Masuk"What can I get you?"The question comes out flat, with none of the warmth my counter voice usually carries, because Ryan Parker doesn't get my counter voice. Ryan Parker gets the one I save for people who dumped me at my workplace over a drink I made them with care."Just a coffee. Black."I turn to the machine, pour it, set it down with no foam heart and no design, just black liquid in a white cup, and the bareness of it is my own private editorial.He wraps his hands around the cup and doesn't drink. He looks at me, and the looking has an assessment in it I can feel on my skin, because two wolves have trained my skin to register being watched whether the watcher is supernatural or just a twenty-year-old boy with regret in his eyes."You look different."I wipe the counter. It's already clean, and wiping it anyway is the physical version of saying nothing."I mean it. You carry yourself differently now. Taller or something.""Is there anything else I can get you?"He takes the defle
The days that follow compress into a rhythm set by Knox's scouting schedule and Viktor's harassment rhythm.Knox leaves before dawn. Comes back smelling like the east side. Showers. Gets into bed. His hands find me under the covers and his body curls around mine and the gold channel carries the territorial frequency that means he claimed another building, mapped another block, added another piece to the structure he's assembling in the dark.Some mornings he comes back with new scrapes. Once he comes back with a gash across his ribs that heals while I watch, the skin stitching itself shut over twenty minutes while he lies on the bed with his arm behind his head and his grey eyes on the ceiling and the gold pulsing at the edges. He doesn't tell me who he fought. I don't ask, because asking would mean saying out loud that the man I'm sleeping with is fighting a one-wolf war on the east side against scouts his uncle keeps sending, and that my life now runs on pack politics and a man who
I lick it clean. My tongue flat against his wrist, following the vein from the heel of his palm to the crook of his elbow, and the blood dissolves against my tongue, and the taste intensifies, and his free hand finds the back of my head and holds me there with the claws-retracted pressure that means his human brain is co-piloting a response his wolf wants to escalate."Move over to the wall." He says it through his teeth, and my body turns toward the brick before my brain processes the instruction, because Knox's commands have bypassed my conscious mind since the first night he stood at the foot of my bed.My back hits the rough brick, and through my shirt, I feel it's still warm from the afternoon sun. His body presses against mine, and his victory chemicals are converting into arousal through the usual pipeline."Hands up."I raise my hands, and he pins my wrists above my head with one blood-smeared hand. His grip is firm, his fingers wrapping completely around both wrists because h
He releases my waist and turns toward the alley, and his body is already changing as he moves – the broadening starting in his shoulders and traveling down through his arms, his shirt stretching across the shifting mass, his fingers extending as claws push through. The transformation is faster than I've seen from him before, driven by the combat-readiness his wolf has been running on since the compound. By the time he rounds the corner into the alley, his silhouette against the streetlight is wider and taller, carrying a density the light can't fully illuminate.I should go inside. Knox told me to go inside, and he meant it.But I can’t help following him to the alley mouth, pressing myself against the brick wall at the corner and watching.The scouts are younger than I expected. There are two of them, both lean and hungry-looking, like wolves who haven't been in a pack long enough to build up the mass of established wolves. One has a scar running from eyebrow to jaw. The other is bro
Knox truly goes rogue on a Tuesday.We’re sleeping in the same room when his phone buzzes at 3 AM. He leaves the bed without waking me, but the bond wakes me. The gold channel spikes with a signal that tastes like cold metal and adrenaline, and I hear his boots in the hallway, the front door, then the bike starting in the lot below my window.He comes back at dawn, smelling of concrete dust and engine grease, from the east side of the city, where the warehouses sit empty, and the storefronts have plywood for windows. His knuckles are scraped. His eyes are gray, but the gold sits right behind them, close to the surface, ready."Where were you?""Scouting.""For what?""Territory."The word lands in the bedroom with a weight my body registers before my brain can unpack it. Territory means pack, and pack means the thing Knox lost when he set his cut on Viktor's bar. That loss has been sitting in the gold channel as a hollow frequency, his wolf reaching for it again and again, finding onl
I don’t hesitate.He slides into my mouth, and the stretch of my jaw around him is the familiar ache that started on a bedroom floor months ago when he fisted my ponytail and told me not to stop.Dominic's pace from behind doesn't falter. His thrusts maintain the calibrated rhythm while Knox's hand tightens in my hair and his hips push forward. And they both take me in the ruins of Dominic's twenty-year control.The wreckage crunches beneath me with every thrust from behind – paper tearing, the broken desk shifting on its buckled legs under the combined force of Dominic's rhythm and my body's weight pressing into the surface. But Knox's hand in my hair keeps my head angled toward him, and Dominic's hand on my hip keeps my body angled toward him, so my body is held in a way that makes the bond-light pulse through my skin, illuminating the debris and the claw marks in the plaster.Knox's pace in my mouth matches Dominic's pace from behind, and the synchronization produces a frequency in
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
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
"Unghh—""Don't stop until I say so."His hand tightens in my hair and pushes me back down, and my knees ache against the cold tile floor and my jaw is sore and my eyes are watering and I am, without question, losing my entire mind because I am in the back row of a lecture hall with my stepbrother'







