7

It was Kaelen who finally broke the silence, and he did it by ordering enough food to feed a small army.

"You haven't eaten," he said, already halfway across the room with a phone to his ear. "Don't argue. You smell like someone who hasn't eaten in two days."

"I'm not hungry."

"Wren is." He covered the receiver and looked at me with perfect gravity. "I can hear her stomach from here."

It was true. Somewhere in the middle of my chest Wren was making a small, mournful, undignified sound. I put a hand over my sweater and felt my face go red, and Kaelen turned away to hide a smile and told whoever was on the line that he wanted soup, toast, rice, anything with lemon in it, and he did not care what time it was.

Twenty minutes later we were sitting cross-legged on his marble floor with a spread of dishes between us. He had refused to let me eat on the couch like a guest. "You look like you'd apologize to the furniture," he said, and then he sat down on the floor himself, in a suit that probably cost more than my whole childhood, and handed me a spoon.

"You don't eat on floors," I said. "You're a billionaire."

"I eat on a lot of floors. I just don't tell the board."

The soup was thick and peppery and so hot it made my eyes water. I ate three bowls. Kaelen ate steadily and without ceremony, like a man who had learned long ago to take food whenever he was lucky enough to find it, and between mouthfuls he asked me small questions. What did I like to read? Which pup had been the worst, growing up? I told him about the old library in Silverwood, a single damp room above the feed store where I had read every book at least twice. I told him about the girl who once filled my shoes with ants. I did not plan to tell him about the fire, but it came out anyway, flat and quiet, somewhere around the third bowl. My parents had died when I was seven. The pack had taken me in the way you take in a stray cat, with a bowl of scraps and a corner to sleep in. I had never been allowed to ask what happened.

He did not interrupt once. When I finished, he set his spoon down very gently and said, "I'm sorry."

"It was a long time ago."

"That doesn't make it less." He looked at his hands. "My father died when I was ten. A hunting accident, they said. My grandmother raised me after that, in a house with fourteen rooms and no hugging. She loves me. She just believes affection is something you demonstrate through contracts."

"That's the saddest thing I've ever heard."

"She'd call it efficient."

I snorted soup. He passed me a napkin with a perfectly straight face, and I laughed so hard that tears came again, and for the first time that night they were not the bad kind. Kaelen watched me laugh. Something in his expression went soft and cautious, as if I were a bird that had landed on his windowsill and he was afraid to breathe.

When the laughter faded we were sitting closer than I remembered. His knee touched mine. Neither of us moved it.

I should have stepped back. I knew it, with my pulse tripping over itself. I had been rejected a few hours ago. I had crossed a border no omega ever crossed. I was in the home of the most dangerous Alpha in the region, a man whose reputation made grown wolves lower their voices.

But I was also so tired of being small. So tired of feeling nothing but the raw place where Jaxon had ripped me open. And here was someone looking at me as though I were a thing worth being careful with.

"I don't want to feel this anymore," I said. My voice shook. "I don't want to feel him. Can you make it stop?"

Kaelen went still. "Sage."

"Just for tonight."

"You've been crying for hours. You're in shock." He pulled his hand back, and it looked as if it cost him something. "I won't be the thing you regret in the morning."

"What if I don't?"

"You will."

"What if I don't?" I got up on my knees. My heart was beating so hard I thought he could hear it. "I'm nineteen. I lost the only thing I was ever promised, and I'm sitting in a stranger's penthouse because a wolf I can't even name decided to purr. I'm not drunk and I'm not confused. I'm just tired of being the girl everyone leaves."

Silence. Rain ticked against the glass.

"I'm not leaving," he said, very low.

"Then stay."

"Say it plainly," Kaelen said. "I want to hear it. I don't want any doubt in this room."

My throat tightened. I looked up at him, at the silver burning behind his lashes, and I did not feel afraid.

"I want you to stay," I said. "I'm sure."

He kissed me like a man who had been holding his breath for years.

It was slow at first, careful, his hand cradling my jaw as if I might break. Then I curled my fingers into his shirt and something in him loosened, and the kiss deepened until the room tilted and the sound of the city faded to a hum. Wren was purring so loudly that I could not tell where she ended and I began. Every few moments he drew back and searched my face, checking, asking, and each time I nodded, and each time he let out a shaky breath before he kissed me again.

There was no cruelty in him. That was what I would remember afterward. No sneering, no taking. Only a fierce, almost frightening tenderness that made my eyes sting for a different reason. He carried me through to the bedroom with my arms wound around his neck, and the last thing I saw before the door closed was a wall of glass and a million tiny lights, and a sky that had finally, finally stopped raining.

I woke before dawn.

The bed was warm and the sheets smelled of cedar. Kaelen was asleep beside me with one heavy arm across my waist, his face softer in sleep, a stray lock of black hair across his forehead. For the first time in my life, I felt safe.

Then my eyes drifted to the desk across the room, where a stack of glossy documents sat beneath a lamp. The top one bore a silver crest, a crescent moon cut through by a wolf's profile. Beneath it, in clean block letters, were two words:

THORNE INDUSTRIES.

Thorne. Alpha Kaelen Thorne. The most feared man in the city. The Lycan whose name Elder Marcus had spat in the dust at every pack meeting I had ever stood at the back of.

I had spent the night in his arms.