Chapter three: Breaking his own rules 2

The inside of Ember was exactly what Kadence had expected, and somehow worse.

Red and gold light pulsed with the music. The air was thick with sweat and expensive perfume and something cheap underneath it all. Bodies packed the dance floor, moving like they were trying to outrun something. Along the far wall, a bar ran under amber lighting that made every face look like a version of itself that wasn't quite telling the truth.

His wolf started pacing the moment they walked in.

"Come on." Ronan leaned close to be heard. "You look like you're about to charge someone. Let's get a drink."

They found two stools at the bar. The bartender had purple hair and a row of silver hoops up one ear. She appeared in front of them with a smile that had been used too many times tonight to mean anything.

"Two whiskeys, neat," Ronan said. "Doubles."

Kadence scanned the room. Humans everywhere, their scents tangled together in a mess that made his nose work harder than it wanted to. Their heartbeats were fast and thin, the rhythm of things that knew they were breakable. He caught a few wolf scents scattered through the crowd, but none he recognized. Loners. Passing through.

The bartender came back. Ronan raised his glass. "To terrible decisions and the stories they leave behind."

Kadence touched his glass to Ronan's but didn't drink. His attention had snagged on the stage at the far end of the room. Empty right now, sitting in a waiting kind of silence while the spotlights held their positions overhead.

"What kind of club is this, Ronan."

Ronan looked at his whiskey.

"Ronan."

"It's a gentlemen's club," he said. "Technically."

The blood left Kadence's face. "You brought me to a strip club."

"I brought you to a place where adults perform for a paying crowd. There's a distinction."

"We're leaving."

"Just listen." Ronan set his glass down. "I know where your head goes. I know what this looks like to you. But this isn't the place where your father met Lydia, and you are not him. You're the most disciplined man I know. I'm not worried about you making his mistakes." He paused. "I'm worried about you being so afraid of them that you forget how to live."

The words landed somewhere they weren't supposed to.

Kadence picked up his glass and swallowed. The whiskey burned and did nothing else.

"One hour," he said. More to himself than Ronan.

Twenty minutes into that hour, the world ended.

The music shifted, slower, the bass dropping into something deep and rhythmic that Kadence felt in his back teeth. The stage lights blazed on, silver and gold cutting through the dark.

"Gentlemen and ladies." The voice came from everywhere at once. "Please welcome to the stage... Cinder."

Kadence kept his back to the stage. He was not going to watch. He was going to finish his drink and count down the remaining forty minutes and go home and figure out how to survive thirty days.

Then the scent hit him.

Honeysuckle and woodsmoke. Wildflowers burning in a summer heatwave. It didn't enter through his lungs. It went somewhere deeper than that, bypassing everything rational and slamming straight into the part of him that was purely wolf.

*Mate.*

Not a thought. A detonation.

His wolf came forward so hard his vision went white at the edges. The stool legs scraped the floor as he spun around.

She walked out onto the stage.

The world didn't slow down. It broke.

Silver fabric caught the light as she moved, shimmering like something that didn't belong under club lights. Dark hair down past her shoulders. Skin that seemed to hold its own glow. But it was her eyes that finished him. Amber and gold, autumn distilled into a human face, scanning the room until they found his.

She stopped mid-step.

He watched it move across her face. Confusion first. Then something deeper, something that looked exactly like what was happening to him, the recognition, the pull, the shock of it.

She felt it.

The mate bond snapped taut between them like a live wire. Every nerve in his body fired at once. His heart slammed against his ribs like it was trying to get out.

Eight years. Eight years of nothing, not even a flicker, and she was here. She was standing right there.

On a stage. Under a spotlight. Dancing for a room full of strangers.

Lydia's face moved through his mind without permission. Then his mother's voice, then the sound of her crying through a wall he was too small to do anything about. Then the twins at the edge of the woods, proof of what happened when a Thornwell man followed something he wanted without thinking about the wreckage it would leave.

"Kade." Ronan's voice came from somewhere far away. "You look like you're about to pass out. Talk to me."

He couldn't breathe. Her scent was everywhere now, woven into the air of the whole room, and the bond was screaming at him to move, to cross that floor and put himself between her and every set of eyes pointed in her direction.

"I have to go." He stood. His glass tipped and the whiskey spread across the bar dark as a stain.

"What? Kade, wait."

He didn't wait. He turned and pushed through the crowd toward the exit, his vision narrowing to a tunnel, the smell of honeysuckle chasing him all the way to the door like it had no intention of letting him leave.