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“The nice version. I don’t know what to do with the nice version of you.” She kept her voice flat. Controlled. Her pulse was doing things she refused to acknowledge. “The one who makes terrible coffee and insults my toast crumbs. That one I can handle.”

His mouth moved. The corners pulled, slowly, a grin building from the foundation up. Not the sharp, defensive smirk he’d been deploying all week. A real smile, warm, unrehearsed, creasing the skin around his eyes.

“You like my terrible coffee.”

“I tolerate your terrible coffee.”

His grin widened. “You drank three cups yesterday.”

“I was tired. Don’t read into it.”

He was still smiling. It did things to his face that she was not going to think about. It made him look younger, open, like the man she’d glimpsed in the training yard before everything between them had become tangled in sex and silence and the careful choreography of pretending neither mattered.

“Fine,” he said. “Tomorrow I’ll make it worse. Extra strong. A personal attack on your taste buds.”

“I look forward to suffering.”

“Noted.”

She stepped past him into the corridor. His arm was close enough that the heat of his skin reached hers through the fabric of her sleeve. She didn’t touch him. She kept walking, her boots quiet on the stone, her stride measured.

The smile stayed with her. She carried it down the staircase, through the main hall, out into the courtyard where the afternoon light fell warm on the flagstones. She carried it past the patrol leads who glanced at her without comment, past the supply building, past the western gate where the wolves on duty straightened as she passed.

She carried it all the way back to the quarters, where she closed the door behind her, leaned against it, and pressed her hand to the center of her chest.

She could feel him still standing in the doorway of the briefing room, watching the space where she’d been.

She breathed out. Let her hand fall. Walked to the kitchen, filled the kettle, and set it on the stove. Stood at the counter with her back to the empty room while the water heated.

She’d told them how Garrett operated. She’d sat in a room full of people who had every reason to dismiss her, and they’d listened. Not because they trusted her. Because what she said was true, and the truth was more important than the history between them.

It didn’t fix anything. She knew that. Gideon would watch her with that heavy look for weeks. Caitlynn’s measuring gaze would continue. The pack would still cross hallways to avoid her.

But Kahn had said stay in this room, and he’d meant it. Viktor had drawn a circle on the map where she’d told him to draw it. Chris had called her impressive without making it a joke.

The kettle whistled. She poured the water, watched the steam rise, and wrapped both hands around the mug.

She didn’t drink tea. She’d told him that. But the mug was warm, and the kitchen was quiet, and somewhere on the second floor of the Alpha house, Chris Williams was smiling because of her, and she couldn’t stop the feeling that spread through her ribs when she thought about it.

She drank the tea. It wasn’t terrible.

Chapter 13 - Chris

He couldn’t sleep.

Chris lay in the dark with his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling he’d been staring at for two weeks. Through the wall, Sloane was quiet. But without a sliver of doubt, he knew that she was awake too. Her presence hummed with a low warmth beneath his ribs, steady, close, the proximity of someone twelve feet away through stone and plaster.

He turned onto his side. Closed his eyes. Opened them.

The briefing room kept replaying behind his lids. Not the map, not Viktor’s annotations, not Kahn’s questions. Sloane. The way she’d leaned forward over the table, traced the eastern perimeter with her finger, spoken about her father’s movements with a precision that had silenced every man in the room. Her voice hadn’t wavered. Her hands had been flat on the wood, steady, her eyes moving from face to face with the cool focus of someone who’d been reading threats since childhood.

He doesn’t hit where you’re weak. He hits where you’re strong, watches you double down, then goes where you left open.

He’d spent weeks filing her into a category. Difficult. Guarded. The woman who’d gone after Caitlynn. The woman who left toast crumbs on the counter, who drank standing up, who slept with him once with such fierce, graceless hunger that neither of them had spoken a word about it since.

The woman in the briefing room was none of those things. She’d been clear-eyed, incisive, operating three steps ahead of Viktor’s patrol strategy while Viktor was still drawing circles on the map. She’d told the room how Garrett hunted without flinching. She’d handed them the key to his pattern because she’d been living inside that pattern for twenty years.

Chris pressed his palm against his forehead. The bond pulsed. Sloane, still awake, the static of her shifting in bed carrying through the connection with an intimacy he hadn’t agreed to.