CHAPTER 73: CHAPTER 73: ALPHA

"I walked through the door you didn’t lock," Victor murmured again, like a line in a prayer, like it meant something more than just a door.

Like it meant Elias had left it open for him.

Elias glared into the dark but didn’t argue. He couldn’t. Not with the heat of Victor’s body pressed against his back, and not with the way silence suddenly felt less suffocating than it had all day.

He exhaled and shifted slightly on the mattress, trying to carve space between them, but Victor moved too, seamlessly, an echo of instinct. An arm slid fully around Elias’s waist now, firm and undeniable, pulling him back into the circle of his body.

Elias stiffened. "Victor..."

Victor didn’t answer. Not with words.

Instead, his face pressed in close, nose nudging into the soft space just beneath Elias’s ear. He breathed in like he was starved.

Like he hadn’t drawn breath in days.

Elias’s body betrayed him with a shiver, sharp and involuntary.

Victor’s inhale deepened. One hand spread across Elias’s stomach, fingers splaying, grounding. There was nothing desperate about the way he touched him. Only hunger.

"Stop that," Elias muttered, voice low, strained.

Victor’s lips ghosted against his skin, barely there. "You smell like yourself again."

Elias blinked. "What..."

"Not fear," Victor murmured. "Not suspicion. You’re here. You’re mine again."

The words were simple. Devastating.

Elias bit back a retort and settled instead for pressing his hand over Victor’s forearm. A steady presence, one Elias had spent weeks resenting in theory, but now felt like gravity itself in practice. A quiet force pressed against his back, anchored in breath, weight, and the unmistakable stillness of someone who had no intention of leaving.

And slowly, so slowly, Elias began to relax.

He wouldn’t say it aloud. Not now, not ever, not when Victor was this close and would definitely use it against him later. But the truth sat heavy in his chest, undeniable:

He’d been waiting for Victor.

The tension in his shoulders had already given way, melting in increments too small to track, until the only thing keeping him upright was the quiet insistence of Victor’s arm curled around his middle. His hand, once gripping that forearm as a warning or anchor, had softened to a loose touch, his thumb dragging faintly over the fine fabric of Victor’s sleeve. Even the tight line of his jaw, clenched since the moment Victor left two days too long ago, had eased, his mouth parted around a breath he hadn’t meant to take.

Fuck, he thought, the word flat and bitter as it echoed in the hollows of his mind, because he knew, he knew, Victor had felt it: the way his body had leaned back ever so slightly, the way his skin no longer recoiled from proximity, and the way his silence had started to feel less like protest and more like permission.

Victor’s hand moved.

It was a slow shift, the kind of movement that might have been incidental if it hadn’t been so precise. His fingers slid beneath the hem of Elias’s shirt, careful, exploratory, the drag of warm skin meeting warm skin sending a sharp, traitorous shiver down Elias’s spine. Fingertips, dry and calloused at the tips but smooth across the pads, traced the faint dip of his waist, following the shape of him with the quiet reverence of someone reacquainting themselves with a place once taken for granted.

Elias stilled, his entire body going taut beneath the easy weight of Victor’s.

His breath caught, sharp in his throat, the motion imperceptible to anyone but the man behind him, whose hand had gone utterly still the moment resistance crept into Elias’s posture. Not in fear. Not even discomfort. Just a surge of pressure in his chest, a flicker of heat that made the inside of his ribs ache, and something unspoken blooming too fast beneath his skin to contain.

His skin prickled where Victor’s hand rested.

"You’re still mine," Victor whispered then, voice roughened by sleep but softened by something else, something that made Elias’s breath hitch again.

Victor didn’t withdraw.

His palm remained beneath the fabric, resting flat just above Elias’s navel, a grounding point of heat and stillness, as if waiting for Elias to make the decision he couldn’t bring himself to name aloud. Behind him, Victor’s chest rose and fell in slow rhythm, every breath a warm exhale against the nape of Elias’s neck, the scent of him thicker now, darker, intensified by proximity and sleeplessness and restraint.

The cologne, faint hours ago, had burned down to its essentials: the dry sharpness of bergamot stripped of its polish, leather worn at the edges, and something older, primal, threaded into the weave of him, like the scent of cedar just before it splits under flame. Elias could feel it pressing into his spine, like heat, familiar and dangerous, the edge of an alpha’s hunger not quite released.

The words slid along Elias’s skin like heat from a brand that never quite burned.

He didn’t answer.

Didn’t pull away.

Instead, he lay there, spine curved into Victor’s chest, shirt riding up just enough for the cool air to bite at the edge of his ribs where Victor’s palm no longer shielded him completely. His fingers twitched once, half-forgotten against the sheet, and he exhaled slowly, not because it helped, but because it didn’t.

And still, Victor didn’t move.

He held still, scent wrapping around Elias like smoke, heat pressing gently into him without weight, mouth resting too close to the base of his neck, not kissing, just waiting.

Elias let his eyes drift shut. Let himself feel it. The warmth of that hand beneath his shirt. The steady rise and fall of breath against his back. The burn of knowing he wasn’t resisting anymore.

"I never say that," Elias murmured at last, his voice low and frayed around the edges, like it had been dragged out of him against his better judgment.

Victor hummed low in his throat, a sound filled with amusement. His breath, warm and even, moved against the side of Elias’s neck as his hand resumed its slow exploration beneath the shirt.

There was no urgency in his touch. The pads of his fingers slid carefully along the edge of Elias’s ribs, drifting upward with a kind of quiet entitlement. The way someone might trace a map they’d memorized years ago but hadn’t dared touch again until now.

Elias didn’t move. Couldn’t. Not with Victor’s hand warm against his skin, and not with the weight of his own desire coiled low and tense, fraying between thought and instinct.

Victor’s palm splayed, settling flat against the center of his chest, fingers spread just below his sternum. It was a slow, intentional press, like grounding a storm.

"You never have to say it," Victor said finally, his voice quieter than the wards humming faintly outside the walls. "I already feel it."

Elias’s jaw clenched. His spine stiffened, but Victor’s hand moved before he could flinch, smoothing across his chest in a slow arc, fingers brushing over skin that had never been this exposed, this unresisting, beneath another’s touch. The heat of Victor’s body pressed closer, his breath thicker now, weighted by alpha pheromones that had stopped asking permission and begun to settle into the room like the weather changing.

The air tasted warmer. Denser.

And Elias, sensitive in ways he rarely acknowledged, whose rare biology had always been an afterthought until moments like this, felt it. The low thrum of Victor’s control began to unravel beneath his skin. The scent of cedarwood and dark citrus deepened, curling through the folds of Elias’s sleep shirt, bleeding into the cotton like smoke until the entire bed felt claimed.