Brenna pulls her shirt on. Her hands are shaking. Her face is flushed, and her breathing is ragged. She won’t look at me.
“Brenna—”
“Go after her.”
“What?”
“Sienna. Go after her. She’s—” Brenna’s chest is heaving. She’s looking at the door Sienna just fled through. “She shouldn’t have to see that.”
I stare at her. “Why would Sienna—?”
“Just go, Merric.”
She’s out the door before I can form another sentence. Across the porch, down the steps, disappearing around the corner of the building in the direction of the main house. Gone.
I sit on the overturned cot in the empty bunkhouse with my shirt on the floor and the memory of her mouth still burning on my skin.
What the fuck just happened?
I replay the last thirty seconds. Sienna’s face… shock, yes. Embarrassment, absolutely. She walked in on something she didn’t expect. But Brenna’s reaction—go after her, she shouldn’t have to see that—reads like something else. Like Brenna thinks Sienna’s shock was personal. Wounded. The reaction of a woman who just caught—
Oh.
Oh.
She thinks Sienna and I are together.
Fuck.
The realization hits me like a truck, and the laugh that comes out of me is involuntary, slightly unhinged, and completely inappropriate. I press my hands over my face and breathe.
Brenna Corvus, who ran a covert intelligence network across four states, who can read a hostile delegation from three hundred yards, who planned a parley that made a purist alpha back down—Brenna Corvus thinks I’m sleeping with Sienna.
The laugh dies. Because it’s not funny. It’s the opposite of funny. She’s been watching us for days—the conversation, the touches, the easy proximity—and building a picture that’s completely wrong. And that picture just exploded in the middle of the most important moment of my life.
I need to fix this.
I stand up. Put my shirt on. Straighten the cot. My hands aren’t shaking, which is remarkable given that my entire body is singing with the taste of Brenna and the memory of her knees on either side of my hips and her voice saying,“Don’t you dare stop.”
I need to fix this.
But I don’t know which door to go through. Brenna vanished toward the main house. Sienna fled across the yard. In between is a misunderstanding that’s been building since the day Brenna started watching us from the ridge. And I didn’t see it because Sienna is my packmate, my friend, and the idea of anything else has literally never crossed my mind.
The mate bond thrums in my chest. Fully awake now. No pretending it isn’t. I can feel Brenna on the other end—her confusion, her anger, the raw hurt of a woman who opened herself up and then watched someone else walk through the door.
I sit back down on the cot.
Then I get up again, because sitting here isn’t going to fix a goddamn thing.
I go through the door and into the evening. I have no idea how I’m going to reach her now.
Chapter 17
Brenna
I make it past the barn before I hear the bunkhouse door.
“Brenna—”
