CHAPTER 6: THE WRONG KIND OF WANT

Valen's POV.......

"Every room on this floor!" Alpha Tristan’s voice barked through the heavy wood of my suite door, sharp and impatient. "She can't have gone far, not in that state."

I stood frozen in the bathroom doorway, my jaw set, my palm pressed flat against the doorframe. The small fruit knife sat motionless on the marble counter behind me. The girl was behind me, shivering violently, her wet dress dripping onto the tile.

"Sir, this floor's been cleared once," a guard muffled from the hallway.

"Clear it again," Tristan snapped.

Not in that state.

The words lingered in the quiet room like smoke. Someone had drugged her. They hadn't just tried to take her; they had set a trap. Whoever it was, it was a man who wanted her shamed, exposed, and stripped of whatever little dignity she had left.

Stay away from her, I told myself, tightening my grip on the doorframe until the wood groaned. Whatever this mess is, it isn't yours.

A quiet rustle came from the marble room behind me.

She stepped out into the bedroom, swallowed completely by my spare white dress shirt. The thin linen was drenched, clinging relentlessly to her skin, outlining every lush, heavy curve of her body and tracing the full swell of her hips.

My spine went rigid. I turned my back to her at once, my eyes locking onto the dark windowpane across the room.

"There's a towel," I said coldly to the wall.

"I... your shirt," she stammered, her teeth clicking together so hard the words barely made it out. "It was on the hook. I'm sorry."

"Keep it."

Don't look. Look at the glass. Look at the dark.

My knuckles turned white where I gripped the back of an armchair. I forced a slow breath through my teeth, angling my left shoulder away from her reflection. My wolf remained dead silent, yet my own body burned, every nerve alive with an unwanted, dangerous awareness.

A muffled thud echoed through the wall as a door slammed down the hall.

The girl went dead still behind me. Her breath hitched, catching in her throat like a trapped bird.

I didn't turn around, watching her blurred shape in the dark reflection of the window pane. She swayed, her balance completely shot from the remaining poison in her veins. Tristan’s boot steps clicked nearer in the corridor, heavy and demanding.

Her small, trembling hands reached out, clutching the oversized hem of the white shirt.

"P-please," she choked out, her voice barely a whisper.

"Please what?" I said, keeping my face turned toward the dark glass.

"If he... not tonight. I can't. Please."

A heavy weight settled in my chest. Cold water didn't make a she-wolf beg with that kind of raw, desperate terror. She wasn't afraid of the freezing tub. She wasn't even afraid of the strange man whose room she had invaded.

She was terrified of him. Her Alpha.

In the dark reflection, I watched her lift a shaking wrist to wipe the water from her cheek. She tried to pull herself upright, trying to find some semblance of posture, but her knees buckled under her weight.

Heavy, aggressive fists slammed against the door of the adjacent suite.

"Clear! Next room!" a guard shouted.

Heavy boots moved down the carpeted hallway, stopping right outside my threshold.

Before I could step away, her fingers reached out and gripped my bare sleeve, holding on like a dying woman clinging to a ledge.

I looked down at her small, trembling hand on my arm. A quiet, dangerous realization settled over me: I had already decided I was not going to hand her over.