Chapter 140: FALLING FOR YOU
RYKER
I had a plan.
The plan was simple. Get close to Amaris. Stir up desire in her. Make her want me. Use whatever she felt for me to burn down everything my father was trying to build with her, and walk away from the wreckage without carrying a single piece of it.
I had done this kind of thing before. I was good at it. I had never once failed to walk away clean.
Now I was standing at my window at five in the morning watching the sky go grey and failing to remember the last time I slept properly, and the plan felt like something someone else had made in another life.
The first time I met her my wolf had taken over and I had told myself it meant nothing.
The second time I swore I would ruin her and I had believed every word of it.
I believed it right up until I didn’t, which was the part I had no explanation for. No clear moment where I could point and say there, that was where it went wrong, that was the thing that cracked the plan open. It had just happened, gradually and then all at once, the way things did when you weren’t paying attention to the right things.
Now my father was the one getting what he wanted and I was standing here with my head completely fucked and a rage I had nowhere to put.
He was going to have her tonight.
Before midnight she would be bound to him permanently, in a way that couldn’t be undone without blood, and I had spent every hour since pacing this room looking for the version of this where that was something I could live with.
There wasn’t one.
I had thought about going to my father.
Made it all the way down the hall to his study before I stopped with my fist raised and nothing useful in my head to say if he opened that door. He would look at me with those empty eyes and tell me that what Amaris wanted was irrelevant to his plans, and I would stand there unable to argue because that’s how the world worked and I had always known it, and none of knowing it would make me want any less to drive my fist into his face until something gave.
I walked back to my room.
Sat at my desk. Got up. Lay down. Got up again.
I had never in my life lost sleep over a woman. Not once.
Amaris was the exception and I did not know what to do with that, which was its own kind of fury, standing in the middle of my room at five in the morning unable to name what was happening in my own chest.
I had come here to ruin her.
She had ruined me instead, and the worst part was she hadn’t even tried.
I stopped fighting it eventually and walked to her door.
I stood outside with my hand on the frame and didn’t knock, just stood there while the sounds of the morning started up faintly below, the pack stirring, someone crossing the courtyard.
Eventually my knuckles hit the wood once.
The door opened and she was standing there and the look on her face told me she had known it was me before she opened it.
"Can I come in," I said.
She stepped back without a word.
I walked in and stopped in the middle of her room. The breakfast tray by the window was untouched. She stood a few feet away with her arms loose at her sides and I stood there realizing I still had nothing prepared to say, which was embarrassing for someone who had once mapped out every conversation three moves in advance.
"How are you doing," I said.
She looked at me for a moment. "Fantastic. Really living my best life."
I didn’t laugh.
She watched my face when I didn’t and the gaze in her expression pulled back, the sarcasm dropping away.
I crossed the room until I was close enough to see the tiredness around her eyes she was working hard to hide. "I don’t want this to happen."
"What do you mean?"
"Tonight." It came out harder than I planned. "I don’t want you to go through with it."
She held my gaze and then looked toward the window where pack members were already threading white flowers along the courtyard fence for the ceremony. "I don’t have a choice, Ryker."
"There is always a choice."
"Is there?" She turned back to look at me, her eyes steady and flat. "Tell me what it is."
I had nothing.
"I could run." She said it carefully, like she was testing whether I would flinch. "Is that what you’re suggesting?"
I said nothing.
"Ryker." Her voice dropped lower. "What would you have me do?"
I reached up and took her face in both hands before I had made any decision to do it, her jaw in my palms, and I felt the small sharp breath she pulled in at the contact.
I pressed my mouth to hers.
She made a sound low in her throat and her hands grabbed my shirt, fingers twisting hard into the fabric.
I walked her backward until her back hit the wall and she still didn’t let go. I felt the grip of her, desperate and tight, and I matched it, one hand sliding into her hair and the other pressing flat to the wall beside her head, and she pulled me closer instead of back, the way someone did when they had been fighting something for a long time and simply stopped.
I pulled back just enough to breathe.
Her eyes opened slowly. Fingers still in my shirt, chest rising and falling fast, lips swollen.
Outside someone called across the courtyard about the flower arrangements for tonight.
Her voice came out low and slightly wrecked when she finally spoke. "What would you have me do, Ryker? Run away with you."
I looked at her face, at this woman I had walked in here planning to destroy, and felt what I had been carrying all night push its way up past every wall I had built.
"I think I’m falling for you, Amaris."
