The midday sun filters through the dense canopy, casting dappled light across the thatch of your cooking fire. Smoke rises in lazy tendrils, curling around the clay pot where maize and peppers simmer. You sit cross-legged, humming quietly—a lullaby your mother once sang to calm thunder spirits. Your long, dark hair is unbound today, a rare indulgence, soft like silk down your spine, brushing the earth as you lean forward to stir. Your face is calm, shyly concentrated. Your nose ring glints whenever the firelight catches it. The children’s laughter echoes faintly from the distant training pit, their small feet pounding the dust.

You are alone. Or at least… you thought you were.

Then—fingers. Large, calloused, rough with conquest and bone. They slide gently through your hair.

Your breath stutters, catches. Your back straightens. The jingling of your nose ring is barely a chime—but it’s enough. You already know. No other man would dare.

You turn your head slowly.

And there he is. Zero Wolf. Your husband. The Great General.

His obsidian eyes drink you in, devour you in silence. His massive frame blocks the sun behind him, and his jaguar pelt cloak shifts slightly in the breeze. He wears the same war paint—black slashes across his cheekbones like claw marks—and blood still stains his arms, dry and crusted beneath the gilded cuffs at his wrists. He hasn’t even cleaned himself. He came here first. To you.

His gaze remains locked on your face, as if the simple act of seeing you again after seven long days could somehow undo the rage he’d carried into every battlefield.

“You let your hair down,” he says at last. His voice is low, guttural—scraping across your spine like a jaguar’s growl in the underbrush.

You nod shyly, turning your eyes back to the pot. “It is hot today, general.”

“I am not your general.” He crouches behind you, fingers still tangled in your hair. “Say it.”

Your cheeks burn. “You are my husband.”

His hand slides along your waist. “And you are mine.”

You swallow. He smells like the forest—smoke and sweat and iron. His presence is overwhelming, as always. He is too much—too tall, too broad, too feral. But it has never been fear that seizes you in his presence. Only the terrifying tenderness of being wanted by a man like him.

He presses his forehead to the back of your head, breathing in the scent of you like a dying man does rain.

“I dreamed of your voice every night,” he murmurs into your hair. “I heard it in the wind before battle. I heard it in my heartbeat when I gutted our enemies.”

You shiver. You never ask what he does on his conquests. You never want to know.

“I thought I would come back and find you gone,” he says, almost to himself. “Taken. Killed. Stolen by some pathetic dog of a man who thought he could touch what is mine.”

You turn to him, trembling hands resting against his blood-streaked chest. “You know I would never leave.”

“I know,” he says, voice dark with something unreadable. “But my mind forgets when I am far. It fills with violence. It fills with you. And when I saw your hair—loose like this—I nearly lost myself.”

You blink up at him, eyes wide and shy. “Would you like me to braid it back, husband?”

“No.” His hand curls possessively around the nape of your neck. “Leave it. Let it fall like this. Let them all see what I come home to.”

You blush.

Zero Wolf leans closer, brushing his lips across your temple—not tenderly, not gently, but with reverence soaked in obsession. Like a man who believes the gods themselves gave you to him as a prize for every war he has won.

And perhaps they did.

But even the gods would not dare take you from him now.

Not while Zero Wolf lives.

Not while his heart still beats for you—and only you.