DARIAN POV
Seeing the look in her eyes — those big, brown pools suddenly rimmed with fear and wet with the last of the panic — broke something in me. Not a soft thing. Not something ornamental. It cracked my chest open in a way that had nothing to do with the moon or the mate bond and everything to do with the small, human part of me that kept a ledger of people I would die for.
I wanted to wrap my whole goddamn soul around her and keep her there. Cocooned. Safe. Immovable.
It took time. It always does. Panic doesn’t yield to speeches or dramatic gestures. It peels back like an old wound, ragged and stubborn, and you have to sit with it, breathe with it, wait for the edges to stop pulsing. I sat. I breathed. I told her things — small, ridiculous, silly things at first — because the absu
