Chapter 16
Chapter sixteen
Leo finds me the way he always does. After dark. After the skeleton crew takes over. After the building goes quiet and the ninety-minute check window opens up.
He slips through my door — the repaired one, new bolt, reinforced frame. They fixed the frame I cracked but they didn't change the lock, and Leo figured out the lock two weeks ago.
He's wearing the thin white undershirt and red pants and bare feet and his face is serious. Actually serious. Which means he's already read the room — read me — before he walked in.
I'm sitting on the bed. Knees up. Arms wrapped around them. I've been like this since Sven locked me in three hours ago.
Leo closes the door. Leans against it. Watches me.
"You look like shit," he says.
"Thanks."
"What happened?"
I open my mouth. Close it. The words are there — Gavin's conversation, the forensic update, the gold in the mirror — but they're tangled up with Gray's voice saying stay away from me and the pull in my wrist that won't stop reaching for a man who told me he doesn't want it.
"The blood came back," I say. "The third sample. The specialist team ran it against my current draw. Sixty to seventy percent match."
Leo's jaw tightens.
"That's not a hundred," he says.
"It's not zero either." I press my forehead to my knees. "And the claw marks were clean. One swipe. Controlled. Not frenzied. Whatever did it knew what it was doing."
He pushes off the door. Crosses the room. Doesn't sit next to me. Doesn't give me space or distance or the polite buffer everyone else in this facility maintains.
He climbs onto the bed, hooks his arm around my waist, and pulls me into him.
I go rigid for a second — instinct, the body's first response to being grabbed.
But his arms are already around me, both of them, and his chest is against my back and his face is in my hair and the smell of him hits me like a door opening.
Warm skin. Pine soap. Something underneath that's purely wolf — musky, sharp, alive.
His scent wraps around me the way his arms do and my body does something it hasn't done since I got here.
It lets go.
Not all the way. Not completely. But the coiled, braced, ready-for-impact tension I've been carrying in my shoulders and my jaw and my spine — it softens.
Just enough. Because his body is warm and solid and pressed against mine and every point of contact is saying the same thing: I'm here.
I've got you. You can put it down for a minute.
I didn't know I needed this. I didn't know my body was waiting for exactly this — to be held by someone who smells like mate and safety and who isn't asking me to explain or perform or hold myself together.
"Talk," he says into my hair. Not a question. A permission.
"Gray told me to stay away," I say. My voice comes out smaller than I want it to.
His arms tighten. "Stood in front of me and said he's choosing not to do this.
" I laugh. It sounds wrong — thin, brittle.
"So that's my day. Sixty-to-seventy-percent chance I'm a monster, I'm turning into something I can't control, and one of the people my body chose would rather crush the bond than be near me. "
"Gray's an idiot."
"Gray's terrified."
"Those aren't mutually exclusive."
I look at him. His face is close. The sharp jaw. The dark eyes with something amber behind them now, visible in low light. The mouth that doesn't smirk anymore — or does, but differently, with the wolf in it.
"Are you scared?" I ask.
He's quiet for a beat. Two.
"Yeah," he says. "I'm scared."
"Of what?"
"Of this. Of you. Of the fact that my body shifted into a wolf because you touched me and instead of running the other direction I keep showing up at your door in the middle of the night.
" His voice is low. Honest in a way that the old Leo never would have allowed.
"I'm scared that the Panel is going to separate us.
I'm scared that whatever happened in that basement is going to follow you into every room you walk into. And I'm scared of how much I —"
He stops.
"How much you what?"
He looks at me. The amber warm. Present.
"How much I need you," he says. "Not the bond.
Not the pull. You. The girl who calls me wolf boy and eats terrible cafeteria food without complaining and looks at a man in chains like he's the most beautiful thing she's ever seen.
That's what scares me. The bond I can blame on biology. The rest is just me."
My hand finds his where they are wrapped around me.
His fingers lace through mine. Tight. Warm.
"If they smell weakness, you're done," he says. Quiet. "The Panel. The Board. Whoever's coming. They're looking for reasons to classify you as a threat. If you walk in there scared and uncertain, they'll use it."
"I know."
"So whatever this is — whatever you feel right now — feel it here. Feel it with me. And when you walk into that room, you show them nothing."
"You sound like you've done this before."
"I grew up in the system too, Alex. Different system. Same rules." His thumb traces a circle on the inside of my wrist, right over the mark. "Don't show them the wound. Show them the scar."
His mouth is near my temple. I can feel his breath in my hair. His arms still around me, his chest against my back, and the warmth between us is shifting — turning into something with an edge.
"Don't look at me like I'm safe," he says. Low. Against my skin.
"Why not?"
His hand leaves my wrist. Finds my jaw. Tilts my face back toward him. His mouth is close enough that I can feel the shape of his words. "I'm not safe and I'm not gentle and the things I want to do to you right now have nothing to do with comfort."
My body knows the difference. Has been waiting for the difference.
"Then don't be gentle," I say.
His mouth finds mine. Slow. His hand on my jaw holding me exactly where he wants me. Every second deliberate. His tongue slides against mine and I make a sound into his mouth and his hand tightens on my jaw.
"Lie back," he says.
I lie back. He follows me down — beside me, propped on one elbow, his free hand tracing down my throat. My collarbone. The flat of his palm over my heart, feeling it hammer.
"You're shaking," he says.
"I know."
"Not from fear."
"No. Not from fear."
His hand moves lower. Over my breast through the thin shirt — his thumb finding the peak and circling, slow, watching my face while he does it. I arch into his hand. He keeps that pace, watching me respond, cataloging what makes my breath catch and what makes my hips shift.
"Leo."
"I'm here."
"I need —"
"I know what you need." He pulls my shirt up. Over my head. His mouth replaces his hand — warm, wet, closing around my nipple, and my fingers find the back of his head and grip. He takes his time. One side, then the other. Thorough. Like he's memorizing me.
His hand slides down my stomach. Under the waistband. His fingers find me and the sound he makes against my skin when he feels how ready I am is low and satisfied and possessive.
"Tell me what you want," he says.
"You. Just you."
He strokes me slow. Two fingers. Finding the rhythm that makes my hips rock into his hand.
Patient in a way that's almost cruel — building the tension in increments, pulling back when I get close, his mouth on my throat, the hollow below my ear.
Taking his time because he wants me to feel every second of it.
"Leo — please —"
"Not yet." His lips against my ear. "I want you wrecked before I'm inside you."
His fingers press harder. Faster. The rhythm tightens and my back arches and I'm gripping the sheet with one hand and his shoulder with the other and when I come it's deep and slow. A wave that rolls through me from the center outward and leaves me shaking and open and completely undone.
He doesn't stop. His fingers ease down — slower, gentler, drawing out the aftershocks while his mouth presses soft and hot against my neck.
"There," he murmurs. "That's what I wanted."
I pull at his shirt. He strips it. Strips everything. His body is warm and hard against mine and when I reach for him — wrap my hand around him, stroke — his jaw clenches and his hips push forward and the control he's been holding cracks.
He hesitates for one second. Then he's over me — between my thighs, his weight on his forearms, his face above mine. Close enough that his breath is my breath.
"I've got you," he says.
He pushes in slow. Inch by inch. Watching my face. And the feel of him — the stretch, the fullness, the heat of his body inside mine — I'm present for every second of it. This specific person. These specific hands. This mouth that called me murder girl and meant it as a term of endearment.
He moves. Slow. Deep. He rolls his hips and pulls back and pushes in and each stroke hits something deep that makes my breath catch. His forehead drops to mine. Our noses touching. Eyes open. I can see him — really see him — and what's in his face is terrifying in its simplicity.
He's here. All of him. No walls. No armor. Just Leo. Scared and present and looking at me like I'm the realest thing in his world.
"Harder," I whisper.
The pace picks up. His hand finds my hip — grips, tilts, changes the angle — and the next stroke makes me gasp.
He does it again. Again. His breathing is ragged.
Mine is gone entirely. The tension is building — a coil tightening at the base of my spine that connects to every point where his skin meets mine.
"I need you to come," he says against my mouth. "I need to feel it."
The coil breaks. I shatter around him — silent, mouth open, no sound, just my body locking down and pulsing. He follows three strokes later — his hips stuttering, his face buried in my neck, my name the only word left in his vocabulary.
We lie there. His weight on me — heavy, real, grounding. His heart slamming against my chest. My hands on his back, feeling his breathing slow.
He lifts his head. Looks at me.
"You're not a murderer," he says. Quiet. Certain.
"You don't know that."
"Yeah I do. You want to know how?"
"How?"
"Because you're crying."
I am. I didn't notice. Tears running from the corners of my eyes into my hair and I didn't feel them start.
The fear and the gold eyes and the sixty-to-seventy percent and Gray's rejection and Leo's hands and the feeling of being held by someone who isn't afraid of what I am — it all broke through at once and my body is doing the thing it never does.
The thing I trained out of myself in my second foster placement when I learned that crying doesn't make the world softer, it just shows people where to hit.
I'm crying and he's inside me and his thumb is wiping the tears off my cheekbone and I have never in my entire life been this vulnerable with another person.
"Murderers don't cry about it," Leo says. "Trust me. You're not one of them."
He rolls off me. Pulls me into his side. My face against his chest. His arm around me.
"Whatever happened in that basement," he says into my hair. "Whatever the blood says. You're still you. Alex. The girl who looked at a feral wolf and leaned toward it instead of away."
I press my face into his chest. Feel his heartbeat. Slow. Strong. Human.
"Don't look at me like I'm safe," I say. Echoing his words back.
"Why not?"
"Because I might not be."
His arm tightens. "Good thing I don't need you to be safe. I just need you to be mine."