Naked Desire (SSPG R-18)

Kenna’s POV 

“Be careful with those flowers, they’re worth more than you will ever be.” 

My stepmother didn’t look at me when she said it. She never did. Her eyes stayed fixed on the mirror, adjusting a pearl comb in her hair while I stood behind her holding an armful of purple hibiscus flowers that cost more than the room I slept in.

“Yes, ma’am.” My voice came out steady. I’d had twenty-three years of practice.

I carried the flowers down the hall myself, past servants who moved faster than I did and still somehow made it look effortless, like belonging was a power they had built and I’d never trained. 

My arms hurt before I reached the ballroom. I didn’t set the flowers down until every branch of it was arranged exactly the way the wedding planner wanted them, because if one petal bent wrong, it would be my fault, and Alpha Roland’s daughter or not, I couldn’t afford to be at fault for anything today.

Three hours earlier, I had woken in the dark, in the narrow room below the estate that still smelled faintly of the laundry drying racks stored next door. 

I hadn’t lit a candle. I knew the room well enough to dress without one, knew exactly where the loose floorboard was, exactly how many steps to the door. 

Some mornings I told myself that knowing a place that well was its own kind of belonging. Most mornings I didn’t believe it.

By the time the sun came up, the entire pack was already a breathtaking wedding.

“Careful, careful…that’s imported silk, not something they’ll waste on the help.” A noblewoman’s voice, pitched just loud enough. I didn’t turn around. I had learned that turning around only gave them a face to aim at.

“Is that her? The wolfless one?” Another voice, softer, but not soft enough to be a secret. 

“Goddess. Imagine carrying that shame your whole life.”

“They say she’s never shifted. Not even once. Twenty-three years old and nothing.” A pause, then a laugh disguised as sympathy. 

“Poor Alpha Roland, what a thing to have hiding in his own house.”

I set the last vase down without letting my hands shake. They didn’t lower their voices because they didn’t need to. I wasn’t a person to them. I was furniture that happened to overhear things.

I found Jenna in her dressing chamber an hour later, arms lifted while three seamstresses pinned her gown tighter at the waist. 

She looked like something out of a painting, golden hair loose over one shoulder, cheeks flushed with the particular glow of a girl who had never once wondered if she was wanted.

“There you are.” She smiled at me in the mirror. “I need the blue sash, the one from the east trunk. And Kenna…” she tilted her head, considering me the way she might consider a shade of ribbon 

“Could you let my hair down after they finish with the corset? You always do it better than the maids.”

“Of course.” I found the sash. I unpinned her hair when the seamstresses stepped back, working the pins loose one at a time, careful not to snag the complex braid work I had helped design for her three weeks ago, back when the wedding still felt like a distant, abstract thing instead of a knife pressed slowly into my ribs.

“You’re so good at this,” Jenna said, watching me in the mirror instead of turning around. 

“Honestly, I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

I didn’t answer. There wasn’t a version of that sentence I could respond to without saying something true.

When the last pin came free and her hair fell in soft waves down her back, she reached up and caught my hand before I could step away. 

She turned in her seat, and for one unguarded second, I let myself believe the warmth in her eyes was real.

“Don’t look so sad, sister.” She squeezed my fingers. 

“Maybe one day someone will choose you too.”

She meant it kindly. That was the worst part. I could see it in her face, no cruelty, no calculation, just the easy, thoughtless kindness of someone who had never once had to wonder if she was worth choosing. 

It went into me clean and quiet, like a blade slipped between ribs by someone who didn’t even know they were holding a knife.

“Maybe,” I said, and smiled, because smiling took less out of me than anything else I might have said.

The doors opened before she could say more, and the temperature of the room changed.

I felt him before I saw him, the way every wolf in the room straightened, the way conversation thinned to nothing. 

Alpha Jace Brown filled a doorway like he’d been built for the shape of it, dark and composed, his presence pressing down on the room without him doing anything at all.

He didn’t look at the seamstresses. He didn’t look at me. 

His gaze went straight to Jenna, and something in his jaw eased, just slightly, the smallest concession to relief.

“Is Jenna ready?” he asked. He was asking the room. He wasn’t asking me, because he didn’t know I was a person who could be asked.

“Almost,” Jenna said, rising in a rustle of half-pinned silk, glowing under his attention like a flower turning toward light.

 “Give me twenty minutes.”

He nodded once and turned to leave. His eyes passed over me on the way to the door, not through me, not around me, just over, the way a gaze slides over a chair or a vase or anything that isn’t required to be noticed. 

Four years of being in the same house as girls who curtsied when he walked by, and I had never once heard him say my name. I doubted, standing there with a pincushion still in my hand, that he even knew it.

The door shut behind him. I stood very still and let myself have one full second of the thought before I buried it where I buried everything else.

I gathered the pins from the floor, straightened the dressing table, and went to finish tidying Jenna’s chamber while she was called away for her final fitting with the wedding coordinator. 

It was mindless work, folding discarded ribbons, hanging the veil back on its stand, smoothing the wrinkles from the gown laid across the bed.

I was refolding a cape when I noticed it. The wedding dress, the real one, the ceremonial gown 

Jenna was meant to wear it at the altar in three hours, still hung untouched inside its glass case by the window, exactly where the seamstresses had left it that morning.

But the dressing room beyond it, the private chamber where Jenna always retreated to be alone before ceremonies, stood open and Jenna wasn’t inside it.