Chapter 21
Brenna
Cameron is asleep. At last. Greta worked her magic: soup, comfort, the low hum of a woman who doesn’t ask questions but somehow gets answers to all of them anyway. By nine o’clock, Cameron was on the couch with his head on a pillow and eyes finally closed, and the house exhaled.
I stand in the kitchen doorway and watch him sleep.
His face is slack, young, all the sharp edges softened.
The scars on his arms are visible above the blanket’s edge.
My boy. My complicated, furious, perceptive boy, who learned the truth about his father today and handled it with more grace than either of his parents deserved.
Willow went to bed an hour ago. Greta retreated to her room with a book and a pointed look that said, “Sort yourselves out.” Rook and Dane are on watch. Briar is somewhere in the hills, because Briar is always somewhere in the hills.
I turn toward the kitchen to make tea and nearly collide with Sienna.
She’s coming from the pantry with a jar of honey, and we do that awkward two-step shuffle of people trying to occupy the same narrow space. She steps back. I step back. We look at each other.
The last time I saw this woman properly, she was standing in a bunkhouse doorway with a dinner plate and a look of horror while I was half-naked in her alpha’s lap.
“Sorry,” I say. The word comes out before I’ve planned it. “I mean, about… the other night. In the bunkhouse. I shouldn’t have… You didn’t deserve to walk into that.”
Sienna blinks. Sets the honey on the counter. “You’re apologizing to me?”
“You were upset. Understandably. And I should have been more—”
“I was embarrassed. There’s a difference.” She tilts her head and studies me with genuine curiosity. “Why would I be upset?”
The question catches me mid-sentence. I open my mouth. Close it.
“Because…” I trail off. The explanation that’s been so clear in my head for days suddenly sounds absurd when I try to give it air. “Because you and Merric are—”
Sienna’s eyebrows climb her forehead. Her mouth opens. And then she laughs.
Not a polite laugh. A real one; full-bodied, slightly incredulous, a laugh that comes with a hand pressed over the mouth in a futile attempt to smother it.
“Oh my God,” she manages. “You think… Me and Merric?”
The kitchen floor opens up beneath me. Or it should. It feels like it should.
“You’re not,” I say, already knowing the answer.
“Brenna.” Sienna is wiping her eyes. “I’m gay.
Extremely, enthusiastically, exclusively gay.
Merric is my alpha and my best friend, and I love him dearly, but the man could be the last wolf on earth and I wouldn’t—” She stops.
Presses her lips together. Fails to suppress another snort of laughter.
“Oh God. How long have you been thinking this?”
“Since the ridge.” My voice sounds strange. Distant. “When I came down to watch the ranch. You were always near him. Coffee. Touching his arm. Sitting together on the porch.”
“That’s called friendship. Pack. We’ve known each other for years.”
“I know that.” I pull a face. “I know that now.”
“But you didn’t know it then. And you’ve been carrying this around for all this time? While trying to deal with everything else?”
I lean against the counter. My legs feel unreliable. “It seemed obvious.”
“It seemed obvious because you were looking for a reason not to let him in,” Sienna says gently.
No judgment. The observation of a woman who’s been watching two people circle each other and has finally been handed the missing piece.
“If he was mine, you didn’t have to deal with the fact that he’s yours. ”
The refrigerator hums. Cameron shifts on the couch in the other room, murmuring something in his sleep.
“He’s… not mine,” I mutter.
“You can keep telling yourself that. Doesn’t make it true.
” Sienna shakes her head. “For what it’s worth,” she adds, “he’s been a wreck since you came back.
A functional, competent, holding-it-together wreck, but a wreck.
I’ve never seen him like this. Not even close.
” She picks up the honey jar. Pauses at the doorway.
“He’s in the bunkhouse. Alone. In case you were wondering. ”
She leaves. Her footsteps cross the porch and fade into the yard.
I stand in the kitchen rubbing the back of my neck while my understanding of the last few days reorganizes itself.
Every glance, every casual touch, every porch-step conversation I’d interpreted as intimacy was pack.
Just pack. Years of friendship and loyalty.
The easy physical language of wolves who’ve run together long enough to stop thinking about it.
I was wrong. About all of it. I built a wall out of a lie I told myself, and I’ve been hiding behind it because hiding was safer than—
“Brenna.”
Merric. In the hall, with his arms crossed and a raised eyebrow that tells me he heard everything. Maybe not the words. But enough.
“How long have you been standing there?”
“Long enough,” he confirms.
“You heard.”
“I heard Sienna laughing like she hasn’t laughed in weeks. I heard you apologize to her. And I heard her set you straight.” He steps into the kitchen. “You thought I was with Sienna.”
“I thought—” My voice catches. “It doesn’t matter what I thought.”
“It matters.” He’s close now. Three feet.
And I can feel him; not the wanting, not the pull, but something stronger.
Patience at the end of its tether. “It matters because you’ve been pushing me away…
partly because you thought I belonged to someone else.
And I need you to hear me say this clearly: I have not touched anyone since you. Never. There has been nobody.”
I shake my head in disbelief.
“Nobody,” he repeats. “Because my wolf chose you, and he never changed his mind, even when I tried to make him.”
I should say something. I should have a response, something measured, something that maintains the careful distance I’ve been engineering since the day I came down that hillside.
But my engineering is in ruins, and the woman standing in this kitchen isn’t the operative or the commander or the mother.
She’s the girl who loved a boy in a field, just older and tired of running.
Running from what she wants. Because there’s really no reason to fight it anymore.
He’s back. He’s passed every test, and Sienna is just pack.
I don’t have a single goddamn reason except my own stubborn pride.
What am I waiting for?
“I don’t want to talk anymore,” I say because my head is spinning with too much information.
“Good.” He crosses the remaining distance. “The time for talking is done.”
Of course it is. We’ve been navigating each other for days. And I’ve been lying to myself the whole time. I’m done fighting this. Fighting myself. The wolf inside sighs with relief.
He picks me up.
Not gently. His hands find my hips, and he lifts me off the ground. My legs wrap around his waist by instinct, muscle memory from a lifetime ago, my body remembering what my mind spent too many years trying to forget. I lock my ankles behind his back, and his mouth finds mine. The bond detonates.
He carries me through the kitchen. Down the hallway.
I’m kissing him like I’m trying to consume him; teeth and tongue and the desperate, graceless hunger of a woman who’s been starving and just realized it.
His hands are gripping my thighs hard enough to bruise, and I want the bruises.
I want proof that this is real, that his hands are on me, that the sound he makes against my mouth when I bite his lower lip is something that’s actually happening in a world where I’m allowed to have this.
We don’t make it to the stairs.
He presses me against the hallway wall. The impact knocks a picture frame loose, and it crashes to the floor.
Neither of us flinches. My back is against the plaster, and his hips are pinned against mine.
I can feel him, the ridge of his cock hard, insistent against me.
The thin layers of clothing between us feel offensive.
“Off,” I say against his mouth. “Get this off me—”
My shirt goes over my head. His follows.
His chest against mine, flesh against flesh, and the heat of him is unreal.
Wolf-warm, furnace-warm, the temperature of a man whose blood runs hot and whose body has been waiting for this specific contact for too damn long.
His mouth drops to my collarbone, and my head falls back against the wall.
When his teeth rasp my nipple, I make a sound I don’t recognize.
He slides a hand down to find the button of my jeans.
I’m already reaching for his belt. We’re clumsy with it—fingers tangling, buckle catching, the graceless fumbling of two people who can’t get to each other fast enough.
His jeans shove down. Mine get kicked off one leg and hang from the ankle of the other because there isn’t time to be neat about it. There isn’t time for anything.
He hooks one arm under my thigh, pins me higher against the wall, and I reach between us and take his shaft in my hand.
The weight of him is so familiar; even after all this time, I know every solid inch of him.
I tighten my grip, and the sound he makes is raw.
The sound of a man at the end of his control.
I know it because I’m right there with him.
“Brenna… If you want me to stop—”
Stop? Is he out of his fucking mind?
“If you stop, I will kill you.”
I guide him to my entrance, slick and ready, and he pushes into me. The world goes white.
Not my magic. Not the mate bond. Just the obliterating, full-body shock of being filled by someone who fits like a key in a lock that’s been rusted shut.
I cry out—can’t help it, don’t want to help it—and his forehead drops against my shoulder.
He groans, and for three heartbeats, neither of us moves.
Then we move.