“Yes.” Her breath hitched on the word and steadied. “I’m not a little girl anymore who cries just because some boy makes fun of her. And like it or not, you’re not your father. You just pretend to be cruel because you think it makes you strong. It doesn’t.”
The room seemed to narrow, fold inwards, cramped and heated. He considered a million things, then. Shouting. Growling. Shifting. But something in her words grounded him. Kept him caught in the moment.
“You don’t get to pick and choose what I am to you,” she said, “and you don’t get to pretend to worry about me when you’re hiding from the truth.”
He snarled, his head turning to the window. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Her chin lifted. “Then tell me.”
He looked back at her then. He saw her swallow. Saw a pulse beat at her throat. Felt his blood heat.
“Layla.” It came out rougher than a warning, softer than a plea.
“Dominic.”
He didn’t remember closing the last of the distance, only the soft heat when his fingers found her waist, the way her hands were already in his shirt, reckless and desperate. She met him with fury, with a sound that tore through him and calmed something at the same time. He tasted rage and longing, and he didn’t know who it belonged to.
“Tell me to stop,” he said against her mouth, because one of them had to say it.
“Why?” she breathed, and pulled him back down.
There were a dozen reasons to show caution, and they ignored them all. The room blurred into breath and heat and the irresistible shock of being wanted by the one person you’d forbidden yourself to desire. He remembered her hands shaking as they clung to him, not from fear but from the overwhelmingrush of everything colliding together all at once. He remembered the way she said his name the second time. And the third.
The candles she always burned flickered low, throwing the room into a softer dark.
The rest became quiet. Two breaths mingling and slowing, the patter of rain, the faint scrape as his hand found hers on the blanket they’d dragged to the floor like an afterthought.
Chapter 9 - Dominic
The Sawmill hadn’t emptied so much as thinned, the noise of it still ringing in Dominic’s ears like static. The pack’s disbelief had been predictable. Their obedience, inevitable. He’d expected both.
But standing on the edge of the platform now, watching the room churn with low voices and sharp glances, Dominic felt a number of things all at once that he couldn’t identify.
He told himself it was the aftermath of command, nothing more than the weight of having spoken, of knowing that words once given couldn’t be taken back. The old familiar yoke of leadership.
He told himself a lot of things.
Julian was already in motion, directing the guard to clear the hall, his voice taking on that eerie calmness that Dominic had never seen disobeyed.
Theodore hadn’t spoken since the announcement. He stood near the base of the dais, pale, his jaw locked tight. When Dominic met his eyes, he saw a maelstrom. He suspected a storm of his own was reflected right back.
“Bring her to the council room,” Dominic said, the words clipped, practical. He didn’t want to reveal any part of himself to the members of the pack that still lingered.
Theodore blinked. “You mean…Layla?”
“Yes. Layla.”
For a moment, he thought Theodore might refuse. His friend’s mouth opened, then shut, throat working. A dozen emotions flickered there: shock, anger, disbelief, but not enough courage to sayno.
Dominic’s tone left no space for hesitation. “Now.”
Theodore’s shoulders squared, years of training reasserting themselves. “Yes, Alpha.”
The word shouldn’t have stung; it was his title, after all. But something in the way Theodore said it, formal and distant, seemed like an accusation. Dominic turned away before he could think about it, listening instead to the shifting rhythm of boots and whispers as the pack began to file out.
This was necessary. Those were the words that turned themselves over and over in her head. Necessary for the pack, for Skymist, for the fight ahead.
And yet, beneath it, another voice kept asking why he’d looked directly at her when he said her name. Why he’d chosenher, when it would have been easier, smarter, to name anyone else. He’d spoken Lunarion’s words. The pack expected that.
