his vision narrowing under the weight of them. He could not breathe. He could not think. He could not stand there and let her believe that, let her say that, let her walk out on him again.
His body moved before his mind could catch up, before reason could sink its claws in, before he could remind himself that she was furious, that she might never forgive him. He stepped forward and caught her. Not rough, not cruel, but with the grip of a man drowning, of a man starving, of a man who had already lost too much to let her slip away again.
She gasped, startled, but he was already hauling her against him, lifting her like she weighed nothing and swinging her over his shoulder in one unbroken motion. She let out a sharp, furious shriek, her legs kicking, her fists pounding against his back, her voice ringing through the hall like the cry of something cornered. None of it made him loosen his hold. None of it slowed him.
"Put me down, you absolute bastard!"
"No." The word was low, a growl dragged from somewhere deep, final in a way that left no room for argument.
He carried her through the foyer, his stride unshaken, past the wide marble staircase, past the exact spot where she had walked out on him weeks ago, past the place where his entire world had collapsed. He did not pause. He did not care if she hexed him where he stood. This time he was not letting her go.
He reached the sitting room and crossed to the sofa in three long strides. He set her down, not harshly but with enough force to keep her there, enough to knock the breath from her protests. She sat rigid for a heartbeat, then pushed herself upright with both hands braced on the armrest, her eyes sparking with outrage, her whole body tensed to fight.
He moved before she could. Dropping to his knees in front of her, he gripped the arms of the sofa, boxing her in completely, leaving her no room to escape, no space to retreat.
His breath was ragged, his chest rising too fast, too sharp. The thud of his heartbeat was violent in his ears, as if it knew that this was the edge, the moment where everything would either be salvaged or lost forever.
His thoughts tore through him in frantic loops, running over every way he might fix this, every word that might keep her here, every plea he might spill before she slipped away again. But no matter how he turned it over in his mind, no matter how he tried to shape it, there was no clean path forward, no gentle solution, no version of this where he did not bleed for her.
"My love."
The words slipped out before he could stop them, before thought could catch up, before he could weigh what they meant or imagine how she might respond. He had never spoken them to her like this, never said them out loud, never risked the truth in so naked a form.
The sound of them seemed to change the air. Her lips parted, her body went unnaturally still, her breath caught in a way that told him he had struck something deep, something raw, something neither of them was prepared for. Her anger dimmed, not gone but blurred at the edges, leaving space for something softer, something dangerous, something he might have mistaken for hope if he were foolish enough to believe he still had a chance.
"My love, please forgive me for my sins." His voice was hoarse, quiet enough to make her lean in to hear it, but the weight behind it was heavier than anything he had ever spoken.
His hands trembled where they gripped the fabric of the couch. His whole body was bowed toward her, not as a display but as a surrender. "I had a silent agreement with Astoria. She would be my mistress, nothing more, someone to satisfy my needs and nothing else. But never in my life..." His breath caught, his throat tightened, his chest ached with the truth he was about to lay bare. "Never in my life did I imagine you would come into my world and change everything."
She didn't move. She didn't speak. She didn't shove him away or cut him off. She simply sat there, still and unreadable, letting him give away every last broken, desperate piece of himself.
"Please, Luna." His hands reached for her, fingers grazing the fabric of her dress, closing around the edge of her sleeve as though it was the last thread keeping him in place. "Forgive my sins."
If she said no, if she walked away again, if she left him now, he did not know how he would survive it.
The silence stretched until she finally exhaled, a slow, deliberate sound that felt like the shape of a decision. "You expect me to forgive you." It was not a question, not an accusation, not even sharp with anger anymore. It was only a statement, but it landed with the weight of a curse.
He had no answer. He did not know how to defend himself. He had never begged for anything, not like this, not for something that mattered. He had never knelt before anyone, never stripped himself down to something fragile and unworthy yet willing to be remade. And yet here he was, offering all of it to her.
"It was before you," he said at last, his voice low and frayed, desperate for her to see the truth. "Before I knew it would be you. Before I even knew I had been waiting for you."
Her inhale was sharp, the first crack in the mask. He saw it and knew he had reached something real.
"And you ended it?"
"Yes."
"When?"
He froze. Of course she would ask that. Of course she would make him say it. He could not lie to her, not about this, not about the only thing that mattered.
"The night you left."
Silence fell again, colder this time, edged with something like disappointment, something like inevitability.
"Not before."
He wanted to lie. He wanted to tell her it had been over long before, that Astoria had been nothing but a mistake, that it had ended the moment Luna stepped into his life. But the truth was crueller. He had been a coward, clinging to what was easy, keeping the arrangement because it asked nothing of him, because it spared him the pain of facing how far he had already fallen for her.
Her fingers twitched at her sides, curling into the fabric of her dress. It was the only sign she was holding herself together.
"You kept another woman in your bed while chasing after me."
"It was not like that."
"Wasn't it?"
Her voice did not rise. She did not lash out or scream. She did not throw the nearest breakable thing across the room. Somehow, that restraint was worse. This cold, steady devastation, this quiet and deliberate unravelling of the last fragile thread between them, was far more dangerous than rage. He would have preferred the fire, would have taken her magic burning through him, would have welcomed the sting of her fury over the weight of this silence.
"I never touched her after you," he swore, his voice low and hoarse, his hands reaching for her. She stepped back before he could get close. "I swear on everything I have ever been. The second I knew what you were to me, it was only you."
Luna did not move. Her expression gave nothing away, but her eyes told the truth he feared. Those eyes, pale and unyielding, saw through him as if she could strip away every careful mask, every excuse, every small self-deception. She did not need magic to do it. Just a look.
He hated that she could undo him this way. That she could make him feel small. That she could remind him what it meant to love without safety nets, to give himself over to someone who could break him in half without ever lifting her wand.
When she spoke again, it was with the slow certainty of someone who had already chosen which way this would go.
"Have you fucked her while we were together? Tell me the truth."
There was no anger in the question. No accusation. Just the blunt necessity of it, a demand for an answer before anything else could happen, before she could decide whether to stay or go, before she could decide if she would let him keep her.
The words had barely formed before his response came.
"No. Never."
The sound of it was sharp and absolute. He had never meant anything more in his life. He had never spoken with such conviction, such urgency, such desperate need for her to believe him.
She did not speak. She did not blink. She only stood there, watching him in that unbearable stillness, as if she were waiting for something he could not name, something deeper than words, something that would cost him more than he had ever given anyone.
His breath was ragged, uneven, every inhale catching like it hurt, every exhale sounding like surrender. His whole body was locked so tight with restraint that his jaw ached and his hands twitched where they hung uselessly at his sides. He could not stop now. Not when this was the only moment he had to give her everything, to lay himself bare, to let her see every ruined, shattered, pathetic piece of him before she decided whether to walk away for good.
When he finally spoke, his voice came raw and jagged, torn from his throat like a wound that refused to close.
"I fucked her the day you sat next to me."
The words fell between them like a death blow, heavy and irreversible. They bled out into the air, ripping it wide open, leaving no space for misunderstanding, no cover for excuses, no shield from the brutal truth.
"That was the moment I knew I was finished. I invited her over, I fucked her, and I could not even look her in the eyes because all I could think about was you."
His pulse thundered in his ears. His stomach twisted until nausea rose in his throat. His own disgust scraped along his skin. Saying it aloud made it worse. It made it real. It made him want to tear himself apart until there was nothing left to remember.
"I imagined it was you."
The words came quieter, darker, steeped in something wrecked and beyond repair, something that carried the taste of pure self-loathing.
"Even then, even with her under me, I was thinking about you. Even fucking someone else made me think of you."
The silence that followed was a living thing, pressing in, waiting for the final break, like the charged air before lightning tears the sky in half.
But she did not react the way he thought she would.
Luna did not flinch. She did not tremble. She did not shatter under the weight of what he had said. Her lips curved slightly instead, her gaze cooling, her expression shifting into something distant, something that hollowed out his chest.
Indifference.
It looked like indifference.
He knew better. He knew that behind that stillness was something sharper than anger, something more merciless than rage. Disappointment. And it was worse. So much worse.
"Should I congratulate you?"
Her tone was light, almost amused, but the devastation was threaded through every word. She held herself perfectly steady, as if she were holding together a structure that could collapse at any second.
"No."
The answer came fast, certain, final. This was not something to take pride in. Not something he could defend. Not something she should ever have had to endure.
Luna's breath came slow and measured, a controlled release that gave away nothing, but he felt it anyway. Something in her had shifted. Something had hardened. Something colder had settled in her, and he knew he had just lost something that would never return.
"Well… I had my adventures too, just so you know."
The words slammed into him like a curse designed to linger, the kind that did not kill outright but dragged you through every second of its poison before it finished the job.
His vision narrowed. His thoughts turned savage, tangled with a heat that was more animal than human, a fury that clawed up from somewhere primal.
"Who was that?"
It came out a snarl, low and dangerous, the sound of something on the verge of breaking its chain.
She did not blink. Did not flinch. Did not soften. Her lips curved slowly, her eyes flashing with something that felt like the edge of a blade, something deliberate and merciless.
"Stop the dramatics," she murmured, tilting her head like she was studying him under glass, like she wanted to see exactly how far he could fall before he shattered. Her voice was calm and dismissive, and it told him she knew exactly what she was doing.
"It was just a random man."
No. Not good enough. Not nearly enough to quiet the pounding in his skull.
"That man is dead from now on."
The words carried no bluff. His voice had gone rough and lethal, the kind of tone that meant there was no line he would not cross, no cost too high if it meant erasing the fact of another man touching her.
Luna's gaze stayed locked on his. She lifted her chin in challenge, a hum slipping from her lips, steady and unshaken. She was testing him. Pushing him. Taunting him.
"He was a good fuck, actually," she said, her eyes bright with cruel amusement, watching him fracture piece by piece. "He made me come. It was fun—"
He did not let her finish.
One heartbeat and he was on her. The air between them vanished as his hands closed around her arms, dragging her up so fast she gave a startled gasp. There was no pause, no room for thought, only the violent surge of need that had been coiled inside him for too long.
The sound of fabric tearing split the room, sharp and brutal. Her dress gave way under his grip, leaving her skin bared to the cold air, leaving her caught between them, pinned in the war they had been fighting since the first moment their eyes met.
Magic flared off her in a rush, hot and dangerous, sparking in the air around them like a warning shot. Her gaze told him exactly what her magic did. She was not prey. She would never be claimed without a fight.
But Draco did not care. He could not care, not when she had done this to him, not when she had driven him to the edge and left him there, not when she had let him suffer in silence for months while she moved through the world untouched, unbothered, untouched by the ruins she had left behind.
She had provoked him with precision, wielding her words like a dagger, cutting him open until he bled for her, stripping away every last thread of restraint he had clung to. She had looked him in the eye and dared him to prove whether he was man or monster, and now she would find out.
He had spent weeks drowning in the agony of her absence, clawing his way through a darkness that would not lift, and tonight she had stood in front of him and spoken about another man. Another man in her bed. Another man where only he should have been. She had shattered what was left of him. There was no coming back from that. No returning to the fragile truce they had once balanced on. She had done this. She had asked for what would come next.
Draco Malfoy did not beg. He did not plead.
Draco Malfoy took what was his.
And she would be his for a lifetime.
Because he loved her in a way that devoured him. Loved her with a madness that burned through every vein, a hunger that gnawed at him until he could not think. It hurt and it consumed, burrowing into his bones until it felt like he could not breathe without it. It had rewritten the shape of his existence without his consent. It was need. It was obsession. It was a sickness that would never leave him, a possession he would never try to cure.
His gaze devoured her, tracing every inch of newly exposed skin with the kind of hunger that committed every detail to memory. She stood there breathless, trembling, and defiant, as though she wanted to fight him but could not summon the words. Her body had already betrayed her. The quick flutter of her pulse at the delicate column of her throat told him she was already lost, already his, and had always been his.
"You are wearing matching baby blue underwear."
His voice was low, threaded with amusement and heavy with satisfaction, entirely too pleased by what he saw. She had done this on purpose. She had dressed for him, choosing something delicate and pretty, something meant to be looked at, something meant to be destroyed.
"Let me go," she said, but the plea was weak. Her palms rested against his chest with no force behind them, no real intent to push him away, no real wish to stop him.
"Never."
The word was final. It was a vow and a truth that had existed between them from the beginning, even in the moments she tried to pretend otherwise.
Before she could argue, before she could gather any strength to resist him, he lifted her. His hands gripped her thighs and spread her open, pinning her against the nearest wall as though she weighed nothing. The cool surface pressed against her back was a sharp contrast to the heat of his body, to the way his hips locked her in place, to the way his fingers clung with a possessive desperation that told her there was no escape. He was finished with her games. Finished pretending she could walk away. Finished allowing her to believe she had any choice in this.
Her chest rose and fell too quickly, her head tilting back, her magic sparking against his skin. It curled around them in wild threads, wrapping them in something untamed and beyond control, something neither of them would stop even if they could.
"Please, let me go."
The words barely left her lips, almost too faint to hear, and he knew they carried no true intent. He felt it in the way her thighs tightened against him, in the way her body leaned into his, in the way she was already yielding without meaning to.
"Never."