“Tell me to leave.” Paul’s voice cuts through the darkness like broken glass, raw and jagged at the edges. “Say it now, Morgan, or I won’t be able to stop.”

The rut has turned his eyes molten silver, and they track my every breath like I’m prey he’s been stalking for years. Which, let’s be honest, isn’t far from the truth. His jacket hits my floor with deliberate intent, and my pulse hammers against my throat in response.

“What if I don’t want you to stop?” The words escape before my brain can veto them, and his entire body goes rigid.

“You don’t know what you’re asking for.” His fingers work his shirt buttons with excruciating slowness, each one a calculated torture. “The rut doesn’t care about your inexperience. It wants to ruin you.”

God, the arrogance of alphas. Even burning with supernatural hormones, he manages to sound like he’s doing me a favor. The shirt falls away, revealing a torso that belongs in one of those calendars construction workers sell for charity—if construction workers came with battle scars and the ability to kill with their bare hands.

“Maybe I want to be ruined,” I tell him, and watch his control fracture. “Maybe I’m tired of being the pack’s untouched little victim.”

“Careful.” He prowls closer, each step measured despite the fever burning through him. “That mouth of yours writes checks your body might not cash.”

His belt slides free with a whisper of leather that makes my thighs clench involuntarily. The rest of his clothes follow, and suddenly I understand why virgin sacrifices in ancient stories always looked terrified. The sheer physical presence of him—all of him—makes my earlier bravado evaporate.

“Having second thoughts?” His voice carries dark amusement now, but underneath lurks genuine concern. “We can stop. I can leave.”

“Don’t you dare.” My voice shakes, but I meet his eyes. “I’ve spent my entire life being afraid. I’m done with that.”

He climbs onto my bed, and the mattress dips under his weight like the world tilting off its axis. His mouth finds my throat first, and I gasp at the heat of it, at the way his teeth graze the spot where my pulse pounds betrayal.

“Every time you serve dinner,” he murmurs against my collarbone, “I imagine doing this. Pulling you into some dark corner and tasting every inch of skin you hide under those ugly servant clothes.”

“That’s workplace harassment,” I manage, though my breath stutters when his mouth moves lower.

“Sue me.” His laugh vibrates against my breast, and then his teeth close around my nipple through the thin fabric of my shirt. “After I’m done worshipping this body you think nobody wants.”

His hands map the geography of my curves—the soft swell of my stomach, the width of my hips that Sarah calls excessive, the thickness of my thighs that never fit quite right in any clothes. But under his touch, every imperfection becomes sacred territory.

“You have no idea,” he growls, pushing my shirt up to bare more skin, “how many cold showers I’ve taken thinking about these curves.”

“Paul.” His name comes out as a whimper when his mouth travels lower, tracing patterns on my stomach that make my muscles jump. “I need—”

“I know what you need.” His breath burns against my inner thigh, and I nearly come undone from that alone. “But first, you’re going to beg for it.”

“I don’t beg,” I lie, even as my hips lift toward his mouth.

“You will.” The first touch of his tongue makes me cry out, my hands fisting in his hair. “By the time I’m done with you, you’ll beg so pretty they’ll hear it in the main house.”

He works me with single-minded intensity, alternating between gentle exploration and devastating precision. My body becomes a live wire, every nerve ending singing his name. When he slides one finger inside me, the intrusion makes me gasp—foreign but not unwelcome, pressure but not pain.

“So tight,” he groans against my sensitive flesh. “We’re going to take this slow, little wolf. Going to open you up until you’re ready for everything I want to give you.”

“I can take it,” I insist, though my voice shakes when he adds a second finger.

“Not yet.” He curls his fingers, finding a spot that makes me see constellations. “But you will. Going to make you come so many times you forget your own name first.”

“Fuck,” he breathes against my throat, and the profanity from his usually composed mouth makes me clench around him. “You feel like—”

“Like what?” I challenge, rolling my hips to meet his next thrust, and his response is to drive into me hard enough that I see stars.

The rut won’t be denied much longer. His rhythm shifts from careful to consuming, each stroke deliberate devastation. He hooks my knee over his shoulder, changing the angle, and the new depth makes me cry out loud enough that tomorrow’s breakfast will be awkward for everyone involved.

“That’s it,” he encourages, his voice wrecked. “Let them all hear what I do to you.”

The thought of someone hearing should kill the mood, but instead it adds gasoline to the fire. His thrusts turn desperate, like he’s trying to brand himself into my muscle memory. My body responds with embarrassing enthusiasm, making sounds I didn’t know I could produce—wet, needy, absolutely shameless.

“Look at me,” he commands when my eyes flutter closed. “Want you to see exactly who’s inside you.”

His hand finds my throat, not squeezing, just holding, feeling my pulse race against his palm. The possessiveness of it, the careful control even while he’s losing his mind to the rut, sends me spiraling toward another edge.

“Paul,” I whimper, and he responds by driving deeper, harder, until I’m nothing but sensation and his name.

“Tell me who you belong to,” he demands, each word punctuated by a thrust that rewrites my understanding of physics.

“You,” I gasp, the word torn from somewhere deeper than my throat, my nails carving temporary ownership into his shoulder blades. “You, my Alpha.”

The word makes him snarl, but then my body clenches around him and we’re both lost, falling over the edge together in a tangle of sweat and need and something dangerously close to meaning it.