Claws Deep

Holland

“Okay, what is going on?”

The words jumped out of me like they had claws of their own, sharp and reflexive. He had grabbed me as soon as I walked in and just stood there. He released my arm—just lifted his hand away—and with the contact gone, the fireworks vanished too, like someone snuffed a wick between finger and thumb. The hum beneath my skin, the heat, the not-quite-electric current: gone. The sudden ordinary of it made me feel robbed.

Remy’s jaw worked once, twice. “I wish there were an easier way to describe it,” he said, turning toward his desk as if a sentence might be hiding in the top drawer. His voice was lower now, the rough edges sanded. “You’re not going to believe it anyway—not until you see it for yourself.”

He trailed off. The office seemed to hold its breath with him.

On the desk, a fountain pen lay uncapped beside a stack of contracts, and for a ridiculous second I fixated on the way the nib glinted in the lamplight. Anything to keep my brain from bolting. He looked torn between two equally dangerous choices.

“What could be so hard to tell me about this weird feeling?” I tried to laugh and heard the wild note in it. “It’s just… I don’t know. Static. Carpet shock.” I reached toward the short sleeve of his black button-up, that smooth cotton sliding over tattooed muscle. “What material is your shirt?”

I knew I was grasping at straws—maybe even hoping one would turn to rope—but the alternative felt like free-fall.

Remy didn’t answer the fabric question. He paced, a controlled line from bookcase to corner and back again, hands slipping in and out of his pockets like he was practicing letting go. The movement sharpened him: shoulders, forearms, the pale slash of the scar along his cheek. Whatever hovered on his tongue tormented him. I could see it in the way he wouldn’t quite look at me, in the tight wind of his mouth.

He stopped. Faced me. “What if I told you I’m a werewolf?”

There are sentences that feel like a trapdoor opening beneath your feet. That one dropped the floor out from under me so fast my stomach lifted.

“Oh, damn,” I said before my better sense caught the words. “You’re fine, but you are out of your mind.” I barked a laugh I didn’t feel. “Oh, yeah? And I’m Santa.” I threw that in like a lifeline to normalcy, as if sarcasm could patch the rip he’d just sliced in reality. “Try again.”

Anguish moved over his face in a wave—real, not theatrical. No one fakes that kind of hurt well. He took a step toward me, slow and unthreatening, palms half up like he might soothe a startled animal.

But I was already walking. “No,” I snapped, and the word felt like armor sliding into place. “I’m not going to listen to this. I have enough going on, Remy. I don’t need someone playing with my head.” The sternness in my voice surprised me; it sounded like a backbone I’d been building lately in the quiet hours, heavy and necessary.

He didn’t try to block my way. He didn’t grab my arm again. He just flinched slightly, the kind of flinch you see when a person chooses to take a blow rather than raise a hand to stop it.

I turned, rattled the doorknob, and let the stairwell swallow me. Each step down echoed, a hollow metal ring that chased me like an accusation. In the lobby, the world looked painfully normal: the potted ficus drooping from thirst, the countertop I’d wiped a hundred times, the flicker of fluorescent lights that needed replacing. I scooped up my bag, my keys, whatever dignity I could carry without dropping, and fled.

The drive home stretched like an elastic band: too long, too tight, snapping back over the same thoughts. I white-knuckled the steering wheel and hated myself a little for the tremor in my fingers. The sky hung low and hard, December steel. My reflection ghosted in the windshield at stoplights: a woman with tired eyes, a woman who finally chose herself and had no idea how to keep choosing, a woman who kept attracting men with red flags even when she pinned her promises like charms to her own chest.

A werewolf? Really?

By the time I pulled into my building’s lot, my brain had told me every reasonable story a dozen times: static. Adrenaline. The mind playing tricks with a jolt of fear. I leaned my forehead against the steering wheel and breathed until my heartbeat slowed from war drums to a tired, stubborn thud.

No more ridiculous men. No more knives in kitchens. No more catastrophes disguised as confessions.

I hauled my bag up the stairs and into my small, careful apartment. The place smelled like laundry detergent and hope; I kept it clean the way some people pray. I poured water. Fed myself something that pretended to be dinner. Turned on a show and forgot to watch it. The sparks he’d put into my skin had gone, but the memory of them flickered in the dark like a stubborn pilot light.

“Don’t be stupid,” I told the empty room. It didn’t argue. I slept badly.

Remy

I knew it was too soon.

The door had barely closed behind Holland before the realization landed like a punch I didn’t dodge. I’d opened a secret that doesn’t open clean for humans. Not with words. My wolf—Pierce—paced the length of my mind, snapping against the inside of my ribs, furious and aching and exultant all at once. Our mate. Close enough to smell the warm cedar of her hair, the sunlight of her skin. Close enough to feel the bond flash to life when my palm met the softness of her arm.

And I told her the truth like a blunt instrument.

She didn’t believe me. Of course she didn’t. I’d laugh too if a stranger—worse, a boss—told me monsters were real and I was meant for one. She had ghosts already. I could smell them in the ink of her fear, in the way her body three times tried to make itself smaller and three times refused.

“You should have waited,” I muttered, scrubbing a hand over my jaw. The office suddenly felt too tight, the ceiling too low, the walls holding more air than I could breathe. The painting of the wolf on the far wall watched me like a warning.

Pierce crowded forward, hot and insistent. Go after her. His voice in my head was smoke and gravel. Fix it. Bring her back.

“No.” I closed my eyes and leaned back in the chair, forcing each breath to be measured. “We give her space.”

She is ours.

“She is herself.” I ground the words between my teeth. “Space.”

He didn’t like it. He slammed against the edges of my control, hard enough that my hands shook with the effort of holding him. For years I’ve taken the brunt of his storms and never faltered. But one touch from her had undone knots I’d kept tied since I was a boy, and now even my certainty felt raw. I watched the cameras in the lobby after I realized what she was to me. Riddled with the need to know she's safe. Just watcing to make sure she's okay while she handled customers, while she laughed once and it shot straight through me—it had taken everything in me not to go down there.

Every time she crossed the lobby from the lot, Pierce surged, greedy, ecstatic. I’d pressed him back—once, twice, a dozen times—until sweat slid down my spine under my shirt. In all my years leading Sage Moon Pack, I’d never felt discipline turn to exhaustion so fast. Our mate had been within reach for a single day, and still I stood on the cliff edge of myself as if I’d held the line for months.

Work steadied me. Numbers, contracts, problems that yielded to money or logic. Even then, Holland threaded herself through every hour. The memory of her scent curled under things. The sight of her—small and fierce and so much more than she wanted anyone to see—etched itself into me. And the touch—

Goddess that touch.

My chest hurt with the force of wanting: body, mind, and something deeper I never liked naming because names give things power. When the ache sharpened into that particular tug—the one that says she’s near—I looked up.

A knock against my mind. Jacek. Coming up, Alpha.

“Come,” I said aloud, and the door swung open a heartbeat later.

Jacek filled the frame: six foot something, bald head catching the office light, blue eyes bright with a mix of loyalty and nosiness I’d long learned to live with. He’s my Beta—my right hand, my second, my brake when I aimed to run too hot. He’s big, yes, but next to me he always looks a little like a younger brother trying to grow into a coat two sizes too large.

“Report?” I asked, though I already knew this wasn’t about inventory.

He grinned, the wide, unselfconscious grin of a man whose intuition had been confirmed. “Did you really find your mate?”

The smile gave away that he didn’t need the answer. When an Alpha meets his mate, the bond doesn’t stay private; it sends a ripple through the pack’s link, subtle but present—like a bell struck at the far end of a hall. The stronger the Alpha, the clearer the ring. Sage Moon had thrummed all morning, that faint surety humming under everything we did.

I let the admission settle on my face before I gave it breath. “Yes.” The word tasted better than most words ever had. “I did.”

“Well, where is she?” Jacek plopped into the chair across from me, which protested with a thin squeal. His excitement was boyish, and something in me—some brittle place I’d kept shuttered—softened because he could feel it too. “Introduce me. I’m dying to meet our future Luna. Goddess, Remy—Sage hasn’t had a Luna since—”

“Since Percy,” I finished quietly, my mother’s name a steady wound and a steady pride. “And Kale chose never to take another.”

He sobered, the past pulling a line of respect across his features. “Yeah.” A beat. Then the grin twitched back, irrepressible. “So? Let’s go.”

“Jacek.” I set my hands on the desk and he heard the warning in the way I said his name. He calmed, but the bright shiver of his joy didn’t dim. “This isn’t simple.”

“Not simple?” He looked genuinely confused. “You meet, you mark, you mate. The Moon Goddess smiles, the pack sings, and the bond strengthens us. Every story ends with the Alpha and Luna crowned in each other.” He leaned forward, lower voice for the dying flame of humor. “You, my friend, don’t do simple. But this—this is destiny on a platter.

I let him have the joke because he’d earned it a thousand times over. Still, the truth was jagged. “She’s human.”

“Ah.” The word landed like a pebble tossed into a still pond, ripples inevitable. “Right.” Jacek’s gaze slid to the painting on the wall—the wolf in fog, always watching—and back to me. “So she doesn’t understand the mate bond.”

“She doesn’t believe in werewolves.” My mouth pulled tight around it. “I told her too soon. She laughed. I would have, too.”

He rubbed a hand over his jaw, thinking. Jacek hasn’t met his mate yet—at least, not one who stood and stayed long enough to be named—but everyone in our world knows the shape of that moment when sparks find skin. For us, it’s not a puzzle. The body recognizes what the mind hasn’t learned to say yet. For a human, the mind refuses the language and the body seems like it’s lying.

“I’m sure that must be hard for you, Alpha,” he said gently. “But you’ll figure it out. Even as a human, she must feel it. Maybe she calls it chemistry. Or… that fire thing humans talk about in bad movies.”

I huffed, a sound close to a laugh. “They have a lot of names for not wanting to admit the Moon Goddess runs them anyway.”

Behind my ribs, Pierce pressed forward just enough to make my chest tighten. The ache was constant now, a quiet misery that sharpened whenever she was close and settled into a low throb when she wasn’t. It would be worse if she rejected the bond entirely, if she chose another. The thought made a warning black pulse at the edges of my vision. I banked it before it could grow teeth.

My eyes wandered for a second over the office—the weight of the books, the careful order, the private scars in the wood that no one else noticed. For the first time since I inherited this space, it felt…empty. I’d made my life vast: pack lands, a successful company, a seat on the regional Council. I’d made my world heavy enough to keep me busy. And yet with Holland just one floor below—just a flight of stairs and a slammed door away—this office had become a shell I paced like a caged thing.

“She’s small,” I heard myself say, and Jacek’s brows rose. I didn’t usually talk like this—not about women, not about want. “Under five feet, I think. Curves like the Moon Goddess meant to soften a man’s sharp edges. Strong chin. Brown eyes like… like a hearth that remembers every fire that’s ever burned in it.” I shook my head once, annoyed with myself. “And a spine like oak, even when her hands shook.”

Jacek’s smile turned knowing. “Not your usual poetry.”

“Nothing about this is usual.”

He sobered again. “So. The plan?”

“Give her space.” The decision cost me, but I said it anyway. “Let her process. We move carefully. I’ll find a way to show her what words can’t carry.”

Pierce snarled inside me at the word space, then sulked, then finally curled in resignation with his nose on his paws, as if to say this had better work. It was the best I’d get from him for now.

I stood, because stillness made me feel like a statue in my own life. “Lunch?”

Jacek blinked, surprised. “You mean leave the building?”

“I mean let the downstairs breathe without me looming and making it worse.”

He considered it, then nodded. “Fine. But you eat, and you don’t pick a fight with anyone who stares at you like you’re a thunderstorm with legs.”

“I don’t pick fights.”

“You don’t have to. They come pre-picked.”

I snorted, grabbed my jacket, and the two of us left the office like men stepping into weather we were resigned to endure.