Chapter 9
Victor watched Chloe’s taillights disappear into the gently falling snow, gripping the stone pillar at the bottom of his steps and fighting the urge to go after her.
His hands—still too large, still Hyde’s hands—left impressions in the old mortar.
He stared at them, watching the green glow fade from beneath his skin, and felt bile rise in his throat.
Fuck. What have I done?
He’d kissed a patient. A pregnant patient. A vulnerable woman who’d come to him for medical care, who trusted him to maintain professional boundaries, and he’d—
She kissed you first, Hyde rumbled in his mind. Wanted it. Wants us.
“Shut up,” he growled, not caring if anyone heard. The street was empty anyway, just snow and shadows and the weight of his own failures pressing down on his shoulders.
He forced himself to start walking, not towards anywhere but simply for the sake of movement. Just the burn of cold air in his lungs and the crunch of snow under his feet and the desperate hope that physical activity might quiet the chaos in his mind.
It didn’t work.
He replayed the kiss with every step. The softness of her lips.
The small sound she’d made when he’d pulled her closer.
The way she’d gripped his shirt like she was afraid he’d disappear.
The trust in her eyes when she’d looked up at him afterward, snowflakes catching in her dark hair.
And Hyde, rising to the surface with a possessive growl that had felt less like losing control and more like coming home. That was the truly terrifying part.
He’d spent every day of his life since he’d reached puberty building walls between himself and his Hyde.
More than twenty years of discipline, chemical intervention, and sheer force of will.
More than twenty years proving he was nothing like his father.
And one kiss from a brown-eyed librarian had shattered it all.
Hyde prowled beneath his skin, restless and unsatisfied. Want her, he insisted. Need her. Protect her. Keep her safe.
“She doesn’t need protection from the world,” he snarled. “She needs protection from us.”
Wrong.
“You don’t get a say in this.”
But Hyde did. No matter how thick his walls, Hyde was part of him.
Sometimes his ancestors had found the balance between man and beast, between intellect and primal desire.
His father had lost that balance, and Victor had spent his entire adult life terrified of following the same path.
And now he was on the verge of losing the battle.
Professional consequences first. He’d kissed a patient.
Even if she had kissed him first, even if every cell in his body believed she belonged to him, his behavior was grounds for losing his license.
The ethics were clear. I have to refer her to another doctor.
But who? The nearest OB was in the city, an hour’s drive.
The thought of her making that trip alone, especially in winter, especially pregnant, made Hyde snarl with protective fury.
Our mate. Our responsibility.
“She’s not—” He stopped himself, unable to speak the lie aloud. Every instinct he possessed—man and Hyde both—had recognized her as his the moment she’d walked into his clinic. And that was the second problem.
He couldn’t be with her. He couldn’t risk the loss of control that intimacy would bring.
His father’s records were full of incidents—minor at first, then escalating.
A slammed door that cracked the frame. A raised voice that made windows rattle.
And finally, the night his mother had locked herself in the bedroom while his father—Hyde ascendant and raging—had torn apart the living room.
He’d been twelve, old enough to understand that love hadn’t protected his mother, and old enough to swear he’d never put anyone through that. And now here he was, thirty-six years old and still alone because he was too terrified to trust himself with another person’s safety.
He’d reached the top of Main Street and he hesitated.
The sensible thing would be to go home and exhaust himself in his gym.
But he couldn’t face the thought of being alone in the silence with his thoughts spiraling and Hyde demanding that he go to Chloe and make sure she was safe in that isolated cabin in the woods.
The Moonlight Tavern, then. It wasn’t one of his usual nights—he kept a strict schedule, Tuesdays and Saturdays only, two beers maximum—but desperate times called for desperate measures.
The town square was quiet as he made his way back through town, most businesses already closed for the evening.
When he reached the tavern, light and warmth spilled from its windows, along with the low hum of conversation, but he couldn’t make himself go in.
Hyde was still too close to the surface.
He walked around to the porch overlooking the river instead, staring out at the silent river. A few minutes later, a dark head rose from the water.
“Evening, Victor.”
“Sam.”
The kraken’s silver eyes studied him thoughtfully.
“Bad day?”
“Bad decision.” He sighed and rubbed his face. “Multiple bad decisions, actually.”
“The pretty librarian who’s working on the archives?”
“How did you know—” he began, then shook his head. There were very few secrets in Fairhaven Falls.
“So.” Sam rose a little higher out of the water. “What’d you do?”
“Kissed her.”
The words came out flat, as if he were reporting a lab result instead of confessing to the most unprofessional act of his career.
Sam’s expression didn’t change. “And?”
“And she’s my patient. Pregnant. Alone. Vulnerable.” His hands clenched on the railing. “And I lost control.”
“Did you hurt her?”
“What? No. I would never—” He stopped, hearing the defensive anger in his own voice, and forced himself to breathe. “No. But I could have. Hyde was—he was right there, Sam. Right at the surface. I could feel him wanting to—”
“To what? Kiss her back?”
“To claim her.” Victor stared at the dark water. “You know what he’s like. What we’re like.”
“I know something about being a monster. About thinking you’re too dangerous for connection. Before Nina…”
“It’s different for the two of you.”
“Is it?” Sam tilted his head, water droplets sliding from his dark hair. “You don’t think I’m capable of hurting people?”
No. In full Kraken mode could be just as dangerous as Hyde, perhaps even more so. It was one of the reasons that they had developed a friendship, that and the knowledge that they were the only ones of their kind in town.
“How did you—” he began, but then a door slammed and Ben came storming out on the porch.
The big rabbit Other was practically steaming, his tall ears flicking back and forth furiously.
“Damned interfering old woman.”
“Flora,” he and Sam said simultaneously, and Ben scowled.
“Of course. You know that cottage next to my property? The one that’s been empty for a year?
Flora just told me she’s renting it to someone after Christmas.
To a kindergarten teacher of all things.
Someone who’ll probably want to be sociable.
” Ben shuddered, and despite himself, Victor’s lips twitched.
The tavern owner was notoriously reluctant to . . . well, to be around other people.
“Maybe she’ll be a quiet kindergarten teacher,” Sam suggested. Ben shot him a look of pure disbelief.
“The chances of Flora finding a quiet, antisocial kindergarten teacher to rent the cottage next to my house are approximately zero.” Ben ran a hand through his thick short fur. “I swear she’s been meddling since the day she was born and she’s not going to stop until the day she dies.”
“Watch out,” Sam warned. “You keep talking about her and she’s likely to—”
“Appear?” Flora practically skipped up onto the porch, giving them all her wide, slightly demented smile.
Tonight she was dressed all in white—a white velour tracksuit scattered with sparkly silver snowflakes that made her look like an aging snow fairy. Since there was a fairy somewhere back in her orc family tree, it seemed only fitting.
“Of course I could hear you,” she said cheerfully. “Grumbling about my meddling like you don’t all benefit from it.”
“I need another beer,” Ben muttered, turning and stomping back into the tavern. Sam just sighed and sank beneath the water.
He was quite sure that Flora knew exactly where the Kraken had gone but, unfortunately, she turned to him instead.
“Don’t think you’ve escaped,” she said to Victor. “I have something to say to you.”
His jaw tightened, the muscles along his neck going rigid. Flora undoubtedly knew about his failure and intended to berate him for it. “I know what you’re going to say.”
“Do you?” She leaned against the railing, her tone deceptively casual. “Because what I’m going to say is you need to get over yourself.”
“What?”
“You’re not your father, Victor. You’re never going to be your father, no matter how much you seem determined to torture yourself with the possibility.
” Sharp black eyes saw right past his defenses.
“Your father wasn’t strong enough to accept both sides of himself.
And your father didn’t have a mate who sees past the beast to the man beneath,” she added gently.
“She doesn’t see anything,” he said harshly. “She doesn’t know.”
“So tell her, although I suspect she already knows you’re more than just a grumpy, controlling doctor. Let her see who you really are.” She patted his arm gently. “Trust her, Victor. And trust yourself. It’s time.”
With that final piece of advice, she turned and skipped off the porch into the snow, humming a jaunty tune. He watched her go, her white figure almost indistinguishable against the falling snow, then turned to stare out across the water, her words echoing in his mind.
Tell her.
He couldn’t. The thought alone made his stomach clench with dread. He pictured Chloe’s face when he told her about his Hyde, about the risks, the violence lurking beneath his skin.
“I hate to say it, but Flora is usually right,” Sam said, resurfacing.
He groaned and buried his face in his hands. “This is insane. I’m losing my mind over a pregnant human.”
“You’re trying to understand rather than just react. That’s what your father didn’t do.”
“You didn’t know my father,” he snapped.
“No. But I know fear,” Sam said softly. “And I know what happens when you let it make your choices for you. You end up alone at the bottom of a river, telling yourself it’s safer this way while the world moves on without you.”
The words struck a reluctant chord. He might not be hiding at the bottom of a river, but he was hiding just the same.
“I spent decades hiding,” Sam continued.
“Telling myself humans couldn’t understand, that Others would fear me, that isolation was wisdom.
And then Nina—” He stopped, something vulnerable crossing his face.
“Nina looked at me like I was worth knowing, like I was special. And I had to choose to stay safe and alone, or risk everything for the chance at connection.”
“Which did you choose?”
Sam’s lips quirked. “I’m floating outside a bar on a Thursday night waiting for a human woman to finish her shift. What do you think?”
“Point taken.”
Everything Sam and Flora had said made sense on an intellectual level. He wasn’t his father. He had maintained control for two decades. And Chloe hadn’t been afraid, even when Hyde rose to the surface. But intellectual understanding and emotional acceptance were two very different things.
“I told her I was sorry,” he said finally. “For kissing her. I apologized like it was a mistake.”
“Was it?” Sam asked.
He thought about the way she’d felt in his arms. The rightness of it, and the way Hyde had settled instead of raged, protective instead of possessive.
“No,” he admitted. “It was the least mistaken thing I’ve done in years.”
“Then maybe you should tell her that.”
“I was going to refer her to another doctor.”
“So don’t.”
“That’s not—I can’t just—” He stopped, hearing the excuses lining up. The professional concerns. The ethical violations. The carefully constructed justifications for keeping his distance. All of it was fear wearing different masks.
“I don’t know how to do this,” he said quietly. “How to be both. Doctor and Hyde. Controlled and… not.”
“So you’ll figure it out as you go along. And listen if Chloe tells you you’re doing it wrong.”
The back door opened again, and Nina appeared. The petite human’s face lit up when Sam rose higher out of the water. Victor watched the way Nina approached without hesitation, how Sam’s massive hands were careful when he reached for her, how she leaned into his touch like she belonged there.
That’s what I want, he thought.
“Go home,” Sam said. “Get some sleep. Tomorrow you can figure out how to un-fuck this situation.”
“Thank you.”
Sam just inclined his head, one hand resting on Nina’s lower back, and Victor felt a pang of envy so sharp it stole his breath. He wanted that easy intimacy and the simple ability to touch someone without second-guessing every movement. I want Chloe.
The walk home was cold and quiet, his breath fogging in the night air.
He let himself into his house and stood in the dark entryway, listening to the silence.
His office called to him. He had patient files to review, medical journals to read, research to catch up on.
The familiar work would be soothing, helping to quiet his racing thoughts.
But instead he found himself climbing the stairs and returning to the back bedroom, to pull down another locked box. This one contained his father’s journal, the documentation of a man’s slow descent from controlled physician to something darker. He’d found it after his father died.
The last entry was dated three weeks before his father’s death. The handwriting was barely legible.
I thought I could control it. Thought love would be enough. But the Hyde doesn’t understand love, only possession. And since Elizabeth left there’s been nothing but increasing rage. I can’t do this anymore.
His father had fought but he’d lost, and he’d left a trail of destruction in his wake. He couldn’t—wouldn’t—do the same thing to Chloe’s life.