They were just—playing.
No agenda. No threat assessment. No circling something they hadn’t decided to name yet. Just two wolves in a rose garden in the middle of the night, completely and utterly themselves.
And somehow, without any fanfare at all, it was the most tender thing I’d ever seen.
Chapter 39
Conrí
We could have stayed out there with her all night.
And not for the reasons I might have anticipated—not the pull of her scent or the heat that had been building since the office, not the bond pressing forward with its ancient, insistent logic. Simply because this was her wolf unguarded for the first time. Running for the pleasure of it. Playing without agenda or armour or the focused calculation of something that had learned to survive.
Just Bad Girl. Completely herself. In the dark and the cold and the rose garden with her tail in the air.
It made me question everything we’d concluded in those first moments. The conference room. The threat assessment. The word hybrid delivered like a verdict while Kael pressed against me and demanded blood.
We never expected to find her in the office, Kael said, the admission carrying the distinct quality of something he’d been sitting with for a while.
No. We hadn’t. We’d been looking outward—other cities, other countries, the world cast wide and fate apparently in no hurry. And there she’d been for three years. Breathing the same air. Existing in the same building. Her wolf dormant beneath the surface, undetected, waiting for Croatia to wake her up.
The thought of what we might have missed if she’d never booked that flight sat uncomfortably and I set it aside.
She pounced on us again.
Kael let her.
More than let her—he wanted it. Wanted her weight against us, her pawing and her half-hearted snapping, the warmth of her pressed close even briefly. We wanted her scent on us. All over us if she’d allow it. Once we shifted back the trace of her would cling—to our skin, our hair, the collar of whatever we put back on—and she would smell it on us and something in her would register it before her mind had time to weigh in.
The seed, planted quietly through play.
Her teeth found our ear.
The bite was more suggestion than force—a half-hearted thing, more tickle than threat, the kind of contact she could retreat from and call accidental if pressed. But it was contact. Her choosing it. Her initiating.
Such disrespect to an Alpha, some ancient and deeply unimpressed part of us noted.
We didn’t care even slightly.
Kael rolled—smooth and deliberate, reversing their positions in a single motion—and for one suspended second she was beneath us, his weight hovering, the moment balanced on its own possibility.
She was gone before he could pin her.
Off across the grass in a burst of speed that left us momentarily still, watching her go—the shift and gather of her haunches, the way she moved through the dark like something the night had been expecting. She stopped at a distance that was precisely, pointedly safe. Turned. Her tail flicked once. Twice.
Catch me if you can.
Her voice in our head—bright and certain and entirely without fear.
Kael didn’t answer.
He didn’t need to.
She already knew.
He gathered himself—one breath, two—and then we were after her, and the park opened up dark and wide and entirely ours, and somewhere ahead of us Bad Girl howled at the moon with the full-throated joy of something that had finally, completely arrived in itself.
We ran.
