MasukIVY'S POVThe night air hits my face where the slap is still stinging and the cold feels good against the heat. I walk without direction because direction requires intention and I don’t have intention right now, I have momentum and the momentum is carrying me away from the kitchen and my mother’s hand.The campus is quiet.The streetlights cast circles on the pavement, and I walk through them one at a time, and each circle of light feels like the spotlight I’ve been in for a while now.My cheek throbs and the gold mark on my neck pulses in response because the mark is connected to my nervous system in ways that only Dominic could probably explain with precision. I, on the other hand, experience it as a simple, devastating fact – when I hurt, the mark knows. And when the mark knows, Knox knows, because he’s always checking.The channel is already carrying a questioning signal from across the apartment, a pulse that translates to you okay? and I dampen it by pressing my palm against the
DOMINICThe slap registers through the wall and my body translates the impact before my ears finish receiving it – the flat, percussive frequency of palm against cheekbone, the resonance that skin-on-skin produces when contact is delivered with force.My son is out of his chair before the translation completes.He moves through the study doorway and into the hall with the zero-to-terminal velocity his wolf produces when something he loves is threatened, and his eyes are full gold by the time I catch his arm, my hand closing around his bicep with enough force that a human bone would protest and a wolf bone simply registers the grip as communication.“Let go.” His voice is sub-human, the growl running underneath the words, and the arm I’m holding is already broadening with the first stage of a shift that his rage is driving faster than his biology usually permits.“No.”“She HIT her, Dominic.”My name from my son’s mouth. Never “Dad.” Never “Father.” Always my first name, delivered with
His amber eyes are open. I can feel them on the back of my neck through the bond, and I also feel something underneath it that I can only describe as fear, and Dominic being afraid is so rare that the rarity makes it louder.Something about what he did tonight, about his wolf surfacing in front of the compound, about the mask cracking, his entire being is in a state of unrest, and through the bond I feel him replaying the corridor and his voice aimed at his brother, and I feel the thing underneath the replay that his wolf keeps pushing at him while his brain keeps pushing back.He lies beside me in the dark with his amber eyes open and his breathing too controlled, and I want to ask him about it, so I turn towards him slowly.Then the front door opens.The sound cuts through the dark bedroom and Knox’s arm tightens around my waist before his brain identifies the source, but Dominic sits up behind me and the amber channel spikes.“Kids? I’m home!”Mom.Knox releases my waist and rolls
The drive home takes forty-two minutes and the silence in the car is different from the silence on the drive there.Dominic drives with his hands at ten and two, his knuckles white as he focuses on the road ahead, and in the rearview mirror, his amber eyes are fading slowly. The amber surges and dims and surges again, and through the bond each surge clashes with a cold signal I haven’t felt from him before, and it sits deep and heavy in my chest.Knox sits in the passenger seat with the window down and the cold air hitting his face. His right hand rests on my knee and his thumb traces circles on my kneecap, and the circles are steadier than on the drive here because the elevated heartbeat from the howl is settling into the post-territorial frequency of a wolf who just did what his biology has been demanding since Viktor’s first summons.I sit in the back with both marks warm against my skin and the compound’s leather-and-wolf scent still on my clothes, and I'm still thinking about eve
The lock that Dominic set a few seconds before tears out of the frame with the casual destruction Knox applies to obstacles between himself and what he’s decided to do, and the door swings wide open, showing us the corridor beyond it full of wolves.They came from the bar and the back rooms and the parking lot and the quarters upstairs, thirty wolves filling the doorway and the corridor, drawn by a sound their bodies answered before their minds could catch up.Knox’s shifted hands find my waist and the heat of his grip burns through my shirt and into my skin. My breath catches and my body arches toward him and my brain is still three seconds behind because the bond made the decision before I could.“On the chair.” His voice is a growl shaped into words, and the command sends me backward until my thighs hit the metal seat he was sitting in thirty seconds ago.The metal is still warm from his body.His shifted hands pull my shirt over my head and the fabric tears at the collar because h
Knox is on his feet before the wolf’s fingers complete their arc and the motion is like a detonation, his body leaving the chair quickly, and him crossing half the distance to me before his boots finish the first stride. His eyes are full gold now, and the sound coming from his chest is a vibration I feel through the concrete floor before I hear it through the air.Across the room, Dominic moves from the shadows at the same moment.His movement is different from Knox’s. He simply leaves the doorway with a finality that shows he is finallt stepping off a ledge he’s been standing on for three days. His glasses catch the fluorescent light as he moves and the amber behind them is steady, locked, the wolf no longer behind the professor but beside him. He and his wolf have merged into something that doesn’t have a name and that moves through space with the unified intention of a predator that has stopped pretending to be civilised.Their eyes meet across the room.The eye contact lasts a ha
I should have blocked the number – the number I didn’t give him, the number he stole from my phone while I was asleep, which is a fact that should disturb me more than it turns me on.And underneath the text from yesterday is today’s command sitting in my inbox like a landmine:"You’re sitting in m
My jaw aches when I chew my toast and every time it does I feel a pulse between my legs that has no business existing before 8 AM, and I've been checking the clock since I woke up because he said "same time tomorrow" and that means tonight, which means I have approximately fourteen hours to figure
The belt slides free from the loops with a sound that cuts through the dark like a blade, and I should be reaching for my phone or screaming for my mom or doing literally any of the things a normal person would do when a man they met yesterday is standing at the foot of their bed at – I glance at t
The bite healed in a few days, which seemed fast, but I wasn't exactly monitoring it with scientific rigour because I was too busy crying over Ryan Parker and pretending the frat party never happened. It left a faint silver line on my neck that I cover with concealer out of habit. Sometimes the ski







