I’m thinking through how to ask for something without telling him what it really is, how to plead for his warmth while keeping the rest of my secretssafe when I take half a step into the hallway.
I freeze in place.
Even in the dim light, I know that shape. Broad shoulders. The long legs bent awkwardly in front of him. Hood pulled over his head. Ren.
For a beat, my heart lurches. He’s so still that my first thought is that something’s wrong, that maybe he collapsed there. From pain or illness. But when I look closer, that theory falls apart. He’s dressed in soft gray sweats and an unzipped hoodie with nothing underneath—like he’d made a deliberate effort to be comfortable on that stop on the floor. To stay there. Back pressed to the wall, arms hanging loose across his knees. Not an accident. Not exhaustion or pain. Heputhimself here.
My jaw is slack as I stare at him.
The second I’d stepped through the doorframe, his head had snapped up.
I can’t tell if he’d been sleeping and his heightened senses still caught on to me or maybe he hasn’t closed his eyes at alltonight, but either way, he’s already watching me when I find him.
His gaze holds mine in the dark, and for a heartbeat, neither of us moves.
“Rennick?” My voice cracks around his name.
He’s on his feet in one fluid motion, the hood slipping back just enough for me to see it—the remorseful wince. The great Alpha of Pack Fallamhain looksembarrassed. His hands lift like he’s surrendering before a fight even starts.
“I can explain,” he says quickly.
“What the hell are you doing out here?” I question at the same time, my voice a rasp whisper. “Why are you on the floor?”
The words fall out of me, but the truth hums low in my chest before he answers. My wolf already knows. She paces behind my ribs, tail high, smug in the way a lovestruck idiot can be.Our mate stayed. He guarded.
Rennick rubs at the back of his neck beneath the hood. “I— Fuck, Noa.” His sigh sounds like defeat and relief tangled as one. “I just need to be close to you, all right? To know you’re safe. Especially after what happened in Ashvale. I was too far when it started, and I barely made it back in time.” His hands flex uselessly at his sides before he gestures at the spot on the floor he’d claimed. “This is as close as I can get without crossing into your space. And I’m not doing that until you tell me I can.”
My heart twists. The image of him sitting out here all night, on the cold unforgiving wood floor, watching over me like a sentry…it hits something deep inside me. Adds another crack in the walls I’m losing the fight at keeping built between us.
“You…” My throat feels dry, my voice small. “Have you been doing this every night since I got here?”
He nods once, sheepish. “Yeah.”
My gaze drifts to the cracked doors of his bedroom just across the hall.“You do realize your bed’s literally right there,”I point out. “Wasn’t that the whole point of putting me in this room? So I’d be close to you?”
He takes one careful step forward. “It’s still not close enough.”
The breath leaves me in a stutter. My wolf rolls over inside me, baring her throat in quiet submission. All this time I’ve been lying awake wishing I could feel him nearby, not knowing he’s been here all along, fighting the same pull, just on the other side of the wall.
It hits me that neither of us have ever stopped reaching. We just learned new ways to pretend we weren’t.
“Ashvale really scared you, didn’t it?” I whisper, almost to myself.
His hand finds me before I can think to move away, fingers brushing my chin, coaxing my lip free from between my teeth. The rough pad of his thumb follows, tracing the corner of my mouth like he’s trying to undo the hurt I caused myself, then skims higher across my cheekbone. The tenderness he shows me still finds a way to catch me off guard.
“I never want to feel that kind of fear again,” he says, so low it’s nothing but a gravelly vibration between us. “But it’s not just that, baby.”
My eyes search his face, the dim light and the hood over his head casting shadows across his handsome features. Making him look as tired as I feel. “Then what is it?”
“There’s this ache,” he admits, pressing his free palm flat against the tanned skin of his sternum. “It’s constant. Even if I could ignore it, I wouldn’t want to. My wolf either. It’s what pulled him across state lines to find you. He couldn’t stand the distance between us any more than I can.”
My gaze drifts to his chest, to the place he touches like he’s guarding something precious. I know that spot well. Where his still hums with something worth protecting, mine sits silent andhollow, nothing more than the yawning grave of where his bond used to live. It’s where the rot began, the birthplace of my death sentence.
The memory of that night flickers through me, the faint swirl of flurries in the air, the stillness of the trees, the kind of cold that should have hurt but didn’t. I remember laying there barely feeling the wind on my skin because the chill inside me was worse. I’d already gone numb, frozen from the inside out, long before the little snowflakes ever touched me.
And then he found me.
His wolf.
