"Yes," Gray says. Not moving either.
Dalton looks at the window. Looks at me. Looks at Gray.
"Five more minutes," he says.
We stay.
Chapter nine
Alex
I'm running.
The forest floor under my paws is frozen solid, the cold not touching me the way it touches humans, just information, just texture, the feeling of packed snow under each stride. The trees blur past and my lungs pull the air in deep and everything is scent and sound and motion and I am not thinking in words.
Ahead of me, RJ runs.
He’s fast. Faster than I expected — the large grey wolf moving through the trees like he’s lived here long enough to know every root, every dip, every turn. He glances back at me — just once, those pale eyes catching the moonlight — and then he breaks left and accelerates and I feel it in my chest like a match strike.
He's playing.
I push harder.
The forest opens into a clearing and I come through the treeline at full speed and RJ is already there, already shifting, the wolf becoming the man between one breath and the next — and he turns to face me and his eyes are clear. Not the fractured distant thing I've been watching through chain link. Clear. Present. Locked on me with the specific intensity of someone who knows exactly where they are and who they're looking at and what they want.
I shift.
The cold hits my skin and I don't care because RJ is crossing the clearing and he's not stopping and when he reaches me he lifts me like I weigh nothing, my back against the nearest tree, his body pinning mine, and his mouth comes down and I stop thinking about anything at all.
He kisses me breathless. That's the only word for it — breathless, the air going out of me and not coming back because I don't need it, I just need this, his mouth and his hands and the bond blazing between us at a frequency I've never felt before, complete and certain and roaring.
His forehead drops to mine.
"Alex," he says. Just that. My name in his mouth like he's been saving it.
"Yes," I say.
He pushes inside me and I feel the need in it — not just his body, all of him, the thing that has been building since the fence and the chain link and the howl and all the distance between us, finally, finally—
This is what it's supposed to be—
I wake up.
Dark. Ceiling. The cottage.
My lips are still tingling. I press my hand to my mouth like I can hold onto it and feel the ghost of his kiss there, warmand real and already fading. My body is still warm in a way the room doesn't account for, a heat that has nothing to do with the blanket. And his scent — impossible, he's five miles away, it can't be here — but it is, faint at the edge of my awareness, pine and cold and RJ, dissolving as I breathe.
I lie there and feel it go.
Don't, I think, at all of it. Don't go.
It goes anyway.
What's left is the absence — the shape of what I just had, the dream-version of him clear-eyed and choosing me, his voice saying my name like he'd been saving it. What's left is the wanting pressing at my wrist like a bruise and the knowledge that he's at rock bottom five miles away and I'm here with ghost-warm lips and his scent already gone.
Before I can think through the reasons not to—I reach.
Not with my hands. With the bond, the unfinished thing, the wanting that’s been building since the day I arrived at Feral Academy, patient, bruised, not yet.
