Chapter 53 THE MARK
Ava's POV
I stood at that window for a long time after I saw it.
The symbols on his back were moving, slowly, like something breathing underneath his skin, and the light they gave off was faint but real, gold and silver shifting between each other, and he had no idea I was awake, no idea I was watching, and that was somehow the most frightening part of all of it, that this was just him when he thought nobody was looking.
I went back to bed before he turned around and I lay there staring at the ceiling with my heart going fast and waited for him to come back inside.
He slipped in quietly a few minutes later and lay down next to me and I kept my eyes closed and my breathing even and he settled beside me and was still almost immediately, that complete stillness he had that no human person had, and I lay there in the dark next to him feeling the distance between us even though our shoulders were almost touching.
I didn't sleep again.
In the morning he was already dressed and on his phone when I came out of the bedroom and he looked at me briefly and said the first hearing was at ten and he'd be back by afternoon, and I nodded and poured coffee and waited until the suite door closed behind him before I let out the breath I'd been holding since the window.
I gave myself twenty minutes to sit with it and then I got dressed and went to find Elias.
He had said he'd find me but I didn't want to wait and I remembered the café from yesterday so I went there first and he was already at a corner table like he'd known I was coming, which maybe he had.
"You saw something last night," he said when I sat down, not a question.
"His back," I said, "the symbols."
Elias nodded slowly, wrapping both hands around his cup. "He's been suppressing it since you arrived, keeping the human form tight, it takes effort and sometimes at night when he's not concentrating it bleeds through."
"What is he suppressing exactly," I said, because I was done with half answers and vague edges, I wanted the actual thing.
"His real form," Elias said simply, "what he looks like when he's not wearing the human version."
I sat with that for a second. "And the mark on me, the one that glows, what is that exactly."
"It means you're his," Elias said, "not in a possessive way, or not only that, it means your body has already started recognizing him at a level deeper than conscious, the bond is forming whether you agreed to it or not."
"I didn't agree to anything," I said and I heard the edge in my own voice.
"I know," he said quietly, "that's why I'm here."
I looked at him across the table and tried to figure out what he wanted because everybody in my life wanted something and nobody announced it cleanly at the start.
"What do you get out of this," I asked him directly.
He was quiet for a moment and then he said, "your mother was someone I cared about a long time ago and I failed to protect her and I've been carrying that for fifteen years and you look exactly like her and I'm not going to fail again," and he said it without any performance, just flat and honest, and it was the most straightforward thing anyone had said to me since I arrived in London.
I went back to the hotel at noon and sat on the bed and thought about everything Elias had told me and by the time Dominic came back at two I had made a decision, which was that I was done waiting for him to find the right moment.
He came in loosening his tie and saw my face and stopped.
"What's wrong," he said.
"Your back," I said, "I saw it last night, the symbols, I saw them moving."
He went still in the way he did when he was deciding something.
"Dominic," I said, standing up, "I'm not angry, I'm not running, but I need you to stop deciding what I can handle and just tell me the truth."
He looked at me for a long moment and then he pulled his shirt out of his trousers and started unbuttoning it and I watched him take it off and turn around and in the afternoon light the symbols were faint, barely visible, just marks on his skin, but they were there.
"They're always there," he said, "I keep them quiet."
"What do they mean," I asked, stepping closer.
"My lineage," he said, "where I come from, what I am, it's all written there."
I reached out and touched one with my fingertips and felt warmth under the skin, alive and moving, and he tensed but didn't stop me.
"Is this what I'm becoming," I said quietly, "will I have these."
He turned around and looked at me and something in his face broke open just slightly.
"Ava," he said.
"Tell me the truth," I said, "all of it, not pieces."
And he did, finally, standing there with his shirt off in the London afternoon, he told me everything, about what he was, about the world that existed alongside this one, about my bloodline and why the mark had appeared, about the bond and what it meant and what completing it would do to both of us.
I listened without interrupting and when he finished I was quiet for a while and he let me be quiet without filling the space which I appreciated.
"You should have told me from the beginning," I said.
"Yes," he said simply.
"Why didn't you."
"Because the last time I told someone the truth this early they ran," he said, "and I couldn't let you run."
I looked at him and he looked back at me and I was furious still and underneath the fury was something else, that pull that had been there since the first night in Club Obsidian, that thing I'd never been able to explain or shake.
I crossed the room and kissed him hard and he kissed me back immediately, hands finding my waist and pulling me in, and I grabbed his shirt from the bed and pushed it back off his shoulders and he walked me backward until my knees hit the mattress.
"You're still angry," he said against my mouth.
"Yes," I said, pulling him down with me anyway.
It was rough and desperate and a little punishing on both sides, me demanding and him giving everything I demanded, my nails down his back and his mouth on my throat and both of us saying things we probably meant but would never say calmly, and when it was over we lay there breathing hard and not talking for a long time.
I pressed my hand flat to his chest and felt his heart beating, steady and real.
"Show me," I said quietly, "what you actually look like."
He turned his head to look at me.
"Not tonight," he said.
"When."
"When you're ready," he said, "and you're not ready yet."
I wanted to argue but something in his voice stopped me, not dismissiveness, something more careful than that, like he was protecting me from something I genuinely didn't understand yet, and I was tired enough to let it go for now.
I fell asleep against his shoulder and slept properly for the first time since we'd landed.
I woke up because the room felt wrong.
Not wrong like something had changed, wrong like the air had changed, thicker somehow, and I sat up and looked around and the suite was dark and quiet and Dominic was beside me still asleep and everything looked normal.
Except the mark on my shoulder was burning.
Not warm the way it got sometimes, burning, real heat, and I pulled my sleeve down and looked and it was glowing brightly, brighter than it ever had, pulsing with light like a heartbeat, and I pressed my hand over it trying to cover it and the heat just spread up my arm instead.
I shook Dominic awake and he was alert immediately, sitting up fast, and I showed him my shoulder and watched his face go completely white.
"That shouldn't be doing that," he said, grabbing my arm and looking at it closely, "not yet, not this fast."
"What does it mean when it does this," I said, trying to keep my voice steady.
He looked up at me and for the first time since I'd met him I saw something in his eyes that I had never seen there before. Dominic was Afraid.
"It means someone is accelerating it from the outside," he said, "someone is forcing the bond to move faster than it should," and then he was already off the bed and moving and his voice when he said the next part was very quiet and very cold.
"And the only person in London who knows how to do that," he said, picking up his phone, "is Elias.”