I belong to myself again.

He flexes his hips once or twice more, and then we lie there in total stillness, total silence, our harsh breaths synchronizing and then slowing. Contentment unfurls in me, a sense of safety, a deep well of love. And the sense of a secret uncovered, a hitherto hidden shore landed upon. Something that belongs to Embry and me alone.

“This is the first time it’s been only us in five years,” I say after a minute.

Embry rolls off of me without answering.

I try again, attempting to articulate something I myself don’t understand. “I needed it. Thank you, Embry.”

He makes a derisive noise in the back of his throat as he grabs his pants and yanks them up around his hips. “You’re thanking me for assaulting you?”

Something in his voice isn’t quite right. “For pretending to assault me,” I say slowly, propping myself up on my elbows so I can watch him. “After I asked you to. And we established a way for me to safe out.”

He pulls on his shirt, still not looking at me. “We should get going.”

“Embry.”

He glances at his watch; I see the glass face glint in the dark. “It’s only been twenty minutes. Wu and Gareth are probably only just now getting to the rendezvous point.”

“Embry.”

He finally looks at me. In the moonlight, there’s no sense of color in his face, it’s all highlight and shadow. Those bright blue eyes are nothing more than castles of ice in a dark ocean.

“Did I do something wrong?” I ask, my voice small. “Was this asking too much?”

“You didn’t ask for anything I didn’t want to give.” His mouth twists up into a bitter smile. “And that’s the problem.”

I roll and sit up so I can see him better. “I know you’re not like Ash,” I say carefully. “It seems like you want pleasure more than control from sex—”

“Not pleasure,” Embry cuts in. “Escape. There’s a difference.”

“But that doesn’t mean it’s wrong to—”

“Don’t talk to me about wrong. You don’t know what I was thinking in that bed, goddammit. You don’t know what I was feeling. What I wanted to do to you!”

This hurts. I swallow. “Whatever you were feeling, I was only feeling the connection between us.”

“There is no ‘us’ without Ash, don’t you see? You say it was our first time alone together in years, but did you feel alone there?” He cants his head toward the bed. “Did you feel like Ash wasn’t there? Because I felt him there. I saw your wedding ring flashing in the moonlight, I heard you talking about him. I felt like I was fighting him off every second I was inside you, just to have you all for my own for a few precious moments.”

He drops back on the bed, eyes on the star-speckled sky outside. “I’m a bad man, Greer. I’ve always known it, the way they say you can know that you had a twin inside the womb. It’s a part of me—this selfish, careless part—and I wish I could cut it out of me, I wish I could be perfect, and when I was younger I used to wish that I had the courage to…”

He stops and sighs. “I don’t wish that anymore. Except maybe I do now, because how fucked up is it that I enjoyed forcing myself on you? I don’t have Ash’s excuse. And how extra fucked up is it that while I was forcing myself on his wife, I was angry with him? Jealous of him? Possessive of you? The three of us have only had this for a few days and already I’m fucking it up.”

“No,” I whisper. “I love it, Embry, I love you. All of you.”

He turns to look at me and then he’s kissing me, pushing me onto my back and hungrily stealing kisses from my mouth, murmuring over and over again, “You shouldn’t love me. You shouldn’t. You shouldn’t.”

But I do, I can’t help it. I never could. I fell in love with him after only one night five years ago—he thinks I can change that now?

With a reluctant sigh, he straightens up and stands again, pulling a small knife out of his pocket. I blink up at him, curious, and he gives me a rueful shake of his head, as if he’s astounded that I still trust him after what just happened. But I know him and I know what he wants, and so I stay still as he cuts the bonds free from my wrists and then moves down to my ankles, sawing at the thick band of tape there.

“Fuck,” he swears. A split second later, warmth drips onto my bare feet. I sit up to see him cradling his hand, blood running down his wrist in a thin line, the crimson of it turned black in the moonlight.

“Embry!” I say, horrified, and I peel the tape off my ankles and sit forward onto my knees so I can take his injured hand into mine and examine it.

“It’s nothing,” he says, wincing a little as I uncurl his fingers. “My hand slipped, that’s all.”

It is a shallow gash, but a long one, stretching the entire width of his palm. I grab the white sheet off the bed and wrap the corner of it tightly around his hand.

“I’ll be right back,” I say, “so don’t move.”

He obeys me, watching me with a sudden stillness as I slide off the bed and quickly go into the closet. When I flip on the light and see myself in the mirror, I see what he saw as I walked away—a woman, completely naked, with tangled hair hanging to her waist and bite marks on every inch of her body, marks so dark I know they would have been visible in the moonlight. As always, I feel a flash of pride at the sight of my marked skin, marks I’ve asked for from the men I love. But I don’t know what Embry felt when he saw it.