Chapter 15 · Six Years of Silver

Julian was still on his knees when I kicked the tray table through the door.

I let the metal slam against the jamb. Loud enough to wake the dead. He didn't flinch. Didn't even look up. Just stayed there with his head dropped and his hands resting loose on his thighs, waiting for his sentence.

"Get up," I snapped. "On the counter."

He moved. Six feet of pure royal Alpha with dying fever ticking in his veins, moving like an old hound that had been beaten too many times to bother dodging the boot.

Then the shirt came off, and the air left my lungs.

It wasn't his chest. I'd already made my peace with his chest—a week of staring at my own knuckles, at the suture needle, at anything that wasn't that bare, hot expanse of skin. It was his back.

Old flogging scars crossed his shoulders, white as lard. Beneath them, newer work. Dime-sized burn rings marched down both sides of his spine in clean, deliberate pairs. Silver burns. The kind you get when you hold hot wire against your own meat and don't let go.

The nape was worse. That was where the mating gland sat.