Chapter 20 #2
Jay tilted his head slightly, like he was studying the two of us. Then, after a long moment, he said, “Then we stop pretending this is normal. We stop tiptoeing around it.”
Roan arched a brow. “And do what, exactly?”
Jay’s lips curved, just slightly. “We make it sport.”
We both stared at him.
“Sport?” I repeated.
Jay shrugged, as if what he’d just said wasn’t completely insane. “She’s a professional. A fighter. Strategist. She’s always had the upper hand with us, always out-thought us, out-maneuvered us. If she wants this—wants us—then we don’t just give in. We don’t coddle her. We make her earn it.”
Roan crossed his arms slowly, wariness creeping in. “Earn it how?”
“We hunt her,” Jay said simply. “We let her try to escape, try to outsmart us. But she knows what happens if she gets caught.”
He said it with that maddening beta calm, but there was heat under it. The kind of quiet, building promise that made the room feel smaller.
“This is insane,” I muttered, but I could already feel my instincts snapping to attention.
My pulse kicked. My skin buzzed. My mouth went dry.
Every alpha instinct I had screamed yes.
Roan looked over at Jay, then down at the floor like he was checking his soul for cracks. Then, finally—his voice a rasp—he asked, “Are you sure you’re a beta?”
Jay smirked. But before he could answer, a soft click split the tension in half.
We all turned.
The bedroom door had opened behind Roan, and she stood there—barefoot, robe hanging off one shoulder, hair a wild halo around her flushed face. Her eyes burned gold, glowing in the low light, and her skin shimmered with sweat and scent and something more.
She didn’t speak. She didn’t have to. Every molecule in the air shifted. And my heart. Fuck. It stopped. Then came roaring back to life, all at once. Wren. Bedraggled, beautiful, blazing.
More perfect than I had ever let myself admit.
Roan was frozen in front of her, tension radiating off his back like a living thing. Jay had gone still too, his expression unreadable—but ready.
But me? I took a step forward, because I knew. The game had already started.
“I’ll do it.” The words fell from her lips like a match hitting gasoline.
Every single molecule in me ignited.
A low, guttural sound rumbled out of my chest before I even realized I was making it. It wasn’t human—wasn’t civilized. It was raw, primal, mine. The kind of growl that came from someplace buried so deep in me I hadn’t heard it in years.
I barely resisted the urge to fist pump like some kind of lunatic. The sheer adrenaline, the electric punch of yes that ripped through me, was too much. Too hot. Too consuming.
She’d said yes.
Not to safety. Not to retreat.
To us.
To this.
The possessiveness that slammed through me hit with the same force as the need—hard enough that I had to curl my fingers into fists before I reached for her and ruined everything before it started.
Jay, of course, was the only one whose voice stayed steady. Calm as always, even when every line of his body betrayed the same pulse of hunger that had me half-feral.
“You have to really run, Wren,” he said, tone low, deliberate. “You can’t just let us catch you. If you give in—if you surrender—then we won’t do anything.”
I wanted to goggle at him for being able to say that like it was simple. Like his restraint wasn’t hanging by the same thin thread mine was.
But I got it.
Hell, I respected it.
He was giving her agency—her choice. That mattered.
Even if every instinct in me was screaming to skip the whole damn chase and bury myself inside her so deep that we’d never figure out where I ended and she began.
The fog in my head thickened, wrapping around thought and sense until it was just scent and sound and need. Then Roan moved. A sharp slash of his hand through the air—fast, decisive.
It was like he’d sliced through the tether of her scent, forcing a breath of clean air into the haze. I gasped in something deeper than oxygen.
“Are you sure this is what you want?” Roan asked, voice low but firm. The words were jagged steel, forged in control. “Tell me you understand what we’re saying. Tell me you understand what will happen.”
Wren’s chin lifted.
God, that chin.
Eyes blazing, mouth soft but sure. That bright intelligence in her stare, sharp enough to cut through every drop of logic I had left, met Roan’s head-on.
The queen in her had woken.
“I run,” she said, voice steady and clear, though the air around her vibrated with heat. “You hunt. If you catch me, you can have me.”
Roan’s jaw flexed, but she wasn’t done.
Her gaze cut to me, then to Jay, then back again.
“But you each have to catch me,” she added, her tone almost wicked.
For a second, I forgot how to breathe.
Oh, she was good.
She was adding rules. A challenge. A layer of control laced with pure, devastating temptation.
“Just because one of you does,” she continued, “doesn’t mean the others get me. But if you do succeed…”
She paused—long enough that the silence in the cabin turned thick and alive.
“I want everything,” she said finally. Her voice had gone husky, molten. “I want your knots. I want to feel you marking me. I want…”
Her gaze flicked across each of us, deliberate, scorching.
“…you.”
The word detonated inside me.
That she said you—and meant all of us—was a blazing, neon go sign that hit my bloodstream like liquid fire.
Roan tilted his head back, nostrils flaring as he inhaled deeply, like he needed the confirmation of her scent to believe what he’d just heard. His voice, when it came, was roughened with heat and tension.
“Fine,” he said. “Then get dressed.”
My pulse hammered.
“It’s cold out there,” he went on, eyes locked on her. “You get a thirty-minute head start.”
The faintest smile curved her lips. Dangerous. Wicked.
“Thirty minutes,” she repeated. “That’s generous.”
Roan’s mouth twitched, but his voice was pure command. “You’ll need it.”
She tilted her head, that smile deepening—then turned and disappeared back into the bedroom, the sway of her hips doing obscene things to every nerve in my body.
The door clicked softly behind her.
For a long, heavy moment, the only sound was our breathing—ragged, uneven, charged.
Then Jay let out a quiet, almost reverent exhale.
“Well,” he murmured, lips curving. “Game on.”