I didn’t go.
Her back window was cracked open. She always left it like that for ventilation because her house ran warm and despite three increasingly sarcastic emails I’d watched her compose from her desk, whoever it was that was supposed to fix it never came.
I padded around the side of the house and nudged through the gap in wolf form, landing silently on the kitchen floor. I’d done this before, on nights when she fell asleep on the couch and I couldn’t make myself leave. That’s what I told myself: that it was about checking on her, making sure she was safe, that the door was locked and the stove was off. But it wasn’t about that. It was need, pure and simple, getting worse every week.
If anyone in the pack knew what I was doing, their King breaking into a human woman’s house through a cracked window to lie on her floor while she slept, I would lose every shred of authority I’d spent eight years building. Aldric would have a field day. The council would question my judgment, my fitness to lead, my sanity. And they’d be right to, because this wasn’t the behavior ofa King. This was the behavior of a man who was losing a war with himself and didn’t care anymore who won.
She wasn’t in bed. The bedroom door was open and the bed was empty, covers thrown back, which meant she’d tried to sleep and couldn’t. I found her on the couch with a book open on her chest and the lamp still on, casting warm light across her face, her hair loose and fanned across the throw pillow she always used. One arm hung off the edge with her fingers almost touching the floor. She must have come back out here to read and lost the fight against exhaustion.
The tension from the office was gone from her face. All the tightness in her jaw, the stiffness in her shoulders, the careful blankness she’d been wearing since I said “professional,” all of it gone. She looked soft and open and completely unguarded and my wolf went quiet for the first time all day.
This close, the bond was almost unbearable. Not painful, not exactly, but intense in a way that made my skin feel too tight and my chest feel too full. Being near her in human form was hard enough, but in wolf form, with my senses dialed up and her scent filling every breath, it was a different kind of torture entirely. I could hear the blood moving through her veins, count her heartbeats, smell the vanilla in her hair and the lavender from whatever lotion she used on her hands and underneath all of it, her, the scent that was just Andrea, that I’d been addicted to since the day she walked into my office.
I lay down beside the couch, close enough to feel her warmth radiating off the cushions, and closed my eyes. Her heartbeat, slow and even. The creak of the floor settling, the hum of the fridge, distant traffic muffled through the walls. My wolf settled against the floor and I just listened.
This was the only peace I got. These stolen hours on her floor, beside her couch, listening to her breathe while she had no idea I was there. It was fucked up. I knew it was fucked up. I was sneaking into my mate’s house in the middle of the night to lie on her floor like a goddamn stalker because the bond was eating him alive and he was too much of a coward to just tell her the truth.
But the truth would change everything, and right now, lying beside her in the dark with her heartbeat in my ears, I was too goddamn chickenshit to let everything change.
Minutes passed. Twenty, maybe more. I wasn’t tracking time, just tracking her breathing, the rhythm of it, and every time she exhaled I felt my own body ease a fraction.
She stirred. Her head turned on the pillow, cheek pressing into the fabric, and her lips parted as she mumbled something half-asleep, barely audible.
“Finneas.”
My eyes snapped open and my wolf went rigid.
She was lying on a couch with a dog beside her and she was dreaming about me. The human version, the one who grabbed a client’s wrist today and told her to be professional and then stared at her for hours, who she’d ranted about on the porch with her face flushed and her voice cracking between anger and what sounded a hell of a lot like want.
And even after all of that, even after I humiliated her and confused her and spent the day being every kind of wrong, shewas saying my name in her sleep like it was safe there. Like I was safe.
She sighed and curled deeper into the pillow and didn’t wake. Her fingers twitched once where they hung off the couch, then went still.
I stayed beside her for another two hours. Wide awake, my wolf so still it ached, replaying my name in her voice until it wore a groove into my brain. She’d said it soft, almost tender, with none of the edge she used at the office, none of the sarcasm or the “Mr. Kingsley” she pulled out when she was pissed. Just my name, unguarded, like it belonged to her as much as it belonged to me.
The house was quiet around us, just the hum of the fridge and an occasional car passing outside, headlights sweeping briefly across the ceiling. Andrea shifted on the couch and her hand slid off the edge and her fingertips brushed my fur, light and accidental, and my wolf pressed up into the touch so fast I couldn’t stop him. She curled her fingers in, still asleep, still dreaming, and held on.
I wanted to hear her say my name when she was awake. Looking at me. Knowing exactly who she was saying it to. Wanting to say it anyway.
The neighborhood had gone completely silent. No cars, no TV light from the house across the street, nothing. It was late, deep into the night, and I had to leave.
I got up slowly, careful not to brush the couch, and padded to the back door. Nosed it open, slipped through, nosed it shut behind me. The yard was dark, every house on the block asleep,and I crossed the grass to the fence line where I’d left my clothes folded behind the garden shed.
I shifted back. The change rolled through me, bones lengthening, spine straightening, fur pulling back under skin. A few seconds and I was crouching by the shed, reaching for my pants, when the back door creaked open.
Shit. Everything in me went cold.
“Fin?” Her voice was groggy, thick with sleep. “Fin, is that you?”
No. Not now, not like this.
I could hear her bare feet on the porch boards, and then a flashlight beam swept across the yard, the white-blue glow from her phone cutting through the dark. It caught me at the tail end of the shift, my body still settling, the last of the wolf receding under my skin. Crouched by the shed, naked, human, fully exposed.
The beam froze on me.
For a second, nothing. Just silence so thick I could hear my own heartbeat and hers, both of them racing, and then:
“What the fuck?”
