Kade | Unleashed

I hear her laugh before I see her.

It's the worst possible way to find out she's in the training yard, not a report from Marcus, not a scent on the wind, but that sound. Low and genuine and rare, the kind that used to be mine to earn. The kind I haven't heard in six years.

I come around the corner of the equipment shed and stop.

She's at the far end of the yard with Rhett.

He's showing her something; a grip adjustment on a short blade, his hands wrapped around hers from behind, repositioning her fingers with the patient ease of a man who has absolutely no problem being that close to her. She's listening. Head tilted, weight shifted back slightly into his space, not pulling away.

She says something I can't hear.

Rhett grins that slow, deliberate grin he uses when he's won something, and leans down to say something in her ear.

She laughs again.

My jaw locks so hard I feel it in my back teeth.

The training yard is active around them. Soldiers running drills, Betas sparring in the marked rings, the usual morning noise of bodies and impact and barked instruction. None of it registers. There is only the thirty feet of open ground between me and the two of them, and the thing rising in my chest that I haven't felt this close to the surface in years.

My wolf is not interested in reason this morning.

I cross the yard.

Rhett sees me first, he always does, that's what makes him a good enforcer. He straightens, steps back from Cassia with the unhurried ease of a man who doesn't consider himself to have been doing anything wrong. Which is more infuriating than guilt would have been.

Cassia turns a half-second later.

Her expression does what it always does when she looks at me now, closes. Not quickly, not with any visible effort. It just shuts like a door, smooth and practised, and I get the mask. The flat, steady, measuring look that gives me nothing.

"Alpha." Rhett nods, the faint ghost of amusement in his voice that I need him to stop using immediately.

"Get back to your rotation," I say. Flat and final.

He glances at Cassia once, just once, and something passes between them that I don't have a name for yet, and that absence of a name makes it worse. Then he rolls his shoulders and walks away without argument. 

Because he's smart enough to know when not to push.

I turn to Cassia. "What are you doing out here?"

She raises an eyebrow. "Training."

"With Rhett."

"He offered." She tilts her head. "I accepted."

"I told you to stay away from him."

"And I told you I didn't take orders from you." She says it without heat, without defensiveness, the way you state a fact about the weather. "Has that changed?"

"You're in my territory,"

"Your territory." She nods slowly, like she's filing that away. "Right. Your territory. Your gate. Your archive. Your rules." Her eyes stay steady on mine. "Tell me, Kade, where exactly in your territory does it say I have to stand where you put me and wait?"

"I'm not doing this here."

"Then where?" She spreads her hands slightly, a gesture that manages to encompass the whole yard, the whole pack house, the whole situation. "Because you keep pulling me into corridors and archives and corners and telling me half-truths and then walking away, and I'm starting to think the location isn't actually the problem."

Around us, the yard has gone quieter. Not silent, soldiers know better than to stop completely when an Alpha's temper is rising, the ones who've been here long enough know how fast things can change. But quieter. Bodies angled slightly away, movements carefully normal, everyone pretending very hard not to listen.

The wolf in my chest shoves against the inside of my ribs.

"You want to stand here and have this conversation in front of my entire pack?" I say, low.

"I don't particularly want to have it at all." She crosses her arms. "You started it."

"I started it because you were letting Rhett put his hands on you."

Something shifts in her expression. Barely, just enough that I see it.

"He was adjusting my grip," she says, precisely.

"I know what I saw."

"Then you need to look harder." She takes one step toward me, and there is nothing soft about it. "Because what you saw was a man helping me train. What you felt," she pauses, and her eyes do something complicated that I can't decode "Is your problem. Not mine."

The wolf shoves again.

I have been managing this animal for six years with the discipline of a man who knows exactly what he is and what he's capable of and cannot afford to forget it. I have taken that discipline into every council meeting, every border dispute, every sleepless night with a glass of something untasted and her face behind my eyes. I have been rigidly, furiously controlled.

She's been back four days.

"Don't," I say. The word comes from somewhere below language. From the part of me that is losing the argument with the animal.

Cassia hears it. I watch her register the shift in my voice, the way it's dropped below what's human and for one moment something crosses her face that isn't the mask. Something older. Something that remembers what I sound like when I'm at the edge.

She doesn't step back.

Of course she doesn't step back. She never stepped back from anything in her life and five years of exile have done absolutely nothing to change that.

"Kade," she says. Carefully now. "Get it under control."

I am trying.

The wolf doesn't care about trying.

It has watched this woman walk back through its gate. It has scented children in her shadow whose blood it knew the moment it touched the air. It has spent four days being managed and leashed and reasonable while she laughed at another man's ear and wore the mask for everyone except Rhett, who somehow, in four days, has earned something from her that I can't seem to reach.

It is done being managed.

The shift comes before I can stop it.

Not full, not the complete unmaking of form that a proper shift requires, the deliberate and controlled transformation. This is something rawer. Something that starts in my hands and shoulders and spine and pushes outward without permission. My knuckles crack. My shoulders broaden. The seams of my shirt go first, then the laces of my boots, and the sound that comes out of my chest is not a human sound.

I hold it with everything I have, I hold it at the halfway point where the wolf is present but the man is still here too, both of us occupying the same breaking body.

And I turn and put my fist through the sparring ring post.

The wood is four inches thick and reinforced with iron strapping. It doesn't matter. It goes through like it was nothing and the entire ring structure comes down in a cascade of wood and rope and iron brackets, crashing to the ground with a sound like the end of something. The dust rises. The chain-links at the corners snake across the dirt.

The yard goes completely silent.

Every soldier, every Beta, every Omega who was pretending not to watch is now simply watching. There is no pretence left. No one moves.

My chest heaves. The wolf retreats slowly, reluctantly, dragged back down by the discipline that hasn't broken even if the post has. My hands return to normal. My spine settles. I straighten.

I turn back to Cassia.

She is exactly where she was.

She hasn't moved. Hasn't flinched. Hasn't changed her expression by a single degree. She stands in the wreckage of the sparring ring's shadow with her arms still crossed and her eyes on mine, and she watches me come back from the edge the way you watch a storm pass — not with fear, not with satisfaction, just with a kind of patient, measuring attention that takes everything in and gives nothing back.

She looks at the destroyed post. At the tangled ruin of the ring. At the watching pack around us who are all very carefully not breathing.

Then she looks at me.

"Feel better?" she asks.

The silence in the yard is absolute.

I have no answer for her. Because the honest one is no. No, I don't feel better, I feel like I've just shown every soldier in my pack that the Alpha can be taken apart by a woman who won't even look at him properly, I feel like six years of walls just came down with the sparring ring, I feel like she's been back four days and I'm already losing ground I spent years taking back.

And she's still looking at me like I'm a problem she's solving.

"Clean this up," I say to the yard at large. My voice has come back level, authoritative, the voice they're used to. Most of them exhale.

I turn and walk back toward the pack house.

Behind me, I hear Cassia's footsteps, not following me, going wherever she was going before I interrupted her morning with my catastrophic failure of composure.

And then Rhett's voice, low and dry, from somewhere to my left:

"So. That happened."

I keep walking.

Marcus falls into step beside me as I reach the path, clipboard tucked under his arm, expression carefully neutral in the way that means he has thoughts and is choosing, wisely, not to share them.

We walk in silence for thirty seconds.

"The ring was due for replacement anyway," he says finally.

"Don't."

"Right."

Another silence.

"She's going to be a problem," I say.

Marcus is quiet for a moment. "She already is," he says. "The question is what kind."

I don't answer that.

Because I already know the answer, and it has nothing to do with Sasha or the council or the prophecy or any of the things I should be thinking about.

It has to do with the way she looked at me after, steady and unreadable and completely unmoved while the dust was still settling from what I'd done.

Like she'd already seen the worst of me.

Like it was exactly what she expected.

Like she was waiting for me to show her something she hadn't seen before.

And the most dangerous thought of all, the one I can't put back in the box it escaped from:

I don't know if I can.