His fingers flex against the arms of the chair. I notice the faint tremble there, the way his knuckles have gone white.
“I wake up with blood under my nails sometimes,” he says. “Don’t know if it’s mine or someone else’s.”
Still, I say nothing. I’ve learned there’s power in silence. In being the space where someone else can breathe.
His voice drops to a near whisper. “The worst ones are the ones where I see her. The mate I lost. She comes back looking like herself, sounding like herself, and then she turns to ash in my arms. Every time.”
My breath catches. “I’m so sorry.”
He finally looks at me then. And in his eyes, I see it—the grief he’s tried so hard to chain up, the sorrow that bleeds through every clipped word and tight smile.
“She wasn’t strong enough,” he says. “And I wasn’t careful enough. I thought I could have it all—her and the Pack, the beast and the man. But it doesn’t work like that. Nothing ever does.”
I reach out then, slowly, gently, and set my hand over his. Just the lightest touch. My skin against his. A gesture of compassion, of connection.
He flinches. Not from fear, but from something deeper—something wild and ancient that stirs beneath the surface.
His pupils dilate. His breath goes sharp. And beneath my palm, I feel it.
The wolf.
Not just anger or violence—but a raw, aching need. A creature barely restrained.
His hand tightens beneath mine, just for a second. Then he pulls away like I’ve burned him.
“We shouldn’t,” he says, voice thick.
“I know.”
He stands, pacing toward the window, watching the snow swirl in dizzying spirals.
But he doesn’t leave the room.
And I don’t move.
12
DARIUS
The snow has no intention of stopping tonight. It howls like an ancient beast outside, pressing in with such force it muffles even the cracking of the old beams overhead. The windows rattle, and somewhere down the long east hallway, a shutter bangs like a heartbeat out of sync. But none of it really registers—not the storm, not the wind, not the eerie sounds of this house bracing itself against nature’s fury—because every ounce of me is wound tight with the awareness of her.
Tessa.
She’s in the study.
I don’t need to see her to know it. Her presence sings in my bones, in the aching marrow of me, as if she’s been stitched into the very fabric of my senses. Her scent still lingers—lavender and something softer, something human that hums of skin warmed by firelight and tea steeped too long. It wraps itself around my ribs, seeps beneath my skin like slow, sweet poison, and all I want—all Icrave—is to follow it to her.
The wolf in me is restless. It scratches behind my sternum, prodding me with a kind of electric urgency I haven’t felt in decades. The last time I wanted like this, it ended with bloodon my hands and my mate buried under half a moon’s worth of snow. And still, even now, after all the scars and shame, this need comes back, unrelenting, primal, deeper than desire.
I shouldn’t go to her.
I know that. Iknowwhat I am.
But knowing doesn’t stop my hand from wrapping around the brass doorknob, or my feet from crossing the threshold of the study like a man walking into the very fire he swore to avoid.
She’s standing near the frosted window, her frame outlined in the pale glow of candlelight, hair loose down her back and her sweater hanging long over her hips like she dressed for comfort, not company. Her arms are wrapped around herself, not in fear, but in that absentminded way people do when they’re lost in thought. She turns when she hears me, her eyes widening just a little—not in alarm, but in surprise, soft and unguarded.
“I didn’t think…” she begins, her voice barely above the hush of the wind.
