Odette moved her belongings into the royal quarters before anyone formally approved it. She reorganized his desk, replaced the curtains, and had fresh flowers delivered daily, a variety she liked.

She had the courtyard fountain removed. The one shaped like a winged serpent where Asher and Ronan had hidden as boys. She said it was "crumbling" and "an eyesore." It wasn’t crumbling. It was the oldest structure in the courtyard.

She consulted no one. She announced changes the way weather happens: without permission, and with the assumption that everyone would adapt

She threw a fit and screamed at Ronan in the corridor outside the council chamber for a reason he wasn’t sure. He was genuinely confused and tried to apologize but she wouldn’t hear it.

Asher had to step in and order her to return to their chambers for the rest of the day because she was out of control. He went to check on her that day, and found her not in their chambers. Instead she was in a corridor nearby, stabbing cushions with a dagger. The room was full of feathers and every single chair was destroyed.

He kept walking, filing it in the growing cabinet of things about his wife he chose not to examine.

She was also watching him. The way a warden watches a prisoner who hasn’t tried to escape but still tries to catch them in the act.

Everything she did was slightly too much and it made his skin itch in a way he couldn’t scratch without looking like the villain.

✦✦✦

The scene faded to a destroyed room.

"Who?" Ronan’s voice was low enough to vibrate.

The nearest guard swallowed. "By orders of the Queen, sir."

Ronan stepped inside.

Every drawer had been pulled and overturned. Her clothes were on the floor, trampled, some of them torn.

The bookshelf had been swept clean, volumes scattered across the stone with cracked spines and bent pages. Her writing desk was flipped. Ink pooled across the stone like black blood. The wardrobe doors hung open, contents ripped from hangers and thrown.

Ronan crouched in front of her, slow. "Natalia."

She looked up. Her green eyes were red-rimmed, her face blotched, her lower lip trembling. A hiccup caught in her chest.

Footsteps behind him. Asher appeared in the doorway, breathing hard, his face cycling from confusion to horror to cold, white fury in the span of two seconds.

"What happened."

"Your wife happened," Ronan said without turning around.

Asher looked at the room. At the ink. At the books. At Natalia on the floor. His jaw tightened so hard the muscle jumped twice.

"This ends now." His voice was a dangerous kind of quiet. He turned on his heel and walked toward Odette’s wing with a stride that cleared the corridor.

Ronan stayed. He looked up at the guard. "Have her things moved to my quarters. Tonight."

"At once, High Commander. Right away."

✦✦✦

Ronan was careful. He was so careful it would have been invisible to anyone who wasn’t Asher Valerion. Asher Valerion handed over the most important person in his life and couldn’t stop checking whether she was being held correctly.

Ronan understood that she had just torn out her own matebond with her teeth and was held together by discipline and stubbornness and very little else.

But he didn’t wait for permission. He lay with her after she severed the matebond, holding her the entire night. The next evening he found her in the courtyard alone. She jumped when he touched her. But he didn’t pull back.

He put his hand on the back of her neck and let it stay there until she stopped flinching and started leaning. It took four seconds before her entire body gave up the fight and she relaxed into him.

Asher saw it from his study and looked away.

He found her on the terrace staring at nothing, arms wrapped around herself, and he stepped behind her and pulled her back against his chest without a word. His arms crossed over hers. His chin rested on top of her head. She went rigid for one second, then two, and then every muscle in her body released at once, like something that had been locked for weeks finally gave way.

He pulled her into a doorway that week when Odette and her entourage rounded the corner. His body blocked her entirely, his back to the corridor, his chest pressed against hers, one hand braced on the wall above her head. She was pinned between stone and him, and his heartbeat was the loudest thing in the world.

The footsteps passed. He didn’t move. She didn’t want him to.

A month went by.

Natalia slept in Ronan’s arms every night.

Ronan’s hand slid from the nape of her neck down the length of her spine. Each pass of his palm pressed a little firmer, claiming another inch of her back until the tension she carried like armor began to melt.

She let out a shaky breath against his chest, and he answered it with a low hum of approval that vibrated through her bones. He guided her to the edge of the bed and sat, pulling her between his knees.

When she hesitated, he took her wrists and wrapped her arms around his neck. Then he drew her down into his lap. His hands slid down to her waist, and he pulled her forward until she had no choice but to swing one leg over his lap.

She settled astride him, knees bracketing his hips, her breath catching as their bodies aligned. Before she could overthink it, his mouth claimed hers again, deeper this time, hungrier.

His hands gripped her hips and dragged her down against the hard ridge of his arousal. The friction pulled a broken sound from her throat. He swallowed it with another kiss, guiding her into a rolling rhythm that made her grind against him through too many layers of fabric.

"That’s it... keep riding me just like that," he said against her lips. One hand stayed at the small of her back, pressing her closer, while the other tangled in her hair. He rocked up into her in deliberate strokes, letting her feel exactly how hard he was, how much he wanted her.

His hands roamed up her back, then down again to cup her ass, guiding her movements until she was riding the hard line of his cock with shameless little rocks of her hips.

Every gasp she made, he drank down like it belonged to him. He pulled back just far enough to rest his forehead against hers, their breaths mingling hot and ragged.

"I need you. I want you. Let me."

His words were honest and raw.

He ripped the silk she was in with his hands, not waiting. She let him, then he shrugged off his shirt.

He flipped her beneath him onto the bed, and pulled down his pants enough to free himself. He caged her with his arms, hips wedged between her spread thighs. The blunt head of his cock pressed right against her entrance.

Ronan held perfectly still, watching every flicker across her face as she squirmed beneath him.

"Look at me," he ordered softly. "I want to see the exact moment you realize you’re already mine."

Dexmon braced himself. He knew what was coming. He could feel it in the shift of the memory, the warmth of the room, the way the air thickened. He was about to watch Ronan with Natalia, and every instinct he had told him to look away.

He didn’t look away.

He couldn’t.

She inhaled sharply as Ronan pushed into her.