Chapter 39
Conrí
We could have stayed out there with her all night.
And not for the reasons I might have anticipated—not the pull of her scent or the heat that had been building since the office, not the bond pressing forward with its ancient, insistent logic.
Simply because this was her wolf unguarded for the first time.
Running for the pleasure of it. Playing without agenda or armour or the focused calculation of something that had learned to survive.
Just Bad Girl. Completely herself. In the dark and the cold and the rose garden with her tail in the air.
It made me question everything we’d concluded in those first moments. The conference room. The threat assessment. The word hybrid delivered like a verdict while Kael pressed against me and demanded blood.
We never expected to find her in the office, Kael said, the admission carrying the distinct quality of something he’d been sitting with for a while.
No. We hadn’t. We’d been looking outward—other cities, other countries, the world cast wide and fate apparently in no hurry.
And there she’d been for three years. Breathing the same air.
Existing in the same building. Her wolf dormant beneath the surface, undetected, waiting for Croatia to wake her up.
The thought of what we might have missed if she’d never booked that flight sat uncomfortably and I set it aside.
She pounced on us again.
Kael let her.
More than let her—he wanted it. Wanted her weight against us, her pawing and her half-hearted snapping, the warmth of her pressed close even briefly.
We wanted her scent on us. All over us if she’d allow it.
Once we shifted back the trace of her would cling—to our skin, our hair, the collar of whatever we put back on—and she would smell it on us and something in her would register it before her mind had time to weigh in.
The seed, planted quietly through play.
Her teeth found our ear.
The bite was more suggestion than force—a half-hearted thing, more tickle than threat, the kind of contact she could retreat from and call accidental if pressed. But it was contact. Her choosing it. Her initiating.
Such disrespect to an Alpha, some ancient and deeply unimpressed part of us noted.
We didn’t care even slightly.
Kael rolled—smooth and deliberate, reversing their positions in a single motion—and for one suspended second she was beneath us, his weight hovering, the moment balanced on its own possibility.
She was gone before he could pin her.
Off across the grass in a burst of speed that left us momentarily still, watching her go—the shift and gather of her haunches, the way she moved through the dark like something the night had been expecting.
She stopped at a distance that was precisely, pointedly safe. Turned. Her tail flicked once. Twice.
Catch me if you can.
Her voice in our head—bright and certain and entirely without fear.
Kael didn’t answer.
He didn’t need to.
She already knew.
He gathered himself—one breath, two—and then we were after her, and the park opened up dark and wide and entirely ours, and somewhere ahead of us Bad Girl howled at the moon with the full-throated joy of something that had finally, completely arrived in itself.
We ran.
And for the first time in years, we ran toward something rather than looking for it.
??
??
??
The steering wheel was taking the full weight of everything I couldn’t say.
I gripped it hard enough to feel the leather compress beneath my palms and loosened my hold before I did something structurally inadvisable to the interior of a very expensive car.
Her scent had deepened again on the walk back—warmer, richer, layered with exertion and the cold night air and something underneath both that my body recognised before my mind caught up with it.
We were running out of time.
Not tonight. Not this week, perhaps. But the heat was building with the quiet momentum of something that didn’t ask permission, and when it arrived it would arrive fast, and she had no pack knowledge, no elder to prepare her, no framework for what was coming or what it meant.
We needed her to trust us before that happened.
We needed her to choose us.
“Are you cold?” I asked, my hand already moving toward the heating controls.
She shook her head.
She was looking out of the window at the city sliding past—the late night version of London, unhurried and luminous, the streets thinning out as we moved away from the park. Her profile in the glass. The line of her throat. The loose fall of her hair still carrying the cold of the night in it.
I put both hands back on the wheel.
We drove in silence that wasn’t uncomfortable—the specific quality of quiet that existed between two people who had said enough for one evening and were sitting with it. The park. The rose garden. The running. Things that didn’t need immediate words.
It wasn’t until we were halfway back to her apartment that she spoke.
“What’s your pack like?”
Something settled in my chest at the question. She was asking. Voluntarily. Without me steering the conversation toward it.
That’s not nothing, Kael noted.
“Similar to running the company in some ways,” I said, keeping my voice even, measured—giving her information without pressure.
“Everyone has their position. Their purpose. Their contribution to the whole.” I paused, considering how to explain what was genuinely difficult to translate into human terms. “But a pack is simpler than a boardroom in the ways that matter. The transparency between minds removes the politics. Nobody is performing. Nobody is manoeuvring. You know where you stand and so does everyone else.”
The city moved past us.
“We have elders—the ones who carry the history, who’ve seen enough to advise without agenda.
Alphas who become protectors, or branch out to build their own packs when the time is right.
Family units we keep close because proximity is protection.
And the young.” I felt Kael stir with the familiar warmth that always accompanied the thought of the pups.
“Our young are everything. They’re the reason for all of it. ”
I slowed as a red light bled across the bonnet.
Turned to look at her.
She was watching me with an expression I was still learning to read—something careful and quiet, sitting just behind her eyes.
“That sounds too good to be true,” she murmured.
Not scepticism exactly. More like someone who wanted very much to believe something and had been burned enough times to keep the wanting at arm’s length.
The light held.
“Why not meet a few?” I said. “Form your own opinion. No obligation, no ceremony—just people. You can judge for yourself what it is and isn’t.”
The light turned green.
“Perhaps,” she murmured.
That’s not a no, Kael said, with the quiet elation of a wolf keeping himself extremely still so as not to startle something precious.
I let it sit for a moment. Let her have the perhaps without pushing at it.
Then, with the distinct brand of casual I deployed for things that were not remotely casual—
“I could ask my parents to fly over.”
The choking was immediate and genuine.
“Dear god, no,” she gasped, one hand coming up. “No. Absolutely not. No.”
The laugh came from somewhere real—not the boardroom version, not the carefully measured response, just something that rose up without permission and filled the car entirely. I reached across and patted her hand.
She slapped it.
Then held it.
Her fingers settling around mine with the quiet certainty of something that had decided, in the space between one breath and the next, to stop pretending it didn’t want to.
Neither of us mentioned it.
I grinned all the way to her apartment and didn’t try to hide a single second of it.