Kade | Splinter

She's everywhere.

I smell her in the halls. On the wind. Embedded in my skin like a splinter I can't dig out.

Lavender and something earthy, darker, like turned soil and secrets. Every room I enter feels like it still echoes with her breath.

I keep away most of the day. Try to work. Try to focus.

Neither works.

When Rhett saunters into my office mid-morning with a half-smirk and a report, still wearing the same shirt he had on at breakfast, I nearly tear his throat out for sport.

I don't. But I think about it, and that thought keeps the edge off just enough.

I find her at the training fields instead.

The older Omegas are running crossbow drills under the dim afternoon light, and she's among them, not watching or observing. Participating. Fitted black cargo pants and a sleeveless tee, her arms bare, and I know the inside of those arms. Know the exact place below the crook of her elbow where her pulse beats closest to the surface. I used to press my mouth there when she trembled underneath me.

I stay back. She doesn't need to know I'm watching.

She moves like liquid steel. Focused. Detached. Every arrow loosed hits dead centre. No adjustment between shots. No hesitation. I know she's done this so many times it stopped being practice and became something else entirely,  maintenance, maybe. Keeping the blade sharp.

A cluster of young soldiers watches from the far end of the field, heads bent together, whispering.

I let them watch.

I need to see her like this. Out of place, refusing to act like it.

She doesn't look toward me once. Whether she doesn't notice or doesn't care, I can't tell. With the old Cassia I'd have known instantly, she was never any good at hiding what she felt. Every emotion lived on her face like weather.

This woman gives me nothing.

That's what gets under my skin more than anything else. Not the arrows hitting centre. Not the soldiers watching. Not even the way her body has changed, leaner, harder, carved by years I wasn't there for.

It's the blankness. The control.

She built that wall while I wasn't looking, and I have no idea what's on the other side of it.

I leave before she finishes.

Alone in my quarters, I light a cigarette I won't smoke and stand at the window, watching the tree line blur in the gathering dark.

I should have turned her away. Should have sent her and those children back wherever they came from the second I saw the papers. But the moment she stepped through the gate, my body stopped taking orders from my brain. Six years of discipline, gone in a single exhale.

And those pups.

The boy moves like me. The girl stares like her. Their scent is cloaked, deliberately and expertly muddied, but underneath the masking there's something that pulls at my wolf in a way I can't account for. Something ancient and insistent that has been getting louder since they arrived.

I know Cassia has secrets.

What makes me crazy is the way she wears them like armour. The girl I knew used to cry when I raised my voice. This one would slit my throat and apologise to the children after.

And I want her more than I ever have.

That's what scares me.

I pour a glass of something I can't taste and let myself remember. The last night, before the council meeting. Before everything. She came to my room barefoot, hair down, smelling like spring rain and want. I told her it wasn't safe. That we had to stay hidden. That the elders had started whispering about bloodlines, about her being unfit to stand beside an Alpha.

She crawled into my lap and kissed me anyway.

I didn't stop her.

I stripped her shirt and bit her throat hard enough to bruise, and she laughed, actually laughed and whispered against my jaw: "Then make me yours, coward."

I did. Every inch of her. And the next morning, I destroyed us.

I finish the drink and go to find her.

She's leaving the twins' room when I round the corner. Grey sweater. Bare feet on the wood floor. Hair still damp from a shower, skin clean, expression unguarded in the half-second before she clocks me.

Then the mask goes back up.

We stand in the corridor and say nothing. The silence has weight, the specific kind that only exists between people who once knew each other completely and now have to pretend they're strangers.

I step forward.

She doesn't move back. Doesn't move at all. Just watches me come closer with those storm-grey eyes, steady and giving nothing away, and I hate her for it. I hate that she's learned to do this. I hate that I taught her she needed to.

I stop close enough to feel the warmth coming off her skin. Close enough to catch the way her breath changes, barely, just a fraction, the kind of tell she can't train out of herself because it isn't conscious.

She still responds to me.

She hates that too. I can feel it.

I lean in slowly and run my nose along the line of her throat, just below her jaw, the way I used to when I was reminding her who she belonged to. She goes very still. Doesn't pull away. But her hands ball into fists at her sides, holding herself in place through sheer force of will.

She smells like home and sin. Like the worst decision I ever made and the only one I'd make again.

"I can't think when you're near," I say, low against her skin.

A beat. Then her voice comes, quieter than I expect.

"Then maybe I should stay close."

Something in my chest pulls tight. I brace one hand against the wall beside her head, and I feel her heart rate spike, one hard beat, two, before she gets it back under control.

I pull back just far enough to see her face.

And what I see stops me.

She's looking at me the way you look at something you know is going to cost you everything. Not with want. Not with the anger I could work with. With something worse.

Clarity.

Like she's already run the numbers. Already seen exactly how this ends if she lets me close. And she's decided quietly, completely, without giving me a single word of warning, that she isn't going to let it happen.

Not like this. Not on my terms. Not before she's ready.

Her chin lifts. Her eyes hold mine.

"No," she says. Soft and absolute.

One word. No explanation. No cruelty. Just a door closing, deliberate and final, in my face.

She steps sideways out of the cage of my arm.

Smooths her sweater and walks away barefoot, unhurried, spine straight, letting it be known that I'm a problem she's already solved and filed away.

I stay at the wall.

My hand is still braced against the stone where her head was. I can still feel the warmth she left behind, fading faster than I want it to.

She doesn't look back.

She never looks back. That's always been the thing that breaks me, the way she walks away from things with her whole body, no hesitation, no stolen glances.

Even when we were falling apart before, she did it like that. Like she'd made peace with it before I'd even started fighting.

I stare at the empty corridor for a long time.

The boy's eyes are blue. Ice blue. The particular shade that only comes from one bloodline in this pack.

Mine.

I've been running from that thought since the gate. Circling it. Finding reasons to dismiss it, to explain it away, to keep it at a distance where it can't do what it's threatening to do.

But standing here in the quiet, with her warmth still fading from the wall and the sound of her bare feet long since swallowed by the dark corridor…

I can't outrun it any more.

I push off the wall.

I need answers.

And one way or another, I'm going to get them.