Chapter 5 Kit
Kit
Ifumbled with the buttons of my grey cardigan, fingers clumsy as I tried to cover my bare chest. I needed to hide the evidence of my complete loss of control.
Fucking hell, what have I just done?
Priya’s dark eyes bored into me from across the room. I could practically hear her voice already: “Really, Kit, you won’t tell him how you feel, but you’ll strip half naked in front of him and stuff your shirt in his face?”
The shame hit me, fierce and all-consuming. I couldn’t look at Felix—couldn’t bear to see whatever was on his face right now. Confusion? Disgust? Fear?
Seeing him fall was like holding kindling to a lit match. All my careful control, all my practiced distance—it all went up in smoke. Inevitable as gravity. Unstoppable as breathing.
But now I’d burn for it.
Seb started flapping around with his leather journal, trying to call the meeting to order while everyone else busied themselves with their coffees. Thank Christ for that distraction. I pulled my face into what I hoped was a neutral, bored expression.
Inside, I was dying.
I’d just physically assaulted Felix. Physically assaulted my mate. Because surely that’s what it was called when you started stroking someone’s face—their cheek, their lips—for absolutely no good reason, after practically pinning them to an armchair against their will.
If he thought you were “a bit weird” before, now he definitely thinks you’re a madman.
But I couldn’t help it. This was the only time I’d ever properly touched him, skin to skin, aside from that one time at Christmas where our hands had accidentally brushed for approximately half a second.
When I’d realised that cleaning his wounds might be the only time in my entire life I’d get to properly touch him, something desperate had clawed its way up from inside me.
My fingertips had been determined to drink in every second, mapping the sharp line of his cheekbone, the soft curve of his bottom lip.
The wolf in my chest prowled restlessly, satisfied and frustrated in equal measure. It had tasted what it wanted—what it needed—and now it was hungry for more.
How could the others not see it? How could they sit across from Felix every bloody day and not notice the way his eyes went impossibly wide when he was startled—like a deer caught in headlights, all dark lashes and vulnerability?
How did they miss the way his bottom lip caught between his teeth when he was concentrating, or the tiny dimple that appeared at the corner of his mouth when he tried not to smile?
They looked right through him. Saw the oversized hoodies, the permanently tangled fringe, the hunched shoulders that screamed “please don’t notice me.
” But I noticed everything. The way his left eyebrow sat just a fraction higher than his right.
How his nose had the faintest bump in it.
The way colour bloomed across his cheekbones whenever someone addressed him directly—a soft flush that started at his ears and spread inward.
His face was a masterpiece of quiet expressions. That bottom lip alone could convey a dozen different emotions—pursed in concentration, curved in his rare, brilliant smile, or bitten raw when he was stressed. His mouth was made for laughing, for whispering secrets, for—
Fucking hell, stop.
But I couldn’t. Not when I’d finally touched those cheekbones, felt the warmth of his skin under my fingertips. Not when I’d traced the line of his jaw and felt him lean into my touch, just barely, like a cat seeking affection.
They all saw a shy tech genius who mumbled through meetings and hid behind computer screens. I saw Felix—brilliant, beautiful Felix with his quick wit and gentle hands and that adorable way he got flustered when anyone paid him too much attention.
In my peripheral vision, I caught Felix shifting in his chair. Was his coffee cup trembling slightly in his hands? God, I felt sick.
“Right, then,” Seb said, and I tensed. Because I knew that discussing the Greywatch investigation was on the agenda today.
Which might have been contributing to my making spectacularly poor choices.
“Let’s start with Priya relaying the outcome of your work yesterday, interviewing the witnesses of the cambion attack. ”
Inwardly, I breathed a sigh of relief. A few more minutes before Greywatch, then.
Greywatch. Just the thought of the name had my throat tightening, my heart beating faster.
I’d grown up in the Highlands, raised on pack traditions older than most countries.
Hierarchy. Duty. The weight of expectation that came with being Malcolm’s son.
The alpha’s son. Heir to our little empire.
Every day had been a reminder that I wasn’t living up to my father’s legacy, that I didn’t want to live up to it.
By twenty-three, I’d been suffocating under it all—the constant comparisons, the disappointed looks, the unspoken demand that I become someone I wasn’t.
So when Moira Thorne—one of the few pack members I actually trusted and respected—told me she could get me into a special military programme, I’d practically bitten her hand off.
I’d been so bloody na?ve. Thought I was escaping the suffocating traditions of Highland pack life, the endless expectations, the way they looked at me like I was my father.
I thought I was leaving to do good in the world.
What I’d actually walked into was a nightmare.
At first, it had seemed legitimate enough.
Real missions—deep infiltration into hostile territories where human soldiers would be detected in minutes, intelligence gathering in places no sane person would venture, elimination of targets that conventional forces couldn’t touch.
We were the government’s answer to high-level threats, or so they told us.
And Christ, we were good at it. Faster, stronger, able to track for days without rest. But the missions got darker, the targets more questionable, and the methods…
Well, let’s just say they cared more about results than ethics.
We weren’t soldiers, we were expendable assets with enhanced capabilities.
GREY wasn’t just a military unit. It was also a laboratory.
Between missions, they treated us like weapons to be tested, modified, improved.
How long could a wolf survive without food or water?
How much pain could we endure before we broke?
How many times could they force us to shift in a single day before our bodies gave out completely?
I’d tried to escape. Multiple times. They didn’t let me. And I had the scars to prove it.
When I’d finally managed to get out, my trauma had been so severe that I’d repressed everything. Tried to pretend Greywatch was simply a bad dream. That I hadn’t really slaughtered dozens of innocent people. That I hadn’t fallen in love with someone, and had them die in my arms.
But Pandora’s box had been ripped open six months ago when Rory and Theo discovered that Moira and Greywatch were behind the widespread disappearances of lone wolves across the UK.
They were kidnapping vulnerable shifters from the streets—homeless wolves, outcasts, anyone who wouldn’t be missed.
And they were putting chips in their brains. Control chips.
One night, lying in bed, my hand had wandered to my scalp without thinking. There, hidden beneath hair and scar tissue, I’d felt a small, hard bump I’d never noticed before.
Or maybe I never wanted to notice.
The scan had revealed what I’d dreaded: I had a chip too. Still in there, after all these years.
I couldn’t move past it. Sometimes I swore I could feel the bloody thing shifting under my skin like a parasite, burrowing deeper.
The knowledge that something foreign was embedded in my skull, that I’d been walking around for years with Greywatch technology inside me, made me want to claw at my own skin.
The chip couldn’t be safely removed. It was too well embedded.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, then came the ultimate shock of my life.
Killigrew Street obtained a classified list—wolves currently under Greywatch control. Active assets, they called them.
And on that list, in black and white, was my father’s name.
My supposedly dead father.
My piece-of-shit psychopathic father who was supposed. To. Be. Bloody. Dead.
Something inside me completely broke. Shut down. Complete system failure.
I locked myself away for two entire weeks, with Rory bringing water and meals to my bedroom door.
I remembered very little from that time, aside from Rory’s pleading voice.
He’d finally broken through to me in the end, when he’d said, “Please come back, Kit. I need you. He’s my dad too.
Plus, everyone is so worried. We barely know how to function without you.
Priya’s cried three times today, and even Felix is absolutely miserable.
He’s actually made you some food. He gave it to me to give to you.
It’s outside your door. I only had one bite of it. It’s pretty good.”
Felix had made me food.
That single fact cut through the fog of despair that had consumed me. Then Rory’s words—“I need you”—finally penetrated the wall I’d built around myself.
Growing up in our pack in Scotland, I’d been a terrible brother to him.
I’d watched our father’s belt connect with Rory’s too-small body and done nothing—worse than nothing.
I’d followed his orders when Da decided Rory needed “teaching.” I’d been eighteen, nineteen, twenty even.
Old enough to know better. Strong enough to stop it.
But I’d been a coward.
In the years that had followed, my self-loathing only grew and grew, made worse by my failure to protect those I loved within Greywatch.
I’d walked away from everything—the pack, my birthright as future alpha, the responsibility I’d been raised for—all because I couldn’t bear to become the kind of leader my father was, yet lacked the spine to change things from within.