CHAPTER 24 - WHAT I AM

His whole body goes rigid against mine when I say it, and for a second I think he’s going to pull away – every muscle in his body tenses like he’s fighting some internal tug-of-war between the thing pinning me to this wall and the part of him that’s still human enough to know this is the moment where a normal girl would run.

“You don’t know what I am.” His voice is wrecked, barely recognizable, scraped raw by whatever is happening inside his chest, and his clawed hands are still buried in the plaster on either side of my head and his golden eyes are searching my face for the fear he can probably smell on me.

“Then tell me.”

He does.

He tells me while his body is pressed against mine and his fangs are an inch from my throat and his clawed fingers are slowly, carefully uncurling from the wall to rest on my shoulders instead, and the weight of them is heavier than his hands should be because his hands aren’t entirely his hands right now.

He tells me he’s a werewolf. Born, not bitten – which apparently matters – and that Dominic is the same thing, which hits me like a second shockwave before the first one has finished passing through me, and that the MC isn’t just a motorcycle club, it’s a pack.

His uncle Viktor is the Alpha, and everything I thought I understood about the man I’ve been sleeping with rearranges itself into a shape that should be impossible but that explains every impossible thing I’ve been filing away since the night he stood at the foot of my bed.

The golden eyes. The growl through the wall. The body heat that runs ten degrees hotter than any human. The way he can smell Dominic’s cologne on me from across a room. The way his jaw aches when he holds back from biting me. The claws gouging his hardwood floor while he fights a shift he can’t control.

Werewolf.

I should be running. I should be calling the police or a mental institution or my mother, except my mother is at dinner with ANOTHER werewolf and the police don’t have a department for this and the only mental institution that’s relevant is the one I should be checking myself into because Knox Voss just told me he’s a supernatural creature and my body’s response is to press closer.

“You’re shaking,” he says, and his voice has dropped even further into something that resonates in my ribcage, and his golden eyes are tracking the pulse in my throat with a focus that should make me scream.

“I know.”

“But you’re not running.”

“I know that too.”

His nostrils flare and something in his expression shifts from desperate restraint to confused recognition, and he breathes in through his nose and his eyes close for a second and when they open they’re burning brighter than before.

“You’re not only afraid,” he says, and it’s not a question because he can SMELL it – he can smell the arousal underneath the fear the same way he can smell Dominic’s cologne on my skin and the wetness between my legs from across a lecture hall, and the realization that my body’s response to finding out my stepbrother is a werewolf is to get wet is probably the most damning piece of evidence in the case against my sanity.

I’ve been able to smell you since before the dinner,” he says, and something in the way he says “before” makes the silver scar on my neck pulse hard enough that I press my fingers against it on instinct. “The party. The frat party – I was there. My wolf caught your scent across a room full of people and I tracked you through the crowd and I couldn’t stop myself from biting you because my wolf was SCREAMING at me to mark you before you disappeared, and when you turned around I left because if I’d stayed I would have done something neither of us was ready for. Then Dominic told me he was marrying your mother and I heard your name and my wolf lost its mind because the girl it chose at a party was about to become my stepsister, and I enrolled at Ashworth and agreed to move in because my wolf bit you once and spent every second after that pulling me back to finish what it started.”

The magnitude of what he’s saying settles into my chest like a stone dropped into deep water.

The party. The PARTY. The stranger whose teeth broke my skin and whose growl embedded itself in the wound like a second pulse – that was HIM.

He bit me at a frat party and then showed up at my mother’s engagement dinner three days later and sat across from me and pressed his boot against mine under the table and counted my heartbeat in the parking lot, and every night since he’s been escalating toward something that his wolf started in a dark room full of strangers and cheap beer.

He was tracking me from the moment his wolf caught my scent, and every touch was a step closer to a claim that exists in a world I didn’t know was real until three minutes ago.

“You came to my room that first night because of my scent?” I ask, and my voice is steadier than it should be given that I’m having a conversation about supernatural mating instincts while pinned to a wall by a half-shifted werewolf whose fangs are still visible when he talks.

“I came to your room because if I didn’t put something of mine in your mouth I was going to put my teeth in your neck, and I wasn’t ready to explain that on day one.” The honesty of it is so blunt and so entirely KNOX that I almost laugh, except his face is serious and his eyes are gold and his body against mine is burning hot and the laughter dies in my throat and is replaced by something that tastes like inevitability.

I kiss him.

I put my hands on his too-sharp jaw and pull his face down to mine and press my mouth against his and his fangs nick my bottom lip and the tiny sting of blood makes him groan against my mouth in a sound that vibrates through my teeth and into my skull, and his hands tighten on my waist and his body presses me harder against the wall and something is CHANGING.

I can feel it happening against me – his chest expanding, his shoulders widening, his hands growing until his fingers span the entire width of my waist and the tips meet at my spine.

He’s getting BIGGER, not in the way muscles flex but in the way buildings are built, and the heat pouring off him intensifies until my skin prickles everywhere we’re touching, and his mouth on mine is hungrier now, deeper, his tongue pushing past my lips with an urgency that tastes like restraint dissolving.

He pulls back and his face is the same but MORE – jaw sharper, shoulders broader, and his eyes are blazing gold and the muscles of his chest have shifted into configurations that don’t exist in human anatomy textbooks, and he’s looking down at me from a height that’s at least two inches taller than it was when he pinned me to this wall.

His hands – bigger now, capable of wrapping entirely around my waist – grip my hips and lift me off the ground like I weigh nothing, and my legs wrap around a waist that’s thicker than it was a minute ago and I can feel him pressed against me through his jeans, and whatever the shift did to the rest of his body it did to THAT too because the size of him against me has changed enough that my breath catches and my eyes widen and he sees my reaction and his golden eyes darken with something that’s equal parts warning and promise.

“This is what I am,” he says, and his voice is a full octave lower and the vibration of it runs through my chest where it’s pressed against his. “Still want me to show you?”