Chapter 333: Every Instinct Said I Love This Man

It was the third goddamn time she had woken up naked with a man in a location she didn’t remember going to. If unconscious compromising positions were a sport, she had the title, the sequels, and a trophy case that needed its own room.

The first thing she felt was the tingling sensation everywhere his skin met hers. Not the gentle kind. The kind that started at the contact point and traveled in both directions at once, lighting up nerve endings.

Arms were locked around her tightly, like he was afraid she might vanish. Both felt like live wires of spark where they held her. A chest was behind her that rose and fell in a rhythm so steady it could have been keeping time for the universe.

His heartbeat registered next. It was behind her and inside of her own chest because her heart was beating with his in tandem.

Her eyes opened to green water and steam.

Bright green. The aggressive, opinionated, look-at-me green of a man who had poured something into a tub and misjudged the ratio with the confidence of someone who had never drawn a bath in his life and was goddamn committed to the experiment.

The smell hit her sinuses next. Eucalyptus. Pine. Something floral underneath both that had no business being in the mix but had shown up anyway and was now screaming from every steam particle in the room.

It smelled like a spa had a threesome with a lumber yard and a funeral home. She kept that observation to herself because the arms around her belonged to a man who had clearly done this himself and the effort was entirely too adorable.

There was a matebond humming between them. She knew the sensation well at this point. But this one was different because it sat deeper. Underneath the sparks and the light and everything else, there was a frequency so low she almost missed it. It was woven into the structure of her somehow, threaded through the walls of whatever she was built from, and the realization that it had been there longer than she could account for settled in her chest with a weight that felt less like discovery and more like remembrance.

She didn’t understand it. The understanding would require memories she currently didn’t have, and the shelf where those memories should have been sitting was empty and collecting dust.

His arms tightened.

"Hey, Gwen, I’ve got you."

His voice was low and rough. The words landed and his mouth followed, pressing a kiss to the curve of her neck. Then her shoulder. Then the wet crown of her head. Each one was slow and unhurried, the kisses of a man who couldn’t stop and was making zero effort to try.

"You’re okay, baby."

It felt natural. Good, even. She liked it.

The situation should have led to a full-blown sprint for the nearest exit. The full Guinevere Lunaris emergency-response protocol that had been field-tested across multiple kingdoms and continents and consistently produced results ranging from impressive to batshit.

Her body was quiet. Her wolf was quiet. Her heartbeat, the one she could feel doubled against his chest, was steady and slow and calm in a way that she couldn’t explain because calm required trust and trust required history and history required the one thing she was running a deficit on.

She felt safe.

The safety was irrational and absolute.

She wanted to remember him. Every other gap in her memory had been a question mark she could live with. This one felt like a wound she was walking around with, open and untreated, bleeding into every quiet moment where his hands were gentle and his voice was steady. Every instinct she had said this man is someone I love.

His thumbs traced slow circles on her waist beneath the water.

She gave his hands a gentle squeeze. It wasn’t a squeeze that said I know you. It was a squeeze that said I want to. The difference between those two things was a canyon she couldn’t cross and he was standing on the other side of it, kissing her shoulder like the canyon didn’t exist, and she loved him for pretending.

His breath caught against her hair. Small. A hitch so brief it would have been invisible if she hadn’t been leaning against the chest that produced it.

That was the sound of a man being touched by his wife in a familiar way and trying to pretend it didn’t wreck him. She felt it as much as she heard it, and it broke something in her chest.

He recovered fast. The kissing resumed. Neck. Shoulder. Temple. He was cycling through them like a man working a route he had memorized and she was the entire map.

Then it hit.

Déjà vu so thick she could taste it. The steam, the water, the arms, the way his chin settled against the side of her head like a puzzle piece finding its slot. All of it was familiar in a way that didn’t come from logic. It came from somewhere behind the locked door in her skull, the same door that had been shut since she woke up in the brown room, the same door that opened a crack every time she felt something she couldn’t explain and slammed shut before she could see through it.

The cruelest part wasn’t that the door was locked. It was that she could hear something behind it. Warmth. Laughter. A version of herself that knew this man and loved this man and had built something with this man that the current version could only press her ear against and grieve.

Something was behind that door. She could feel it pressing against the wood like a presence in a room she was standing outside of.

Nothing came through.

The crack sealed. The door held. Whatever was behind it stayed behind it and left her with nothing except the aftertaste of a memory that had almost existed and the growing certainty that she had sat in this exact arrangement before.