His breathing shifts.
"Alexandra came in with Kade. She was younger. She walked right up to you and climbed into your lap like it was hers and started talking to you like you'd known each other forever." I run my hand through his hair again. "Lumi said you just sat there. Completely still. Like you didn't know what to do with her but you weren't going to move in case it broke something."
His hands tighten on the chain link.
"Later you saw her outside. Alexandra was playing chase with her dads. She squealed and ran. And you watched Kane and Kade chasing her and something in your wolf read it wrong." I pause. "Read it as threat."
His breath stutters.
"You shifted before anyone could get to you. You went for them."
Silence.
"She cried," I say. "Because you scared her. Not because you hurt her. You never got close enough to hurt her." I pause. "But you didn't know that when they tranqed you. And when you came back you'd decided something."
I let that sit.
"You decided you weren't safe. And you stopped talking. Stopped trying."
The yard is quiet around us. Alexandra's voice carries faintly from the other side of the building — a squeal, Kane saying something dramatic, Kade's low laugh.
“She's fine. She has always been fine. Lumi hoped seeing her today would help," I say. "She wasn't sure. None of them were." I rest my hand at the back of his neck, warm against his skin. "I'm sorry if it hurt. We just want you back."
He turns.
His face is wrecked and open and more present than I've seen it since before the yard, before the circuit, before he decided.
He looks at me.
Not at the fence. Not at the perimeter. Not scanning for threat. He looks at me and I watch it happen in real time — the separating, of what he believed from what is true, of the RJ who stopped from the one sitting in the cold with tears on his face and his hand finding mine.
"Alex," he says.
Not claim. Not anchor.
Recognition.
I press my forehead to his.
We stay like that in the cold with the fence at our backs and Alexandra bossing her fathers around on the other side of the wall.
His hand comes up and covers mine at the back of his neck.
Holds.
Chapter twenty
Alex
My door doesn’t lock from the outside.
I noticed it the first morning — standing in the corridor with my hand on the frame, looking for the mechanism and finding smooth paint instead. Nobody explained it. Things at Feral Academy change without announcement when the rules shift.
Gold House level. Technically. The words still feel unfinished, like Gavin set them down before he decided what they meant.
I’m in Red House. In a room without a lock on the outside of the door.
I’ll take it.
