Chapter 10 #2
I lower my claws. I cannot lower my other hand; the one fisted in his collar won’t open.
I am holding on to him like he’s a safety rope.
Like he’s the only solid thing in the world.
My face is pressed into the hollow where his shoulder meets his throat, and I am breathing in his scent—plus the smell of my own panic.
“What happened?” Lucas doesn’t release me, and I can tell his eyes are darting around, scanning for danger.
Tiny Violet is shouting my name from the phone on the ground where I must have dropped it.
Lucas bends down without letting go of me and picks up the phone. “Luna,” he says, and his voice is low and absolutely steady. “I have her. She’s safe.”
Violet says something I can’t hear. My ears are ringing.
“I will.” A pause. “You have my word.”
He ends the call. Slides the phone into his pocket.
Then, both of his arms come around me properly, and he holds me the way I have wanted him to, from the hallway at Darius’s house all the way to this moment.
I lean into his embrace because my legs are not working and because I cannot make myself care about pride right now.
Over my head, his voice drops an octave. “What were you doing in there?”
“I was on a call. I walked in without thinking. I didn’t even realize I was past the tree line.”
“Sienna.”
“I know.”
“I told you.”
“I know.”
His arms tighten around me. One hand comes up to the back of my head and stays there, warm and broad, fingers sliding into my hair.
“What were you running from?”
I shake my head against his chest. “Something was watching me. I could feel it before I saw it. Then, something snarled. I ran. It was chasing me.”
He is silent for a beat. I feel him glance out over the top of my head at the tree line. I feel his body go alert in a way that has nothing to do with me.
“Stay here.”
“No.”
“Sienna.”
“No.” I lift my head. My face must be a mess. I don’t care. “Whatever it was, it stopped chasing me the second I bumped into you. It’s gone. Don’t you dare leave me alone.”
His jaw works. His eyes flick to the forest, then back to me.
“Alright,” he murmurs. “Alright. I’m not leaving you. I’ll send my guards to investigate.”
He keeps one arm locked around my waist. With the other, he produces a phone from some pocket, thumbs a number, barks clipped orders.
“Perimeter sweep. Eastern stretch. Now.” He listens. “Full team. Track back along the tree line from the north service road.”
He pockets the phone.
“Come on,” he says. “You are not standing out here.”
He walks me across the lawn with his arm still around me. I do not protest. My feet are bare. There is a leaf stuck to the hem of my blouse. My heart has not yet remembered how to beat at a normal pace.
His office smells of him. Paper, ink, the faint smoke of the fire he keeps lit in the grate even now, in the middle of the warm afternoon.
He steers me to the low couch against the wall, not the chair across from his desk.
He leaves me there for thirty seconds, no longer, and comes back with a glass containing two fingers of amber liquid in the bottom.
“Drink.”
“Lucas, it’s three in the afternoon.”
“Drink.”
I drink. It burns, but it’s good. It loosens a part of my chest that I had not realized was locked shut.
He crouches in front of me. His hand cups my knee, steadying us both, and I don’t think he notices he is doing it.
“Tell me again,” he instructs quietly. “Slowly.”
I tell him. The call. The drift into the forest without meaning to. The hair on my neck. The snarl. The chase. The claws half out. The almost-shift.
“I’m fast,” I admit, and my voice wobbles, which I hate. “I know I’m fast. But I am not a great fighter, Lucas. I’ve trained, but I am not my wolf, and she is not a warrior. I panicked.”
He studies me. “It’s good to know there is something,” he murmurs, “that you are not good at. It’s almost reassuring.”
A small, feeble laugh punches out of me.
His lips twitch. His thumb moves, one small stroke on the inside of my knee.
“You’re safe now,” he says. “Nothing can hurt you while I am around.”
I feel a pang under my ribs, sharp and sweet and unwelcome. I nod, because if I try to speak, I will say something I can’t take back.
He stays crouched there for another minute or so. Then, he stands, rubs a hand over his jaw, and moves to put the desk between us.
I let him.
“Tell me what Violet called about,” he says as he sits in his chair. “I doubt you walked into a forest that you know is restricted for a casual chat.”
I fill him in about the missing hybrids. As I talk, some of the tension abides.
He listens without interrupting. By the time I’m done, his arms are folded across his chest, his brow furrowed.
“I’ll call Darius tonight,” he says. “We can run a joint task force. My investigative network covers four territories. His covers three more. We’ll be able to get the right information.”
“Thank you.”
“Do not thank me. Your friend is right to be worried.”
“If it were people killing hybrids out of hate,” I offer slowly, “there would be bodies. Wouldn’t there? Violence needs an audience. Someone would have found at least one.”
He nods, thinking. “People committing hate crimes leave evidence. They want to be seen. Nine clean disappearances is not hate. It’s an operation.”
“An operation to what end?”
“I don’t know yet.” His jaw sets. “But I’ll find out.”
I meet his eyes. For what seems like an eternity, we simply look at each other across the room. Something passes between us that is not heat, not exactly. It is alignment. Two people who have just agreed to stand against the same thing.
I move to get up. My legs are still not entirely sure of themselves, and I stumble on the second step.
His hands catch me at the waist.
I’m not sure how he got to me so fast. I am only aware that one of his hands is flat on the small of my back, the other at my hip, and my palms have come to rest on his chest without any decision on my part. His heart is hammering under my hand.
“Sienna.”
“Lucas.”
His eyes drop to my mouth.
I know what happens next because I have felt the hunger building under every conversation we have had since I arrived. I have the smallest window of time here in which to step back, and I choose, deliberately, not to take it.
“Don’t think,” I whisper.
His mouth comes down on mine.
The kiss isn’t gentle. His hand slides up my spine and grabs my hair, angling my head back. He kisses me like a man who has been starving, and suddenly, for the length of one minute, he can eat. My lips part. His tongue slides against mine. I make a sound into his mouth I am not proud of.
He walks me backward without breaking the kiss.
My shoulder blades hit the door with a soft thud.
His body follows, caging me there, one of his knees pressing between mine.
Heat rolls off him. His free hand finds the hem of my blouse and slips under it, his palm hot and splayed against my bare skin.
I arch into that hand helplessly, a moan spilling out of me.
His mouth slides down my jaw. Teeth find the hinge of it and scrape.
I whimper. His hand climbs higher under my blouse, tracing my ribs, the underside of my bra, the curve of my breast. His thumb brushes over the fabric, and I feel my nipple tighten against his palm as a sharp, low heat pulses between my legs.
“Lucas…” His name is a ragged whisper on my lips.
His tongue moves down my throat. He licks the place where his mark would go if he were any other man and I were any other woman and this were any other life. I make a wrecked, open sound I have never made before. My hips push forward against his thigh without my permission.
His fingers trail down my stomach and undo the button of my trousers. They slide the zipper down with a small, metallic rasp that is the loudest sound in the room.
“Tell me to stop,” he whispers against my throat.
I shake my head. I can barely breathe.
“Sienna. Tell me.”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t stop.”
His hand slides into my open trousers and into my underwear. He finds me—I am already wet, already aching, and he groans against the skin of my neck.
“Fuck.”
His fingers slide through the slick of me, once, twice.
A third time. He finds the place that makes me jerk against his hand, and he stays there, circling, while his mouth comes back up to mine and swallows the sounds I am making.
Two of his fingers push into me. I clutch at his shoulders.
His thumb settles on the spot his other fingers found, and he sets a pace that has me whimpering into his kiss.
I was already close. I have been close since the oak tree, since the first time I heard his voice on the radio, since the hallway at Darius’s house. My body has been building this pressure for weeks with no outlet, and he is touching precisely the places that have been waiting to be touched.
My hips stutter against his hand. My head tips back against the door.
My lips open on a sound he catches with his mouth.
I break apart around his fingers with my whole body pinned between him and the wood, shaking, repeating his name against his lips in a way I will wait to be embarrassed about until later.
For one long moment, there is only the sound of my breathing and his.
Then, he goes still.
His fingers stop moving. His mouth lifts off mine. I feel the change in him before I see it, a cold current running through his body from the inside.
He pulls his hand out of my pants. Steps back. Steps back again. His other hand drags through his hair, and his eyes are fixed somewhere on the floor between our feet.
“Lucas.”
“Go back to your room.”
His words throw me for a loop. For a second, I just stand there, flushed, half undone, trousers still open, with the echo of his name still in my head.
“What?”
He refuses to look at me. “Now, Sienna.”
I push off the door. My legs are unsteady in a way that has nothing to do with the forest anymore, but I take one step toward him anyway. He takes one step away from me.
“Lucas.”
His shoulders tense. “Leave!” he snaps.
I stop.
I zip and button my pants with hands that are visibly shaking. I smooth my blouse. I do not look at the flush on my throat in the glass of the cabinet beside me because if I do, I will cry, and I am not going to do that in front of him.
He has turned his back to me. His hands are braced on the edge of his desk, shoulders hunched, head down.
I look at that back. At the line of his shoulders. At the man I have just let unravel me against a door, who won’t even turn around and acknowledge that I am still in the room.
I open the door quietly and walk out, deeply humiliated.