DORIAN #3
"No." Lila's chair scraped against the hardwood floor as she stood abruptly, her dinner abandoned. "I don't want to talk to some stranger about what happened. I don't want to relive it or analyze it or figure out what it means for my emotional development."
"Lila, wait—"
"I just want my life to go back to how it was before.
" Her voice cracked on the last word, revealing the seventeen-year-old girl beneath all that careful composure.
"I want to not flinch when someone walks up behind me.
I want to sleep through the night without checking the locks three times.
I want to shift without feeling like I'm going to die. "
She fled the dining room before he could respond, her footsteps echoing through the estate's corridors until a distant door slammed with enough force to rattle the windows.
Dorian remained seated at the empty table, staring at two plates of cooling food that neither of them had managed to finish. The silence pressed against him from all sides, heavy with everything he couldn't fix, couldn't control, couldn't make right through sheer force of will.
I should have been here.
The thought had haunted him for three months now. If he hadn't been in Seattle negotiating that contract. If he'd listened to the restless energy in his wolf that night instead of dismissing it as stress.
If, if, if.
His sister might be whole. Thomas Kelly might still be alive. The pack might not be walking around like trauma survivors in their own territory.
Dorian pushed back from the table with enough force to send his chair skidding across the floor. The estate felt too small suddenly, too confining, walls and ceilings pressing down on him like a trap. He needed air. He needed movement.
The back terrace stretched across the full width of the house, overlooking territory that had belonged to his family for over a century.
Dorian had built this deck himself during the summer after his parents' death, when his hands had needed something constructive to do while his mind processed the impossible reality of being an eighteen-year-old Alpha with an infant sister to raise.
The full moon hung fat and silver above the mountain peaks, casting everything in stark relief. His territory spread below him—dense forest broken by clearings where pack homes nestled among the trees. It should have felt peaceful. Instead, it felt like a burden too heavy for one man to carry.
How can I protect everyone any better than I'm already doing?
The question had no good answer.
His mind suddenly drifted to the woman arriving tomorrow—Harper Lane.
The name still triggered that strange reaction in his wolf, an anticipation that made no logical sense.
He needed her to help Lila, but he also needed her to understand the rules that kept his pack safe.
If she couldn't adapt to their world, if she posed any kind of security risk or disruption to the careful order he maintained…
I'll have to send her away.
Restlessness clawed at him from the inside out, his wolf pacing behind his ribs like a caged animal.
Dorian descended the terrace steps and walked toward the tree line, his hands already working at the buttons of his flannel shirt.
The night air bit at his exposed skin as he stripped efficiently, folding his clothes and leaving them on a flat boulder where he'd retrieve them later.
The shift took him like an avalanche—violent and sudden and completely transformative.
Bones lengthened and reformed, muscles expanded, senses exploded into hyperawareness as his human consciousness merged with something far more primal.
When it finished, a massive black wolf stood where the man had been, silver threading through his thick fur like starlight.
Dorian's wolf form was built for dominance rather than speed—thick through the chest and shoulders, heavy-boned, radiating the kind of controlled violence that made other wolves instinctively lower their heads in submission. But tonight, he wasn't interested in intimidation. He needed to run.
The forest welcomed him like an old friend, pine needles soft beneath his paws as he launched into a ground-eating lope that carried him deeper into his territory.
Scent markers told him stories—which pack members had passed through recently, where the deer trails intersected with wolf paths, the fading traces of the last patrol's passage.
Everything seemed normal. Safe. Under control.
But his wolf knew better. Beneath the familiar scents of home and pack, something else lingered.
I'm losing my grip on everything that matters.
The thought followed him as he ran, matching the rhythm of his paws against the forest floor.
Lila broken and afraid. His pack walking on eggshells.
An enemy who struck from shadows and disappeared like smoke.
And tomorrow, a human woman would enter his carefully ordered world, bringing variables he couldn't predict or control.
He didn't have room in his life for distractions, couldn't afford to let his attention wander from the responsibilities that kept his people alive.
But as he ran through moonlight and shadow, Dorian couldn't shake the feeling that tomorrow would change everything.