Jay’s lips curved, just slightly. “We make it sport.”
We both stared at him.
“Sport?” I repeated.
Jay shrugged, as if what he’d just said wasn’t completely insane. “She’s a professional. A fighter. Strategist. She’s alwayshad the upper hand with us, always out-thought us, out-maneuvered us. If she wants this—wants us—then we don’t just give in. We don’t coddle her. We make herearnit.”
Roan crossed his arms slowly, wariness creeping in. “Earn it how?”
“We hunt her,” Jay said simply. “We let her try to escape, try to outsmart us. But she knows what happens if she gets caught.”
He said it with that maddening beta calm, but there washeatunder it. The kind of quiet, building promise that made the room feel smaller.
“This is insane,” I muttered, but I could already feel my instincts snapping to attention.
My pulse kicked. My skin buzzed. My mouth went dry.
Every alpha instinct I had screamedyes.
Roan looked over at Jay, then down at the floor like he was checking his soul for cracks. Then, finally—his voice a rasp—he asked, “Are yousureyou’re a beta?”
Jay smirked. But before he could answer, a soft click split the tension in half.
We all turned.
The bedroom door had opened behind Roan, and she stood there—barefoot, robe hanging off one shoulder, hair a wild halo around her flushed face. Her eyes burned gold, glowing in the low light, and her skin shimmered with sweat and scent and something more.
She didn’t speak. She didn’t have to. Every molecule in the air shifted. And my heart. Fuck. Itstopped. Then came roaring back to life, all at once. Wren. Bedraggled, beautiful, blazing.
More perfect than I had ever let myself admit.
Roan was frozen in front of her, tension radiating off his back like a living thing. Jay had gone still too, his expression unreadable—butready.
But me? I took a step forward, because I knew. The game had already started.
“I’ll do it.” The words fell from her lips like a match hitting gasoline.
Every single molecule in meignited.
A low, guttural sound rumbled out of my chest before I even realized I was making it. It wasn’t human—wasn’t civilized. It was raw, primal,mine.The kind of growl that came from someplace buried so deep in me I hadn’t heard it in years.
I barely resisted the urge to fist pump like some kind of lunatic. The sheer adrenaline, the electric punch ofyesthat ripped through me, was too much. Too hot. Too consuming.
She’d said yes.
Not to safety. Not to retreat.
Tous.
Tothis.
The possessiveness that slammed through me hit with the same force as the need—hard enough that I had to curl my fingers into fists before I reached for her and ruined everything before it started.
Jay, of course, was the only one whose voice stayed steady. Calm as always, even when every line of his body betrayed the same pulse of hunger that had me half-feral.
“You have to really run, Wren,” he said, tone low, deliberate. “You can’t just let us catch you. If you give in—if you surrender—then we won’t do anything.”
I wanted togoggleat him for being able to say that like it was simple. Like his restraint wasn’t hanging by the same thin thread mine was.
