Page 76 of Knotted By my Pack
I turn, walk back through the mess. Glass crunches under my boots. The air tastes bitter.
Outside, the cold bites again. But she’s still there. We don’t say much on the drive back. The road is quiet, the city blurred out through the windshield.
I keep glancing at her in the passenger seat—legs pulled up, fingers twisting in her lap, eyes blank. She’s somewhere far from here, but I stay close anyway.
My knuckles ache, skin split raw across the ridge of bone. I deserve worse.
When we get to her place, she unlocks the door with slow fingers. The inside is dim, the scent of home clinging to every corner.
She moves ahead, drops her keys in the bowl near the entry, then turns and looks at my hand. Her brow tightens, lips parting like she wants to say something and isn’t sure if I’ll let her.
“I’ll get ice for your hand,” she says softly.
“I’m an Alpha,” I mutter. “I’ll heal.”
“Please.”
It’s that word. Quiet. Small. Like the strength has bled from her. So I nod.
She disappears into the kitchen, the light flicking on behind her, and I watch her shoulders rise and fall with each breath. She comes back with a towel wrapped around a few cubes, holds it out like an offering.
I take it, pressing it to the bruised swell of my knuckles. Her hands stay close, brushing mine as if she wants to say something with touch instead of words.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“For what?”
“For tonight. For all of it.”
I lower the ice. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I shouldn’t have gone to him. I thought…” She swallows. “I thought maybe if I apologized, he’d just… I don’t know what I was expecting from him in the first place.”
I study her face. There’s no lie in it. No flicker of guilt or hesitation. Just something sad and worn out. “Why’d you even want to apologize to someone like that?”
“Because I left him without saying anything. And I guess… I just wanted to stop carrying that. I wanted to explain what that day actually was. I don’t know Noah. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
I nod slowly, but Julian’s words crawl back into my skull like a rot. I shouldn’t bring it up, not now. But I do anyway.
“Cora,” I murmur again, my thumb brushing her flushed cheek. “You have to understand—this isn’t a game for me. It never was.”
Her body is already trembling against mine, her scent thick and sweet in the air—ripe with Omega heat.
It clings to my skin, burrows into my head, makes it hard to think of anything but her. Her pupils are dilated, her chest rising and falling too fast, and I know she’s caught in it, too.
The pull.
The bond we’ve both been fighting.
“I don’t want a nice answer,” I say again, voice rougher now. “I want the truth.”
She looks up at me, bare and vulnerable. “You already know the truth.”
“Say it.”
“I want you,” she whispers. “All of you. I always have.”
The last thread of restraint inside me snaps. My Alpha rips free like a wildfire through my veins, possessive, primal, territorial.
