Snow had been falling for hours, blanketing city in white so thick that the streetlamps outside our window became nothing more than fuzzy halos of gold suspended in darkness.
The world had gone quiet in that particular way it does during heavy snowfall—muffled, intimate, as if the universe had drawn curtains around our small apartment and declared it separate from everything else.
Mikael sat at his desk reviewing correspondence, his reading glasses perched on his nose in a way that made him look unexpectedly approachable. Scholarly. Human, rather than the weapon I knew him to be.
This is probably the last time I'll see him like this.
The thought had been circling my mind all evening, growing heavier with each passing hour.
I moved before I could talk myself out of it, crossing the room and sliding onto his lap with a deliberateness that made his breath catch. His hands came up automatically to steady me, papers scattering forgotten across the desk.
"The correspondence can wait," I said, removing his glasses and setting them aside. "I can't."
"Wren…" Whatever protest he'd been forming died when I kissed him, slow and deep, pouring everything I couldn't say into the press of my lips against his.
His response was immediate—months of carefully maintained coy crumbling under the weight of whatever he read in that kiss.
His hands fisted in my sweater, dragging me closer, and when I pulled back to breathe, his eyes had gone dark with something that made the heat pool low in my stomach.
"Bedroom," I whispered against his mouth. "Now."
He stood without releasing me, lifting me like I weighed nothing—which, compared to him, I practically did. The size difference that had once felt intimidating now felt like safety, like being held by something powerful enough to protect me from everything except myself.
We fell onto the mattress in a tangle of limbs, his weight pressing me into the quilts in a way that should have felt suffocating but instead felt like safety. Like home.
Like everything I was about to lose.
"Too many clothes," I gasped against his mouth, tugging at his shirt with uncoordinated fingers. "Off. Now. All of it."
He pulled back long enough to strip his shirt over his head, and the sight of him—all that golden skin stretched over hard and relief muscles, the dark hair trailing down his stomach, the way lamplight painted shadows across the planes of his chest—made my mouth go dry.
"Your turn," he said roughly, reaching for the hem of my sweater.
I let him undress me slowly, watching his face as each layer fell away. The reverence in his expression, the way his breath caught when he finally saw me bare beneath him—it destroyed something inside me that I'd been trying to protect.
He looks at me like I'm something precious. Like I'm something worth keeping.
If only he knew what I really am.
"God, you're beautiful," he breathed, his hands skimming down my sides with trembling restraint. "Every time I see you, I think I've prepared myself, and every time you prove me wrong."
"Less talking." I pulled him down, arching up to press our bodies together, skin against skin, heat against heat. "More doing."
His laugh was strained, desperate. "Patience was never your strong suit."
"You're one to talk, but I've felt how hard you get just from kissing me. Don't pretend you want to take this slow."
The sound he made—half groan, half surrender—sent electricity sparking down my spine. His hips ground against mine, and I felt the full length of him pressing against my thigh. Thick and insistent and exactly as overwhelming as I remembered from the inn.
"Wren." His voice was wrecked already, and we'd barely started. "I don't want to hurt you. You're so small, and I'm…"
"I know what you are." I reached between us, wrapping my fingers around him, stroking slowly from root to tip. "I've been thinking about this since the farmhouse. Imagining how you'd feel inside me, how you'd stretch me open, how you'd look when you finally stopped holding back."
His forehead dropped to my shoulder, his breath coming in harsh pants against my skin. "You can't say things like that and expect me to maintain any kind of control…"
"I don't want your control." I guided him to my entrance, feeling the blunt pressure of him against my slick folds. "I want you—all of you. Even the parts you're afraid of."
He pushed inside slowly, inch by devastating inch, and the stretch was exactly as intense as I'd anticipated.
My body resisted, then yielded, then demanded more, and by the time he was fully seated I was gasping, my nails digging crescents into his shoulders.
"Hell," he breathed, holding perfectly still while I adjusted to the invasion. "You're so tight. So perfect. I can feel everything—every flutter, every squeeze…"
"Move." The word came out strangled. "Please, Mikael, I need you to move."
He obeyed, withdrawing almost completely before pressing back in with a roll of his hips that hit something inside me that made stars explode behind my eyes.
The size difference that had seemed like a challenge became an advantage—every thrust filled me completely, reaching places I hadn't known existed, stretching me in ways that blurred the line between pleasure and pain until I couldn't tell where one ended and the other began.
"Look at you," he murmured, his voice rough with awe as he watched himself disappear inside me. "Taking all of me like you were made for this. I underestimated you."
The words should have felt possessive, controlling. Instead, they felt like truth—a truth I didn't want to examine too closely because it might shatter the fragile walls I'd built around my heart.
His pace increased, driving into me with a force that pushed me up the mattress, and I wrapped my legs around his hips to anchor myself, to pull him deeper, to chase the orgasm building like a storm in my core.
"Mikael." His name was a prayer on my lips. "Mikael, I'm close, I'm so close…"
"I know." His thumb found my clit, circling with devastating precision. "I can feel you clenching around me. Come for me, Wren. Let me feel you fall apart."
The orgasm crashed through me like a wave, pleasure radiating outward from where we were joined, and somewhere in the midst of it, something else happened.
The candles on the bedside table flared violently, flames shooting toward the ceiling before guttering out entirely. The fire in the hearth roared, then died to embers, then roared again.
And beneath my skin, I felt my magic surge—wild, uncontrolled, responding to the intensity of sensation with power I couldn't contain.
Mikael stilled above me, his eyes wide. "What was that? The fire…"
"Old wiring," I gasped, still trembling through the aftershocks. "These buildings have terrible electrical. Don't stop, please don't stop."
He hesitated for only a moment before his hips resumed their rhythm, and I buried my face in his neck to hide the terror blooming in my chest.
A sign. Another sign. My magic responding to him, to us, to emotions I can't control.
If I stay, this will happen again. It will get worse. And eventually, it will destroy him.
His thrusts grew erratic, desperate, and I felt him swell inside me, felt the moment his control finally shattered completely. He came with a groan that sounded torn from his soul, his body shuddering, his arms wrapped around me like he was afraid I'd disappear.
We lay tangled together afterward, his weight pressing me into the mattress, our hearts racing in counterpoint. The fire had settled back to normal, the candles dark and cooling, and I could almost pretend nothing supernatural had happened.
Almost.
"Wren." His voice was soft, vulnerable in a way I'd never heard before. "I love you."
The words hung in the air between us, simple and devastating.
"I know this started as survival, as convenience, as a lie we both agreed to maintain. But somewhere along the way, it became real for me. You became real. And I love you—not the performance, not the arrangement, but you."
My throat closed around the response I should have given. The response I wanted to give. The three words that would change everything, that would make leaving impossible, that would condemn him to whatever destruction my uncontrolled magic eventually wrought.
I love you too.
The thought was so clear, so undeniable, that I almost said it aloud. Almost let him see the truth I'd been hiding from myself for weeks.
Instead, I closed my eyes and slowed my breathing, letting my body go limp against his, feigning the deep relaxation of approaching sleep.
"Wren?" His voice was tentative now, uncertain. "Did you hear me?"
I didn't respond, simply couldn’t. If I opened my mouth, everything would come pouring out—the confession, the truth, the impossible choice I was facing.
After a long moment, he sighed and pressed a kiss to my forehead, settling beside me with his arm draped protectively across my waist.
"Sleep well, my love," he murmured. "I'll tell you again tomorrow. As many times as it takes for you to believe me."
There won't be a tomorrow, I thought, feeling tears leak from beneath my closed lids. Not for us. Not after what I have to do.
But I couldn't say that. So I lay in his arms, surrounded by his warmth, memorizing the feeling of being loved by someone who didn't know what I really was.
Tomorrow, I would destroy this. Tomorrow, I would make the only choice that would keep him safe.
Tonight, I let myself pretend that love was enough.