DARIAN POV
My mate kissed me.
Two small words that should have fit into a sentence like any other, but they didn’t. They detonated inside my skull like a bomb, shattering the neat little map of my brain into glittering, useless pieces. For a long, stupid second after her lips met mine, the world went sideways and I forgot how to do anything simple—breathe, think, walk, even pretend I was anything other than molten.
She kissed me.
Not like a courtesy, not like a reflex. Not a testing peck to see what I’d do. She kissed me because she chose to, because something inside her reached for me and pressed in. That small, soft motion—timid, brave, asking—was the nearest thing to holy I’d felt in my life. My chest unclenched and then clenched again; my head filled with a hot, blissful fog that m
