Just this once

TESSA

It’s been five days since I found out Ezra is my mate.

It takes seven days for a female to go into heat after finding her mate, which means I have two more days before biology takes over and my body stops being mine — and I haven’t seen Ezra once since the night he pressed me against the wall and told me he wants nothing to do with me.

The palace is enormous, but not so enormous that you avoid someone for five full days by accident. He’s making sure of it, and the knowledge that he’s going out of his way hurts more than I want to admit.

The bruises from the other night have almost faded — almost. There’s still a faint shadow at my wrist where the drunk man grabbed me, and sometimes I’ll catch it in certain light and the memory comes back all at once, the cold stone against my spine, the tuneless whistling, the slow clink of a belt, and then Kaz’s hand closing around the back of that man’s neck like a vice. The heart. The sound it made.

I keep trying to reconcile the two versions of him.

The man who walks beside me through the territory in the early morning quiet, patient and unhurried, asking questions about my old life and actually listening when I answer — like he genuinely wants to know me, like I’m more than the girl he’s supposed to marry and get it over with. And the man in the shadows with blood on his hand, looking at me with something in his eyes I still can’t name.

I wasn’t prepared for the kindness. That’s the part that keeps catching me off guard, the part I don’t know what to do with, because it would be so much easier to hate him for what his pack did to mine, for trapping me here in this beautiful prison. But there’s a steadiness to him I didn’t expect, a quiet strength that makes you feel safe even when your world is burning down around you, and I can’t hate him for it no matter how much simpler that would make everything.

“You’re quiet today,” Kaz observes as we walk back from the eastern border, sunlight filtering through the trees in long, heavy patterns.

I’m thinking about your best friend. About the bond I can’t tell you about. About the heat coming in two days and the man who doesn’t want me.

“Just processing everything,” I say instead, which isn’t entirely a lie.

He doesn’t push. Just nods and steers the conversation somewhere easier, somewhere that doesn’t require me to explain the chaos living behind my eyes, and I’m grateful for it in a way that makes the guilt worse.

***

The changes begin quietly, the way all inevitable things do.

My lips are redder, my hips wider beneath my clothes, and my breasts are heavier, more sensitive, the fabric of my dress suddenly unbearable against them.

It’s subtle enough that no one would name it outright, but obvious enough that it can’t be ignored.

Kaz even mentioned it before he left for his trip.

He won’t be back for another three days.

And he has no idea what’s happening to me, because I was too much of a coward to tell him.

By the fourth day the warmth has become harder to ignore, my skin running hotter than it should, hypersensitive in a way that makes every brush of fabric feel too much. By the sixth I wake in the small hours with heat pooling low in my belly, liquid and insistent, making it difficult to breathe and nearly impossible to think clearly about anything at all.

Getting dressed takes longer than it should. Moving through the palace corridors feels like wading through something thick and resistant, every step requiring more concentration than it has any right to demand.

I need air. I need something that isn’t these four walls.

The maid assigned to me — a quiet woman named Iris who has been nothing but kind since the moment I arrived, walks with me through the palace grounds, pointing out fountains and courtyards and statues of wolves long dead. I’m only half-listening until we round a corner and I stop walking entirely.

The garden is hidden behind stone walls covered in climbing vines, wild roses blooming in shades of crimson and white so vivid they look almost unreal, spilling onto the pathway like they can’t be contained. Flowers I don’t recognise riot between carefully tended herb beds, and the whole space feels secret — carved out purely for beauty in the middle of all this political maneuvering and pack hierarchy, like someone needed a place that existed for no other reason.

“I’ll stay here for a bit,” I tell Iris, my voice coming out breathier than I intend. “You can go.”

She hesitates, torn between her orders and leaving me unattended, and I give her a look that settles it before she can ask. She bows slightly and leaves, and then I’m finally alone with the roses and the quiet and the distant sound of wind moving through the trees beyond the walls.

I move closer, running my fingers over velvet petals that feel cool against my overheated skin, breathing in their fragrance and letting it do the work of centering me. For the first time in days something in my chest loosens, just slightly.

Then I catch his scent.

Cedar and smoke, so familiar now it makes something ache. I turn slowly.

Ezra stands at the entrance of the garden like he’s been frozen mid-step, clearly not expecting to find me here. His jaw tightens the moment our eyes meet, and for a second I think he’s going to turn around and leave without acknowledging my existence at all.

“I have something to tell you,” I say quickly, before he can disappear and I lose my nerve. “Please.”

He doesn’t say anything. Just watches me with those cold, unreadable eyes, and I take the silence as the closest thing to permission I’m going to get.

“The heat. It’s coming tomorrow.”

More silence, heavy and suffocating.

“That’s not my problem.”

His voice is flat, stripped of everything, and it cuts deeper than anger would have — because anger would have meant he was feeling something he couldn’t control.

“I know that,” I push through. “I’m just telling you because—”

“Kaz is strong,” he says, each word deliberate, like he’s trying to keep himself from losing control. “He can handle it.”

The casual cruelty of it — the way he can stand there and talk about another man touching me like it means nothing, like I mean nothing — steals the breath clean from my lungs. The bond thrums painfully in my chest, and I open my mouth to say something but he’s already turning away, already walking out, leaving me alone with the roses and the hollow ache that no amount of heat can burn away.

***

Day seven dawns and I know immediately it’s going to be hell.

The heat slams into me before I’m even fully awake, so sudden and total that I cry out into the empty room. It’s nothing like the warmth of the days before — this is fire in my veins, a desperate clawing need that makes my vision swim and my skin feel like it belongs to someone else, every nerve ending raw and finding nothing that helps.

I lock myself in my room. I breathe through it, or try to. The waves crash over me relentlessly, hours blurring into each other until time stops meaning anything at all, until there’s nothing in the world except the heat and the need and the name my wolf won’t stop repeating, the same word over and over like a prayer she refuses to release.

Ezra.

He doesn’t want me. I know that. I’ve known it since the garden, since the wall, since the moment he inclined his head at dinner and looked straight through me, and knowing it doesn’t matter at all, because my body has made a decision that has nothing to do with what either of us wants.

The sheets are soaked through and twisted around my legs, my nightgown clinging to burning skin, and I’m somewhere between conscious and not when I hear it.

A knock at the door. Just one. Soft and deliberate.

I drag myself off the bed, every movement its own separate agony, one hand on the wall to keep myself upright as I stumble toward the door with my vision swimming at the edges. When I finally manage to open it my breath catches entirely.

Ezra.

He looks wrecked, like he’s been holding the line against something for days and his hands are finally giving out. His jaw is clenched so tight I can see the muscle jumping, hands curled into fists at his sides, and his eyes are dark and wild and absolutely tortured in a way that makes my chest constrict, because it means he’s been feeling this too, all of it, and he came anyway.

“Ezra—”

“Don’t.” His voice is rough, barely holding together. “Don’t say anything.”

He steps inside like it’s costing him something he won’t be able to get back, the door closing behind him with a soft click. He stands there staring at me like I’m the source of something he doesn’t know how to survive, and then he crosses the room in three strides and his hand cups my face — rough and careful all at once — tilting my head up until I have no choice but to look at him.

He looks back like I’m the answer to something he never wanted to be asking.

His thumb brushes across my cheek so gently it makes my eyes sting, and I feel that single touch everywhere — down my spine, pooling low, the heat flaring hotter and sharper at even that smallest point of contact.

“This happens just this once,” he growls, his voice wrecked and barely leashed, eyes holding mine with an intensity that makes my knees weak. “Just this once, Tessa.”

A breath passes between us.

“And never again.“