But I got it.
Hell, I respected it.
He was giving her agency—her choice. Thatmattered.
Even if every instinct in me was screaming to skip the whole damn chase and bury myself inside her so deep that we’d never figure out where I ended and she began.
The fog in my head thickened, wrapping around thought and sense until it was just scent and sound and need. Then Roan moved. A sharp slash of his hand through the air—fast, decisive.
It was like he’d sliced through the tether of her scent, forcing a breath of clean air into the haze. I gasped in something deeper than oxygen.
“Are you sure this is what you want?” Roan asked, voice low but firm. The words were jagged steel, forged in control. “Tell me you understand what we’re saying. Tell me you understand what will happen.”
Wren’s chin lifted.
God, thatchin.
Eyes blazing, mouth soft but sure. That bright intelligence in her stare, sharp enough to cut through every drop of logic I had left, met Roan’s head-on.
The queen in her had woken.
“I run,” she said, voice steady and clear, though the air around her vibrated with heat. “You hunt. If you catch me, you can have me.”
Roan’s jaw flexed, but she wasn’t done.
Her gaze cut to me, then to Jay, then back again.
“But youeachhave to catch me,” she added, her tone almost wicked.
For a second, I forgot how to breathe.
Oh, she was good.
She was addingrules.A challenge. A layer of control laced with pure, devastating temptation.
“Just because one of you does,” she continued, “doesn’t mean the others get me. But if you do succeed…”
She paused—long enough that the silence in the cabin turned thick and alive.
“I want everything,” she said finally. Her voice had gone husky, molten. “I want your knots. I want to feel you marking me. I want…”
Her gaze flicked across each of us, deliberate, scorching.
“…you.”
The word detonated inside me.
That she saidyou—and meant all of us—was a blazing, neongosign that hit my bloodstream like liquid fire.
Roan tilted his head back, nostrils flaring as he inhaled deeply, like he needed the confirmation of her scent to believe what he’d just heard. His voice, when it came, was roughened with heat and tension.
“Fine,” he said. “Then get dressed.”
My pulse hammered.
“It’s cold out there,” he went on, eyes locked on her. “You get a thirty-minute head start.”
The faintest smile curved her lips. Dangerous. Wicked.
