Page 400 of Hate Mates

He didn’t touch me at first. He just looked at me, his silver-blue eyes burning with a hunger that made my breath hitch in my throat.

“Do you know what you’re asking for, Vivienne?” His voice was rough, edged with something dark and unspeakable.

I had nodded, pulse hammering. I had known exactly what I was asking for.

His fingers traced along my jaw, down my throat, pressing just lightly enough that I felt the power thrumming beneath his skin. A warning. A promise.

And then he kissed me.

I had never been kissed like that before—like I was something sacred and something sinful all at once. Like I was meant to be devoured.

When he laid me down, the earth was cool beneath my bare skin, the night alive with the rustling leaves and the distant howls of the wind. But all I could hear was the ragged pull of his breath, the low, guttural sound he made when he pushed inside me for the first time.

It had hurt. But not in a way that made me want to stop. It was a claiming, a surrender. A fire that burned through me, leaving me aching, gasping, ruined.

I had clung to him, nails digging into the hard muscle of his back as he moved, relentless and unyielding, until I shattered beneath him, crying out his name like it was the only thing keeping me tethered to this world.

And when it was over—when I lay there, spent and trembling—he could have taken everything. My power. My soul.

But he didn’t.

Instead, he looked at me like he had just made a terrible mistake. Like I had just become his undoing.

Since that night, no other man has ever touched me. I tried. I tried to let them. But it never worked.

Because none of them were him.

I press a trembling hand to my chest, my heart still racing—not from the run, not from fear, but from the memory of him inside me, filling me, ruining me.

I wonder if he knows. If he ever thinks about it. If he remembers the way I broke for him, the way I have never truly put myself back together.

A sound outside the cave makes my breath hitch.

He’s here.

The hunt is over.

Orion has found me.

Chapter Four

ORION VOSS

She is a beacon in the dark.

Her power, once buried beneath layers of protection, flares as she flees, raw and unrestrained. For the first time in years, she isn’t hiding it. She can’t. The moment she let it slip, I felt it—her magic humming through the air, pulsing like a heartbeat, calling to me.

Finding her is effortless.

She’s weak.

She hasn’t run long. I expected more of a chase, but the years of suppressing what she is have left her drained, her magic untrained, fragile. It bleeds into the night like an open wound, leading me straight to her.

The cave looms ahead, jagged and hollow, and I feel the moment she realizes she has no other options.

She’s trapped.

I step inside, the scent of damp stone mixing with the intoxicating heat of her. My boots scrape against the rocky ground, the only sound in the silence.

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