🐺 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—
She moves to slip past me.
"Reena."
Just her name. Quiet. But something in it lands, and she stops with her back to me, one hand braced against the doorframe. She doesn't turn around but she doesn't leave either.
She goes still.
Not the normal kind of still. This is something else entirely, a full-body freeze that locks every muscle, empties her face of expression. Her skin goes cold beneath my fingers. Her breathing stops.
Her wolf retreats so fast I can't even sense her anymore. Gone. Hidden. Buried so deep I can't feel her presence at all.
Wrong, my wolf whines immediately, the heat in him snuffed out like a match. Something wrong. Where did she go?
I know this reaction.
I've seen it before, years ago, when we were young. The way she used to drift through the pack house like she wasn't quite inhabiting her body. The closed-off expression she'd wear when anyone moved too quickly in her peripheral vision.
Like she was waiting for something. Like she expected—
Fuck.
I let go immediately. Drop her wrist like it burned me.
But the damage is done. She's somewhere else now, somewhere I can't follow. Her eyes fixed on a point past my shoulder. Breath shallow. Pulse visible in her throat, beating too fast.
And her wolf, completely gone. Locked away so deep I can't reach her.
Come back, my wolf whines, all want replaced now with something desperate and wounded. Where did you go? Come back.
"Reena." It comes out quiet. Too quiet.
She doesn't respond. Doesn't blink. Locked inside whatever place she goes when the world gets too sharp, too close, too dangerous.
And I put her there. I did this.
The guilt is immediate and vicious. It twists in my chest like a blade, but underneath it is something worse, the frustration that she won't look at me. That she'd rather disappear inside herself than stay here, present, with me.
Like I'm that unbearable. Like my touch is that poisonous.
We hurt her, my wolf realizes, horrified. Scared her. Made her hide.
The fact that thirty seconds ago he was cataloguing the line of her spine makes it worse, not better.
"Reena." Firmer this time.
She blinks. Once. Twice. Then her gaze refocuses on my face, and I see the exact moment she comes back, awareness flooding in, followed immediately by something sharp and defensive.
Her wolf stays hidden.
A wall slamming down.
"Don't." Her voice is steady. Too steady. "Don't do that."
"I didn't mean—" I stop. Force myself to breathe. "You were leaving."
"I was making coffee."
"You were running."
Her jaw tightens. She's gripping the edge of the counter now, knuckles white. "Maybe you're something worth running from."
The words land like a fist to the sternum. She means them to hurt, I can see it in the deliberate way she holds my gaze, the slight lift of her chin. Daring me to react. To prove her right about whatever she thinks I am.
Not a threat, my wolf insists desperately. Would never hurt her. She should know. Why doesn't she know?
"I'm not—" I start, then stop because I don't know what I'm trying to say. I'm not dangerous? Debatable. I'm not trying to hurt you? A lie, we've been hurting each other in smaller, sharper ways since the bond happened. I'm not what you think?
Maybe I am. Maybe that's the problem.
She moves to step around me, wider this time, giving me a berth that feels like an insult.
"Why did you come back?" The question escapes before I can stop it. "To this pack. To me."
She pauses in the doorway. Doesn't turn around.
For a moment I think she won't answer. But then her shoulders shift, something that might be a shrug or might be something else entirely.
"Same reason you let them bond us in the first place. Because it was easier than admitting we were both too broken to say no."
Quiet. Almost conversational.
Devastating.
Then she's gone, and I'm alone in the kitchen with the ghost of her scent and the memory of how her pulse felt beneath my fingers, rabbit-quick and terrified, and how her wolf had fled from mine.
She ran, my wolf whimpers. From us. She ran.
The marble is cold beneath my palms. I focus on that instead of the urge to follow her.
My wolf is quiet now. Whatever heat had been in him earlier, the low, wanting thing that had watched her reach for that shelf is gone. Replaced with something that feels more like grief. He wants her close, always wants her close, but not like that. Never like that.
Want her to feel safe, he says. Want her to want to stay. Want her to—
I know, I tell him.
The want and the worry and the guilt, all tangled together into something I don't have a name for. Something that's been growing for weeks, quiet and insistent, that I keep telling myself is just the bond, just instinct, just the natural pull of an Alpha toward his bonded Luna.
It's not just that.
It hasn't been just that for a while.
I pull out my phone. Swipe to the security feed.
She's already in her room, door closed. The hallway empty and still.
Still here, my wolf observes, clinging to it. Didn't leave. Still here.
The timestamp ticks forward. I keep watching long after there's nothing to see.
Because this is what I've been reduced to. Standing in a kitchen that smells like her, watching a closed door on a screen, cataloguing the distance between us and calling it keeping her safe.
She thinks I'm trying to cage her.
Maybe I am.
But the alternative, watching her walk away, not knowing if she's coming back—
I can't. I've done that once. I know exactly how it ends.
Protect, my wolf says. Keep safe. Keep close.
She's not mine to keep, I remind him.
He's quiet for a moment.
Then, low and certain: She will be.
I pocket the phone. The screen goes dark. But I can still see it, her closed door. The space between us that might as well be an ocean.
I push off the counter. Force my breathing even. Push my wolf back down, all of him, the want, the worry, the desperate need to go scratch at her door until she opens it.
Control. I need control.
But Reena has always been the thing that makes me lose it.
I leave the kitchen without looking back.
But my wolf does.
He always does.
'---------'
Okay… Cassian is so dramatic it hurts. He’s basically stalking the scent of his mate like a detective-wolf hybrid, flipping between protectiveness, lust, and guilt all in ten seconds. And Reena? She’s clearly got layers he can’t touch yet, making him spiral even harder. intense emotions, awkward boundaries, midnight tension, and that messy mix of desire and fear. Honestly, these two could wreck each other…