Chapter 38
Nika
Over three weeks ago I was rubbing an apple in my armpit for Carla.
Now I was stripping off behind a bush in Hyde Park at midnight to go for a run with my CEO.
Life had taken a turn.
Hurry up, Bad Girl said, pushing and probing with the impatience of someone who had been waiting for this her entire existence.
I need to take my trainers off, I warned her. Don’t you dare.
A rustle from the shrubbery beside ours. Close. Deliberate.
He’s already done, Bad Girl complained. I can smell his wolf.
I didn’t bother pointing out that he hadn’t spent the last three minutes wrestling with a sports bra in the dark, or that he’d been doing this for the better part of four decades. Some observations were better kept internal.
I’d barely pulled my second trainer free when she pushed forward—not a suggestion, not a nudge, a full sovereign takeover—and threw me sideways into the grass. The cold of it hit my palms for half a second before the world rearranged itself entirely.
Then we were up.
Her tail reaching for the moon. Her nose already reading the night.
I’d expected the shift to feel like losing something.
It didn’t. It felt like being handed a set of senses I hadn’t known were missing—like switching from a blurred photograph to standing inside the original scene.
Every old tree in the park had its own register.
The grass and the soil and the cold night air carried separate, layered notes.
Somewhere to the east, decaying wood and wet leaves.
Further, the faint chemical trace of the path lighting.
Water from the Serpentine threading through everything like a bass note beneath a melody.
And beneath all of it—him.
Kael.
He stood in the open, full beneath the moonlight. Black coat pulling blue at the edges where the light caught it—the same thing I’d noticed at the dinner and filed away and definitely hadn’t thought about since. Tall. Still. Proud in the way of something that knew exactly what it was.
And then his tongue fell out and he started panting.
I felt Bad Girl’s reaction move through us like a current—not the aggression of the dining room, not the wariness of every encounter before tonight. Something else. Something that wanted to move.
She bolted.
Past the shrubbery, past the open path, into the dark stretch of grass beyond—not toward him but away, and I understood immediately that this was the point. Not escape. An invitation.
Chase me.
She was fast in a way that surprised even me.
Agile and low and utterly quiet, each paw finding the soft ground without a sound, galloping with the full-bodied joy of something doing the thing it was built for for the very first time.
I watched the world stream past through her eyes and felt what she felt — the cold air rushing over our muzzle, the ground rising and falling beneath us, the park opening wide and dark and entirely ours.
He was behind us. I knew it without looking—his scent tracking closer, the weight of his presence moving through the dark at a pace that told me he was holding back. Deliberately. That longer stride, that larger frame—he could have overtaken us anywhere on that stretch and hadn’t.
He was letting her run.
Something shifted in my chest at that. Something quiet and significant that I didn’t examine too closely.
I turned my focus back to Bad Girl and let myself sink deeper into what she was feeling—and found it was more than I’d expected.
Bigger than excitement, bigger than the simple animal pleasure of movement.
There was something cathartic in it. Something being released with every stride, purged out into the cold night air—the years of dormancy, the darkness of the space she’d been locked in, all of it burning off like fog in the morning.
She was running because she was free.
And she was free because she was finally, finally home in herself.
We were more alike than I’d understood.
Kael’s nose connected with our flank—a nudge, deliberate and warm—and Bad Girl spun on a penny and snapped her teeth at him with a growl that had considerably less heat in it than usual.
He didn’t flinch.
He ran three tight circles around us—showing off, there was no other word for it—and then shot off down the main path like a wolf who had somewhere very important to be.
Bad Girl didn’t hesitate.
We were after him before the thought had fully formed.
Through the park and into the rose garden, where the hedges rose dark and geometric on either side and the moonlight fell in clean lines across the gravel.
That was where he disappeared—into the hedges, behind the rose plants, a full-grown Alpha wolf apparently convinced that if he couldn’t see us, we couldn’t see him.
His tail was sticking out. Both hind legs visible. An entire third of him entirely exposed to the night air and to us.
Bad Girl went still.
I felt the focus move through her—the predator’s patience, the slow deliberate calculation of a wolf lining up a pounce. She lowered herself by degrees, belly close to the ground, each paw placed with exaggerated care.
She was stalking him.
He knew she was stalking him. I could tell by the way that tail had gone very carefully, very unconvincingly still.
She pounced.
He exploded out the other side of the hedge and she crashed through the roses after him, and somewhere in the tangle of it—the low play-growls, the circling, the ridiculous sight of a full Alpha wolf hiding behind a rosebush with his legs sticking out—something pulled tight in the centre of my chest.
Quiet. Certain. Entirely without my permission.
These two ridiculous animals were doing something I hadn’t expected and couldn’t have planned for.
They were just—playing.
No agenda. No threat assessment. No circling something they hadn’t decided to name yet. Just two wolves in a rose garden in the middle of the night, completely and utterly themselves.
And somehow, without any fanfare at all, it was the most tender thing I’d ever seen.