CHAPTER 8

Demetrius's POV

By the time Altracas had finally run himself out, the sky had shifted into deep orange, the sun sinking low enough to bleed color across the water. I let him have his swim at the creek, the cold current washing the blood and dirt from his fur, and when he finally handed control back to me, the forest had gone quiet and dim, evening settling in fast the way it always did out here.

I climbed out, dressed, and started the walk back toward my private residence, my mind already circling back to the one problem I hadn't managed to outrun. A run was supposed to clear my head. It always had before — years of channeling frustration into speed and distance until whatever had been eating at me burned itself out somewhere in the trees. It hadn't worked this time. If anything, the quiet only gave the thoughts more room to spread, until every step home felt less like distance gained and more like distance I was reluctantly giving back.

I told myself it didn't matter. I told myself I'd walk through that door, ignore her, and get on with the dozen responsibilities waiting on my desk — border reports, a training schedule that needed revising, a meeting with the pack elders I'd already postponed twice this week. None of it required me to think about auburn hair or blue eyes or the sound of her breath catching when I'd looked at her too long.

It was a good plan. It lasted exactly as long as it took me to reach my own front door.

Her.

I keyed in the code at my front door and pushed it open, and the scent hit me before I'd even stepped over the threshold — strawberries and peaches, soft and warm, twined together with something that was unmistakably my own scent and the fading trace of my beta's. My chest tightened in a way I refused to name.

Mate is home, Altracas said, entirely too pleased with himself.

I shut him out and kept walking, only then remembering, with some irritation, that I'd never assigned her a room. I'd been so eager to get away from her that morning I hadn't thought that far ahead — hadn't wanted to think that far ahead, if I was honest with myself, because assigning her a room meant deciding how close I was willing to let her live to me, and I hadn't wanted to face that decision yet.

Her scent thickened as I moved down the hall, pulling me toward my own bedroom door, and when I pushed it open, I found her there. Sprawled across my bed, sleeping peacefully, wrapped in my clothes like she had every right to be there.

I inhaled without meaning to. She'd showered. Used my soap, my shampoo — and now she smelled like *me*, layered under her own scent, and something about that combination undid me faster than anything else had all day. The sight of her curled up in my shirt, her hair still damp against my pillow, nearly brought me to my knees right there in the doorway. Every instinct in me surged at once — the urge to cross the room, to reach for her, to gather her against me and finally let myself feel what I'd been fighting since the moment she'd walked into my office.

The image came before I could stop it. Me, sliding into the bed behind her, molding myself along her back. My hand slipping beneath the hem of my own shirt to find her bare skin, drawing her closer, feeling the weight of her settle against my chest like she belonged there. My palm finding the soft curve of her breast, my mouth at the shell of her ear, murmuring words I had no right to whisper to a woman I'd rejected only hours ago.

I nearly stumbled where I stood.

Shame crashed over me so fast it left my head spinning, and I shoved the image away with a force that left my jaw aching from how hard I clenched it. This wasn't supposed to happen. I wasn't supposed to want her like this — not after everything I'd told myself in that office, not after everything I'd told her. I turned and fled the room like a coward, pulling the door shut behind me hard enough that the frame rattled, my heart hammering as though I'd seen something far more dangerous than a sleeping woman in my bed. It was as if I'd never come home at all — as if some other man had stood in that doorway and wanted things I refused to let myself want.

But one thing was undeniable now, no matter how many times I tried to bury it.

My body was betraying me.

I stood in the hallway for a long moment, forcing air into my lungs like I'd been the one running for hours instead of my wolf. I told myself it was exhaustion. I told myself it was the mate bond doing exactly what mate bonds were designed to do, and that recognizing the pull didn't mean I had to give in to it. I'd built an entire pack back from nothing on the strength of refusing to give in to things — grief, rage, the temptation to let vengeance run my life instead of leadership. I could refuse this too.

Altracas didn't agree. I could feel him pacing at the edges of my mind, unusually quiet for once, which somehow felt worse than his usual noise. He didn't need to argue his case. He'd already made it clear enough with that single, wrecked howl at the creek.

And no matter how far I ran, or how long I stayed away from that bedroom door, I had the sinking feeling this particular fight was one I wasn't going to win by simply refusing to show up for it.