Page 41 of Pack Frenzy
Then she turns and walks away in boots too big, hips doing things to my equilibrium.
I stay where I am until the door closes behind her. The yard hums—bees in the rosemary, a car honking in the distance. Normal day. My hands don’t feel normal. They feel like they remember a shape I wasn’t supposed to learn.
I scrub the heel of one hand over my mouth. “Fuck!”
I’ve got rules because when I don’t, people bleed. Don’t grab. Don’t crowd. Don’t let the animal drive the car. Don’t pretend biology is romance.
She looked at me like she wanted to know what kind of monster I am. Then she put a Band-Aid on my hand and fixed a gate with me and left me standing here like a teenager.
I look down at my palms. A scar on the heel from a bottle when I was nineteen. Knife nick on the index from the week Rowan and I got dumb in a bar. New bandage over the knuckle, neat where she smoothed it.
And somehow I can’t think of punching the bag like I wanted. I don’t want her work on my knuckle to be for nothing.
“These hands were built to fight,” I say to the fence. Built to break bones, snap necks, and put Alphas through drywall when they touch what’s mine. “Not to want. Not to—” I shove down the rest. Not to crave her like oxygen. Not to ache. Not for holding someone long enough to say her name until it’s engraved on my soul.
The sun slides higher. Her scent has already thinned in the air. It lingers anyway, behind my tongue, in the constant throb at the base of my skull, in the way my body is suddenly aware of every door in this house that leads to her.
If her heat hits, I’ll hold the line. I’ll burn before I touch her.
Probably both.
I head inside. The gloves in the garage stay untouched. No point in hitting leather when the damage is already done.
Rowan watches a basketball game on the TV, but he takes one look at my face and goes still.
“Don’t,” I say, and he mutes the TV.
“Wasn’t going to.”
“Good.” I grab water from the fridge, drain half the bottle before heading back into the living room. “She goes into heat, you lock me up.”
Rowan’s quiet for three seconds. “Cassian?—”
“I mean it.” I set the bottle down hard enough that the coffee table complains. “Because if I catch her scent when she’s like that, I won’t be the guy who fixes hinges and hands her his boots to wear. I’ll be the thing she needs a safe word for.”
He nods once. He knows. We all know what Alphas become.
I just need to make sure I don’t become it with her.
CHAPTER 10
JESS
Islip in through the back door and toe off Cassian’s boots, setting them neatly against the wall.
The borrowed leather still ghosts around my feet, and the intimacy of it makes my chest tighten. His scent lingers. Leather, amber, and black pepper with just enough bite to make something in me want to know more, to find out how it changes with his moods. With me.
My pulse hasn’t steadied since the bedroom…since his fingers brushed my wrist outside and lingered half a second too long. I tell myself it’s just biology, Omega instinct responding to an Alpha’s proximity, but this feels different. More dangerous. Like standing at the edge of something I could fall into and never climb out of.
The small first-aid kit dangles from my fingers, suddenly heavy with what it represents. Proof that I touched him, tended him, and how he made me want things I shouldn’t.
I cross the narrow hallway and stash it in the half bath, tucking it back into the cabinet where I found it.
When I step out, the low murmur of the TV draws me toward the living room. A basketball game plays at conversation volume—the squeak of sneakers, the rise and fall of commentary.
Rowan sits on the couch, posture relaxed, one ankle crossed over his knee. If he senses me watching, he doesn’t react. Beside him, Eli flips through a stack of recipe cards, probably planning lunch and dinner before I’ve even thought to ask what’s next.
The casual assumption that I’ll still be here for meals wedges under my ribs—gratitude and guilt knotted too tightly to separate.
