And for the first time in years, we ran toward something rather than looking for it.
??????
The steering wheel was taking the full weight of everything I couldn’t say.
I gripped it hard enough to feel the leather compress beneath my palms and loosened my hold before I did something structurally inadvisable to the interior of a very expensive car. Her scent had deepened again on the walk back—warmer, richer, layered with exertion and the cold night air and something underneath both that my body recognised before my mind caught up with it.
We were running out of time.
Not tonight. Not this week, perhaps. But the heat was building with the quiet momentum of something that didn’t ask permission, and when it arrived it would arrive fast, and she had no pack knowledge, no elder to prepare her, no framework for what was coming or what it meant.
We needed her to trust us before that happened.
We needed her to choose us.
“Are you cold?” I asked, my hand already moving toward the heating controls.
She shook her head.
She was looking out of the window at the city sliding past—the late night version of London, unhurried and luminous, the streets thinning out as we moved away from the park. Her profile in the glass. The line of her throat. The loose fall of her hair still carrying the cold of the night in it.
I put both hands back on the wheel.
We drove in silence that wasn’t uncomfortable—the specific quality of quiet that existed between two people who had said enough for one evening and were sitting with it. The park. The rose garden. The running. Things that didn’t need immediate words.
It wasn’t until we were halfway back to her apartment that she spoke.
“What’s your pack like?”
Something settled in my chest at the question. She was asking. Voluntarily. Without me steering the conversation toward it.
That’s not nothing, Kael noted.
“Similar to running the company in some ways,” I said, keeping my voice even, measured—giving her information without pressure.“Everyone has their position. Their purpose. Their contribution to the whole.” I paused, considering how to explain what was genuinely difficult to translate into human terms.“But a pack is simpler than a boardroom in the ways that matter. The transparency between minds removes the politics. Nobody is performing. Nobody is manoeuvring. You know where you stand and so does everyone else.”
The city moved past us.
“We have elders—the ones who carry the history, who’ve seen enough to advise without agenda. Alphas who become protectors, or branch out to build their own packs when the time is right. Family units we keep close because proximity is protection. And the young.” I felt Kael stir with the familiar warmth that always accompanied the thought of the pups.“Our young are everything. They’re the reason for all of it.”
I slowed as a red light bled across the bonnet.
Turned to look at her.
She was watching me with an expression I was still learning to read—something careful and quiet, sitting just behind her eyes.
“That sounds too good to be true,” she murmured.
Not scepticism exactly. More like someone who wanted very much to believe something and had been burned enough times to keep the wanting at arm’s length.
The light held.
“Why not meet a few?” I said.“Form your own opinion. No obligation, no ceremony—just people. You can judge for yourself what it is and isn’t.”
The light turned green.
“Perhaps,” she murmured.
That’s not a no, Kael said, with the quiet elation of a wolf keeping himself extremely still so as not to startle something precious.
