Chapter 35

The primary beams of sunrise separated through the room windows, projecting the chamber in a delicate, brilliant gleam. Karl watched the delicate play of light and shadow across Lexi's exposed skin with riveted interest.


In the repercussions of their unstable mating, her highlights were loosened up in rest, all hints of resistance or difficulty smoothed away into an outflow of unadulterated quietness. His wolf thundered somewhere down in happiness at seeing their mate so settled, so wonderfully powerless close to them. A new delicacy sprouted in Karl's chest, warm and overpowering. He yearned to connect and follow the sensitive bend of her cheek, to delight in the habit-forming delicateness of her skin against his calloused fingertips.


In any case, he held himself stable, barely thinking about relaxing because of a paranoid fear of breaking this delicate flawlessness. Starting from the main second he'd got her woods wonderful aroma on the night-kissed breeze, something basic had awoken inside him. An instinctual drive, an attractive force he was unable to oppose regardless of how he attempted. From the outset, Karl had confused it with straightforward, consuming desire - a base, lewd longing to trench and seed his tissue inside a warm, willing body.

He'd yielded to such savage desires on many times before with the females who endeavored to get his meandering attention. Speedy tumbles in obscured recesses, unpleasant couplings driven simply by actual need with no more profound close to home ensnarement. It was simpler like that, more secure. The tradition of his merciless past had solidified Karl's heart to a shard of barbarous obsidian.

But then Lexi had come storming into his world like a cyclone of unchecked determination and vibrant fire. Regardless of his earnest attempts in actuality, she had tunneled underneath his guards with each teased test and dauntless conflict of wills. Mysteriously, he wound up attracted to her in a manner he was unable to think.

Last night should have been like any other swiftly scratched itch, a bout of white-hot passion to slake the fever gripping them both before moving on as if nothing had changed. But from the very first brush of their bodies, from the first silken glide of his arousal into her welcoming depths, it was so much more.

Burying himself to the hilt inside Lexi had been like a blinding revelation, like coming home to a place he'd never known existed. In that endless moment of union, it felt as if every fractured, broken piece within him had fused together into one coherent whole. Complete in a way he could scarcely comprehend, shaken to his very foundations.

Her name had spilled from his lips somewhere between a growl and a prayer as their climaxes crashed over them in relentless waves of rapture. It had been more than a physical release, more than a simple joining of bodies. For those eternal heartbeats, Karl had felt their very souls intertwining into one harmonious existence.

And in the aftermath, as Lexi trembled and whimpered in his arms with the echoes of bliss, Karl had been awestruck by the sheer profundity of what bloomed between them. What he had naively dismissed as a cosmic fluke, a random aligning of the stars to condemn them as mates, was so much deeper and soul-searing that it stole his very breath.

Beyond the inexorable physical need, beyond the feral hunger for her touch, her taste, he was bound to this female on a level he could scarce fathom. Their essences called to one another in a way that terrified and captivated him in equal measure.

How was it that in the span of one joining, his entire world had shaken and resettled into an immutable reality? That he now felt an unshakable sense of foundation, of being inextricably grounded and centered in a way he had never experienced?

All his life, Karl had drifted from one empty encounter to the next, walled off from genuine vulnerability lest he be destroyed from within. Now, in the space of a few incandescent, breathless hours, Lexi had unknowingly become his lodestone. The pull toward her was not a fleeting magnetic whim, but a constant, immovable force tying him to this plane.

To think he had ever entertained notions of dominating her, of attempting to bend her fierce spirit to his will through carnal possession. Now he could only shake his head at his hubris, his willful ignorance of the true depths of their bond. Where before their fiery clashes ignited his temper to explosive fury, now he found himself...appreciating the strength of her convictions, the passion with which she regarded the world.

There were no illusions that Lexi would ever be a demure, acquiescent female content to retreat into the shadows and obey his every whim. Nor did Karl find himself wanting that, despite the primal part of his wolf that craved such archaic notions of dominance and hierarchy.

In truth, her boldness, her unbridled intensity in all things - these were the very qualities that had captured his interest in the first place. A lesser female would have wilted long ago beneath his censure and seething hostility. But not Lexi. She had battled him at every turn, her tenacious spirit fueling his own, drawing him inexorably into her orbit until the lines blurred between mere intrigue and a deeper, inescapable bond.

And now, with the mate bond consummated and their scents, their very essences irrevocably commingled...there was no turning back. No matter what fresh hells loomed on the horizon - and Karl had no doubts more turmoil lurked in the wings - they were bound together, two souls carving out a new destiny, intertwined.

The realization should have made him recoil, should have had him rousing Lexi to put distance between them before the unfurling tendrils of connection took deeper root. In his past, self-imposed isolation had been the only way to prevent the agony that came with daring to drop his guard. To allow someone to slip behind the reinforced walls around his heart.

But even as the wolfishly pragmatic part of him urged retreat, warned of the dangers of such vulnerability...Karl found he could not bring himself to turn away. Not this time. Not from her.

Drinking in the peaceful tranquility writ across Lexi's delicate features, for the first time in longer than he could remember, a profound sense of stillness stole over his restless spirit. As if some part of him intrinsically recognized this place, this moment, this remarkable female beside him as the calm eye in the raging hurricane of his existence.

Perhaps he didn't fully comprehend the fathomless depths of the connection blazing between them, but neither could he deny its existence any longer. He was bound to Lexi, not through sheer physical domination or edict...but by the ineffable, eternal harmonies of two souls resonating as one.

The realization was both humbling and utterly terrifying. But the tender kernel of hope that had taken root inside his battered heart refused to be quashed. Perhaps the most profound shift of all, was Karl's sudden fierce yearning that Lexi would be the one to guide him towards whatever destiny awaited them. That she would persist in her refusal to allow him to erect those isolating walls, even when his first instinct was to retreat to the safety of his well-worn defenses.

Here, cocooned in the first blush of dawn with her scent and warmth surrounding him, Karl knew he stood at a crossroads. One path led back to the cycle of pain, distrust, and self-imposed solitude that had haunted him for so long. The other terrified him with its vast, unexplored vistas of vulnerability and the prospect of shedding his emotional armor in order to fully embrace the profoundly elemental connection they had forged.

His wolf, so often the cunning, savage beast urging ruthless domination, had gone utterly still and quiescent. As if some core facet of its wild nature inherently recognized that Lexi, in all her vibrant intensity, was the key to unleashing a second, more primal metamorphosis. One in which they emerged as something more than a mere apex predator, and crossed a threshold into something transcendently, sacred.

An imperceptible tremor rippled through Lexi's slumbering form, pulling Karl from his revelry. Her brow furrowed ever so slightly, and she murmured something too faint for even his enhanced hearing to discern. Without conscious thought, he found himself reaching out to tenderly smooth the crease between her eyes with the calloused pad of his thumb.

Lexi's lashes fluttered at his gentle caress, and her lips curved into the barest hint of a smile. "I could get used to waking up like this," she whispered, molten amber eyes blinking open to meet his intense regard.
Karl felt something inside him unclench at the soft affection glowing in her expression. Perhaps she sensed the profound shift between them as acutely as he did. Perhaps she too felt the universe itself had stilled, holding its breath as they hovered on the precipice of something at once terrifying and wondrous.
Any response he might have given was cut off by a deafening boom that shook the very foundations of the compound. Lexi jolted upright, eyes going wide with alarm as a distant howl of pain echoed through the air.
Karl was on his feet in an instant, every sense going into high alert. His contentment evaporated like a puff of smoke as realization slammed into him.
They were under attack. Again.
And whatever threat loomed, it would seek to sever the delicate threads woven between him and his newfound mate before they could be reinforced...