The Ones Who Stayed

T h i r t e e n | Too Broken To Say No

🐺 CASSIAN

The kitchen smells like burnt coffee and something floral I can't name, her shampoo, maybe, or whatever soap she uses that clings to her skin long after she's left a room. I've been tracking it through the Alpha House for three days now, following the ghost of her presence like something feral.

My wolf has been tracking it, hunting it, cataloguing every shift and change in her scent.

She's been avoiding me.

Not obviously. She's too careful for that. But I notice the way she times her movements around mine, how she'll wait in her room until she hears me leave before she comes downstairs. The way she takes her meals at odd hours, slipping through the house like smoke. Yesterday I found her coffee mug in the sink at two in the morning, still warm when I touched the ceramic, which means she'd been down here while I was upstairs. Close enough to hear if I'd started moving.

My wolf had gone nearly feral when I realized. So close, he'd snarled. Right there and we didn't know.

It's driving me fucking insane.

I round the corner into the kitchen and there she is.

On her toes, reaching for something on the top shelf. Her shirt rides up, exposing a strip of pale skin above the waistband of her jeans. The curve of her spine. The vulnerable stretch of her body, all that lean muscle pulled taut as she strains upward.

My wolf surges forward immediately.

Mate, he rumbles. Then, lower, rougher: Look at her.

I look.

I shouldn't. But I do.

The line of her back. The way her weight shifts onto the balls of her feet. The small, frustrated sound she makes when her fingers brush the edge of the box and it slides further away.

Want her, my wolf says, direct and uncomplicated in the way instinct always was. Want to touch. Want to—

Stop, I tell him.

He doesn't stop. He just goes quieter about it, a low heat under my skin that I pretend I don't feel.

Struggling, he observes, shifting gears. Need to help. Need to provide.

"Need help?" My voice comes out rougher than I intend, edged with a growl I can't quite suppress.

She goes rigid. Doesn't turn around. "I've got it."

But she doesn't. She's still reaching, still stretching, and something about her refusal to acknowledge me properly makes heat flare beneath my ribs. My wolf prowling closer to the surface, caught somewhere between frustrated and something else entirely.

Avoiding us, he snarls. Running from us. Wrong. She shouldn't run.

And yet here she is, I think. Running.

I could walk over. Reach past her. Get the damn filters and hand them to her like a normal mate would, like someone who wasn't standing here cataloguing the exact length of exposed skin above her waistband and hating himself for it.

Instead I stand here, watching.

Her hand finally closes around the box. She pulls it down and turns, and for half a second our eyes meet. There's something wild in her gaze. Something cornered. Her wolf flashing gold just beneath the surface.

There she is, my wolf breathes, and the want sharpens into something with teeth.

Then she's moving, slipping past me with that careful distance she's perfected, that measured space that says don't touch, don't look too long, don't—