Chapter 7: please reject me
Vivian Grey’s POV
When we stopped, it wasn’t gentle.
He tossed me, not hard, but definitely without warning, and I landed on something soft that sent me bouncing once, twice.
I blinked up at the ceiling, stunned.
A bed.
He’d thrown me onto a bed.
The room was dim, lit only by slivers of daylight slipping through thick curtains. The air was still, but tense. My instincts screamed, every nerve in me suddenly alert. I scrambled back, eyes wide, my breath shallow. The door stood behind him, and he filled the space completely.
He didn’t say a word. He just looked at me.
Zaliver stood in the doorway, shadowed and sharp. His lips parted slightly, and I caught a glimpse of canines longer than they should be. His head tilted, exposing his throat, and then he started moving.
Each step was slow. Measured. Predatory.
I watched helplessly as he stalked toward the bed. His lashes cast dark shadows over his stormy eyes, making him look even more dangerous. And yet there was something magnetic in the way he moved, something that rooted me in place, that had my gaze locked onto him even as my brain screamed to run.
I darted a glance at the door. Too far. He saw it too.
He smirked and clicked his tongue softly. Then, without breaking eye contact, he reached for the hem of his black shirt and pulled it over his head.
My breath hitched.
Oh.
My wolf howled low in the back of my mind, restless and pacing. Zaliver’s body was everything I feared and everything I craved. Broad shoulders, a chest carved with muscle. His skin looked warm, and I had the most ridiculous urge to touch him.
He was perfection in a nightmare setting.
"Am I to your liking?" he asked, voice deep and rich, taking another step closer.
I was panting. Literally panting.
This was insane. I’d never been in a situation like this. No guy had ever tossed me onto a bed, taken his shirt off, and then looked at me like he was deciding whether to devour me with his mouth or his claws.
I cleared my throat and forced the haze from my head, met his eyes, kept my tone flat.
"You’re a solid eight out of ten."
It was dumb. Stupid, even. But I wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction.
I expected him to laugh, or maybe scoff.
What I didn’t expect was for him to lunge.
He came at me with a flash of fury on his face, and I screamed, rolling just in time to avoid his hands.
I hit the floor with a thud and scrambled to my feet, my hair wild around my face. But before I could make a run for it, a strong hand snatched my wrist and yanked me straight into his chest.
Bare skin met mine.
His arms wrapped around me, and we fell back together. I gasped, bracing for impact, but he twisted us midair so that when we hit the bed again, he landed on top, straddling me.
My wrists were pinned above my head in one hand.
I stared up at him, panting, hair tangled around my face, heart hammering. His weight, his heat, his scent, it overwhelmed everything.
And oddly, I wasn’t scared. Not in the way I should have been.
Part of me felt something else. Something dangerous. Something thrilling. Like this was a game I didn’t know I’d agreed to play.
He leaned in close, so close I could feel his breath ghosting across my skin, and began to nuzzle my neck with his nose. The drag of it tickled, making me squirm slightly beneath him. My fingers itched with the urge to touch him, but I held back, tense as his arms tightened around me.
"You were going to reject me, weren’t you?" His voice dropped low. "Even after I told you that you’re mine."
He paused there, his mouth still against my throat, and for half a second I felt something in him still, the way a held breath stills a room.
"Such a thing to say," he murmured, quieter now, almost to himself.
The words landed strangely. Not like a threat. Like something he’d heard before, somewhere else, said by someone else, and I’d just accidentally handed it back to him.
His grip on my wrists didn’t loosen, but something in his face did. The fury banked into something heavier. Older.
I stiffened. "N-No, I wasn’t," I shook my head quickly, panic sliding into my throat, though I wasn’t entirely sure now what I was panicking about. "I didn’t mean it. I was angry, that’s all. I swear I didn’t mean it."
And I hadn’t. Goddess, I’d said it out of sheer frustration and fear and fury. It wasn’t the truth. Not really.
Zaliver didn’t answer right away. He’d gone somewhere else entirely, his eyes fixed on a point just past my shoulder, like he wasn’t looking at me at all anymore.
"You smell like rain before a storm," he said, almost to himself, and his voice had lost its purr. It had gone flat. Distant.
I froze, every muscle in my body locking up at once.
This wasn’t the same man who’d had his nose at my throat thirty seconds ago. Something had shut a door behind his eyes, and I had no idea what I’d said to close it.
"Let go of me," I said, quieter this time, no longer trying to provoke him. Something about the stillness in him scared me more than the lunge had.
He didn’t move at first. When he finally did speak, his voice had gone cold in a different way than before, not heated and possessive, but hollow.
"You don’t get to say things like that to me," he said. "Not you. Not yet."
I didn’t understand what he meant, and the not understanding was its own kind of fear. "Like what? I don’t even know what I said."
He didn’t answer that either. His jaw worked once, like he was biting back something he had no intention of giving me, and then, just as suddenly as he’d gone distant, the heat came back into his eyes, dark and sharp again, though something underneath it had changed.
"Forget it," he said.
"No," I shot back, my own anger rising to meet whatever this was. "You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to go somewhere else mid-sentence and then tell me to forget it. Whatever just happened, I want to know what it was."
"It’s not your business."
"You invaded my mind." The words came tumbling out before I could stop them, fury bubbling up from everything he’d done. "My memories. Things you had no right to see. You could’ve just asked me. But no, you chose to rip through my head like I was some criminal. And now you want privacy? Get the hell off me."
I thrashed beneath him, my pulse racing, my skin burning with the unfairness of it. Zaliver’s face shifted, his expression darkening as he pulled back. His teeth were bared, canines gleaming. His eyes shifted from blue to jet black, the storm rolling in fast.
I met his snarl with one of my own, letting my wolf rise. I wasn’t going to flinch this time. Not when I knew I was right.
His messy hair fell over his eyes, shadows licking at the sharp angles of his face. He opened his mouth, then paused. A breath left him, slow and heavy, and he pulled back, lifting himself off the bed without another word.
He reached for his shirt and yanked it back over his head, his eyes gradually shifting back to their icy blue, though the warmth never returned to them. The moment was broken. Tension still crackled in the air, but the fire had dulled into something colder and far more unreadable than what had started it.
Whatever I’d said, it hadn’t been about me at all. I was almost certain of that now. And not knowing who it had actually been about scared me more than anything he’d done since I woke up in this house.
Then the door swung open.
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