He refuses to look at me. “Now, Sienna.”
I push off the door. My legs are unsteady in a way that has nothing to do with the forest anymore, but I take one step toward him anyway. He takes one step away from me.
“Lucas.”
His shoulders tense. “Leave!” he snaps.
I stop.
I zip and button my pants with hands that are visibly shaking. I smooth my blouse. I do not look at the flush on my throat in the glass of the cabinet beside me because if I do, I will cry, and I am not going to do that in front of him.
He has turned his back to me. His hands are braced on the edge of his desk, shoulders hunched, head down.
I look at that back. At the line of his shoulders. At the man I have just let unravel me against a door, who won’t even turn around and acknowledge that I am still in the room.
I open the door quietly and walk out, deeply humiliated.
Chapter Eleven
Lucas
The fingers of my right hand still remember.
I stare at the desk in front of me, but I’m not seeing wood. I’m seeing Sienna. Back arched. Mouth open. My name emerging from her lips on a broken exhale. The slick heat of her around my fingers. The sound she made when she came apart, the one I caught in my own mouth and swallowed.
You put your hand inside her. You made her come. And then you told her to leave.
The coffee in my cup is cold. It has been cold for an hour. It remains untouched since I poured it. I’ve been sitting here since dawn with the early light climbing the wall, my pen balanced between two fingers, doing nothing. Outside, the estate is waking up. Boots on gravel. A low exchange between two men changing shift. A door closing somewhere on the ground floor.
I should not have touched her.
I knew the second my mouth found hers that I would not stop at a kiss. I knew it in Darius’s hallway the night I first caught her scent. I have known every time we’ve been in the same room.
I did it anyway.
Sienna rarely reveals how vulnerable she is, so when I caught her in my arms, and she told me not to think, not to stop, my willpower weakened. The thin thread of self-control I’d been stretching across the gap between us snapped right here in this office like it was nothing.
Now, the gap is gone. My wolf has her taste. My hand has the memory of her. Somewhere in this house, she is asleep, undoubtedly hurt by my actions, when hours ago she was coming apart under my fingers, begging me not to stop.
This is how it happens, my father’s voice mutters in my head. This is how you kill her.
I get up from the desk and pace to the window. The immaculate, green grounds stretch to the tree line. At the foot of the oak where she has taken to reading, I see nothing. She is not there. She has not left her room since she walked out of this office yesterday with my grip marking her wrist.
Good. That is what I want. That is what I need.
I go back to the desk and open the first report. My security team combed the area where I found Sienna. They tracked her scent around, but there was no other scent in the area. And yet, they found a disturbed patch of moss, as if someone had been standing there for quite a while, the imprints of bare feet still noticeable. The report talks about them dismissively; those footprints may not necessarily be recent.
I remember the look on Sienna’s face, a kind of fear I’ve never seen in her before. Female shifters are not always trained to be warriors. If there was someone out there, the smartest thing for her to do would have been to run. Which she did.
I make a note to myself to add extra patrols within the forest. Lately, there has been a resurgence of rogue shifters. And the ones who attacked our convoy a couple of weeks ago were stronger than usual.
I make another note to reach out to other packs in the area to find out if they have experienced abnormal rogues like those.
It’s easy to throw myself into my work, but Sienna’s scent whispers through my open window at some point, and I find myself distracted all over again.
The day passes in a blur. Meetings I barely remember sitting through. Signing papers without reading them. Three pack council members find reasons to speak with me, and each of them leaves looking confused. I can feel my face growing harder by the hour, the edges of me setting like concrete. A staff member pauses at the door before coming in with what I assume is the afternoon report. He thinks about what he is about to walk into. He reconsiders.
Good. Reconsider me. I am reconsidering myself.
