“Also, we’ve got two new complaints from the southern district about noise from the construction near the river,” Luca continued. “And someone reported a beta shift in broad daylight near the park on Fifth, but it turned out to be a large dog. False alarm.”
“A large dog.”
“A very large dog, apparently. German Shepherd mix. The humans panicked anyway.”
“Noted.”
Luca went quiet for a second, and I could practically hear him grinning through the phone. “So. You want to talk about it or should I just guess?”
“Talk about what.”
“Whatever’s got you sounding like you’ve been staring at a wall for the last three hours.”
“I’m fine, Luca.”
“Right. You’ve been ‘fine’ for two years. I’m starting to think you don’t know what that word means.” He waited a beat. “Andrea wore that pink skirt today, didn’t she.”
I hung up.
Luca was the only person who knew Andrea was my fated mate. I’d told him the day after the interview because I neededsomeone to talk me down from walking back into that building and carrying her out of it. Luca did not talk me down so much as stare at me for thirty seconds and say, “Well, you’re screwed.” He wasn’t wrong.
What Luca did not know, what nobody in the pack or the company or anywhere else on this planet knew, was what I did on the nights I couldn’t stand it anymore.
The shifting, the porch, the dog.
It wasn’t every night. Some nights I managed to stay away, to channel the restlessness into work or a run through the estate grounds in my full wolf form. But on the nights when my wolf was clawing at me and the silence in this house got loud enough to hear, I’d shift into the smaller form and go to her. It had been happening more and more lately. Three times this week already, and it was only Wednesday.
If Luca found out that the Lycan King of the Ironridge Pack had been shrinking himself down to husky size and sitting on his assistant’s porch while she read Scottish romance novels to him in a terrible accent, I would never hear the end of it. Not in this lifetime or the next. Luca would bring it up on his deathbed and use his last breath to laugh about it.
I dropped the phone on the desk and pressed both hands flat on the surface and stared at the wall.
Yes, she wore the pink skirt. The flowy one that stopped at her knee and moved when she walked. She’d leaned across my desk to hand me a file earlier and her blouse pulled at the collar and I saw the line of her collarbone and my canines extended half a centimeter and I had to bite down until I tasted copper.
Two years of this. Two years of wanting her so badly my teeth ached, and never once letting my hand linger or standing too close or doing anything that would cross a line. Because if I started, I wouldn’t stop. My wolf had no restraint left, and every day the leash got thinner.
I needed to shift. To run, to burn off whatever was building inside me before it cracked through the surface. But mostly I needed to see her, and all three of those things collapsed into the same destination. They always did.
I left through the back of the estate, crossed the grounds to the tree line, and shifted into the smaller form. My wolf settled the instant the change was done, calmer in this body, because this body meant we were going to her.
Her porch light was on when I got there. She left it on for me, which she’d admitted once with a laugh like she was embarrassed about it, and my wolf had been smug about it ever since.
I settled on the top step and waited. Her neighbor across the street was watering his lawn in the dark, which he did every night at this hour for reasons I’d never understand, and he waved when he saw me. “Evening, Fin!”
I wagged my tail because that’s what dogs did. The indignity of a Lycan King wagging his tail at a retired man in gardening clogs was something I chose not to examine.
Andrea came home twenty minutes later. Her blazer was off, slung over her bag, and her hair was down around her shoulders. She looked tired, not the surface-level tired that coffee fixed butthe bone-deep version that sat behind her eyes even when the rest of her face was still bright.
Then she saw me and her whole face changed.
She dropped her bag on the porch, knelt down, and wrapped both arms around my neck. “Fin,” she said it like an exhale, like she’d been carrying something all day and my name was where she put it down. Her fingers dug into my scruff and her cheek pressed against the top of my head and I could feel her pulse through her wrist, could smell the vanilla in her hair, could feel her breath warm against my fur.
I closed my eyes. If I were in human form right now and she held me like this, I wouldn’t let go. I’d pull her in and bury my face in her neck and hold her until she stopped being tired.
She pulled back and grabbed her book and a blanket and settled against the railing. I lay beside her and she opened to her bookmark and started reading aloud.
Her Scottish accent was fully committed and fully terrible, as always, with a low brogue for the hero that came out sounding more like a drunk pirate and an English accent for the heroine that was marginally better but still not good. My wolf settled deep in my chest, calmer than he’d been all day. At one point the heroine told the hero he was being an idiot and Andrea pulled the book away from her face and said “Thank you!” to no one, like the character could hear her, and then went right back to reading. My wolf huffed, which was the closest thing to a laugh this form allowed.
Between chapters she talked. But tonight was different from the usual rants about my coffee consumption or my inability to say thank you. She was quieter. The energy was off.
