Page 104 of Bitten, Marked, Obsessed

Nine of them. Faces half-covered, weapons drawn, fire at their backs. And in the center?

Stefan.

The air between us crackles, thick with tension, like a storm about to snap. Every inch of me is locked and coiled, trying to read Stefan’s face—what’s left of the boy I once knew and the man he’s trying so damn hard to be now.

Stefan stands at the front of the Gideon’s Torch line, but he’s not their leader—not really. That much I can see in the way his grip tightens too fast around the hilt of his blade. The way his broad shoulders—still leaner than Callum’s, still shaped like the swimmer’s frame I used to trace with my fingertips—tense like he’s trying to hold something broken together.

His dark hair is messier than usual, curls longer than when I last ran my hands through them. And his eyes—God, those sharp, glacier-blue eyes—used to soften when they looked at me. Now? Now they’re rimmed in red and fear and guilt and something close to hatred, but not quite. That’s what kills me most.

He’s not just angry.

He’s hurt.

“You’re with them?” I ask again, my voice sharper now, cold in ways I didn’t know it could be.

His mouth twists. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

I want to scream. “So you picked a death cult?”

“I picked safety!” he shouts. “I picked a world that made sense! You left me?—”

“I didn’t leave you,” I snap. “You saw me change, and you walked away.”

“You changed into something I couldn’t recognize, Kendall,” he says, voice cracking at the edge. “You didn’t even try to explain. One day you were mine, and the next you were gone. Replaced.”

The words slam into me harder than I expect. I inhale through my nose, trying not to feel it, but it’s already burrowing deep.

“You think I wanted this?” I whisper. “You think I wanted to be something you’d come to hate?”

His jaw flexes. His fingers twitch around his weapon.

“You lied,” he says again, softer this time. Like that one word is the crux of it all. “Even after everything with my parents. You kept it from me.”

I can smell the heartbreak on him. Bittersweet and sharp like burnt sugar and gunmetal. It leaks off him like sweat.

“I didn’t lie to hurt you,” I say. “I lied because I didn’t know how to survive your truth.”

He flinches.

Behind me, I hear Callum shift his weight, and I know his patience is paper-thin right now. His shaggy brown-blond hair whips lightly in the breeze, that wild look sparking in his hazel-green eyes. He’s every inch the predator Stefan fears he is—tall, sharp-jawed, unrelenting. But he holds his place. For me.

And that says more than words.

Stefan sees him too. Sees the way Callum stands just behind me, the silent shield, the one I never asked for but somehow ended up needing anyway.

The muscle in Stefan’s cheek jumps. “So this is what you want now? Him?”

“No,” I say. “This isn’t about him.”

But it’s not not about him either.

Stefan swallows hard. His face twists into something bitter. “They promised me a world without monsters.”

“I’m not a monster,” I whisper.

He shakes his head like he wants to believe me, but can’t. “You don’t even know what you are, Kendall.”

That somehow hurts more than everything else.

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