Dakota's eyes flashed with something between relief and reckless determination. Instead of answering with words, she surged forward, capturing his mouth in a desperate kiss that tasted of tears and grief and the kind of need that couldn't be reasoned with.
Kade kissed her back with controlled intensity, one hand tangling in her hair while the other kept her pressed firmly against him. When he finally pulled back, both of them were breathing hard, the air between them charged with inevitability.
"Do you think it's easy to climb onto my bed?" he whispered as she continued kissing along his neck, her fingers working open the buttons of his shirt with increasing urgency. His voice carried a dark edge, something between warning and promise. "Only dead bodies fall out of it."
"Even in death, I would have felt a different depth, dying happy," Dakota mumbled against his skin, her lips never stopping their exploration. "Who cares about death! People are dying daily!"
Her words were flippant, careless, spoken with the reckless abandon of someone who genuinely didn't care what happened to them anymore. She wanted to numb the pain, wanted to forget everything that had crashed down on her tonight, and wanted oblivion in whatever form she could find.
"Against all odds, you actually don't care," Kade murmured, and there was something almost like admiration in his voice beneath the concern. His resistance was crumbling despite his best efforts, his wolf pushing against his control with increasing desperation as her scent and touch overwhelmed his carefully maintained boundaries.
He nibbled her ear, his arms pulling her closer against him in a gesture that was equal parts protective and possessive. His lips traced down from her ear to her neck, following the line of her throat with deliberate slowness that made her breath catch and her movements still for just a moment.
And then his mouth found that sensitive spot where neck met shoulder, that place where instinct guided every wolf when claiming their mate. His teeth grazed the skin there, testing, tasting...
And then he felt it.
The mark that was already there.
Not fresh, but not fully faded either. The unmistakable impression of another wolf's claim, slightly raised scar tissue that spoke of a bond that should have been permanent and unbreakable.
For a split second, Kade went absolutely still, his entire body tensing as rage and possessive fury exploded through him with volcanic intensity. Someone had marked her. Someone had claimed his mate and then, based on her current state of complete devastation, had abandoned her or betrayed her so thoroughly that she was fleeing into the night seeking oblivion with strangers.
His wolf snarled with territorial aggression so fierce it threatened to consume rational thought entirely. The animal inside him didn't care about explanations or circumstances or whatever complicated situation had led to this moment. It only cared about one undeniable truth: his mate carried another male's mark, and that was absolutely, categorically unacceptable.
Without conscious thought, without planning or consideration of consequences, Kade's teeth sank into her neck with deliberate force.
Not beside the old mark. Not around it.
Directly over it.
His canines pierced skin with the precision of an Alpha who knew exactly what he was doing, whose bloodline carried power that transcended normal pack hierarchies. He bit down hard enough to override the existing claim, deep enough to scar over what was already there, possessive enough to make absolutely certain that his mark would supersede whatever inferior claim had been placed there before.
The moment her blood touched his tongue, everything changed.
Kade felt it immediately, a surge of pure, cleansing power that flooded through his system like lightning through water. The parasitic poison that had been slowly killing him for years, the cursed infection that had weakened him despite his royal bloodline, suddenly began to die.
He could feel the microscopic worms writhing in his bloodstream, could sense them burning away as Dakota's blood, pure, ancient, powerful in ways even she didn't understand, acted like acid on the corruption that had been eating him alive from the inside.
The relief was instantaneous and overwhelming. Strength he hadn't felt in years surged back into his limbs. His senses sharpened to supernatural clarity. The constant low-grade pain that had been his companion for so long simply... vanished.
She was curing him. Her blood was purging the poison, destroying what nothing else had been able to touch.
His mate wasn't just his mate, she was his salvation.