45. Wraith #2
We finish unsealing the door. It looks like a fucking mess, but when I push on it to test it, it works.
The front door opens downstairs.
All three alphas bolt.
Whiskey doesn't even bother with the stairs.
He vaults over the railing halfway down the hall and hits the landing below so hard the house shakes, his injured fingers apparently forgotten entirely.
Plague follows at a slightly more dignified pace, which means he only takes the steps two at a time instead of three.
Valek peels away from the wall and drifts down the stairwell last, silent as always.
I stay at the top.
Not because I don't want to see her.
I want to see her so fucking badly it hurts.
But her scent is… different.
There's the wild and sweet honeysuckle that's always present, flooding the stairwell and my lungs as I breathe in without a mask or a scarf in the way.
And then there's the deeper, darker undertone that wasn't there before. A woodsy note to her scent. My feral brain registers it before my conscious mind has a chance to catch up.
Below, in the entryway, I hear Whiskey's voice spike. "Dude. Dude, Thane. Fuckin'… dude."
"Don't," Thane says, but he's laughing.
I descend the stairs carefully, ducking under the light fixture at the landing that's been my nemesis since the day I moved in. The closer I get, the stronger her changed scent becomes, and by the time I reach the bottom step, every alpha in the house has their pupils blown to the edges.
Including mine, I'm sure.
She's standing just inside the door, still in the green dress, but the dress is rumpled and the hem is crooked where it was clearly hiked up and pulled back down in a hurry. Her hair is a beautiful disaster of tangles and Thane's cologne is all over her, and her mascara is smudged under her eyes.
She's wearing Thane's tie loosely knotted around her neck, draped to hide her scar.
The edge of a new one is peeking out from beneath the tie.
She's been marked.
My heart slams against my ribs and I grip the railing.
My brother's scent is woven into hers now, threaded deep at the molecular level the way only a mating bond can do. The woodsy undertone curling through her honeysuckle isn't his cologne or proximity.
It's him.
Grafted into her blood.
My brother marked our mate.
Somehow, I'm not jealous.
The happiness is immediate and real, surging up through the tangle of everything else I'm feeling. I'm so fucking happy for her, and for Thane, that for one blissful second, nothing else matters.
It doesn't last.
Because if the pack is marking her, she'll want my mark, too.
I've known this was coming. It's been looming over my fucking head. Fuck, I was just thinking about it ten minutes ago.
How I'll never be able to give that to her because my body is a weapon. I savaged Wade Kelly like an animal, like the monster that was kept locked in a basement and fed raw meat squished under the door.
My teeth don't make marks.
They make wounds.
I can't mark her.
I can never fucking mark my mate.
The realization settles into my bones, leaving me standing there with one hand white-knuckled on the railing and the other hanging useless at my side. My vision narrows to a pinhole and the static in my ears drowns out the sounds of my pack in the entryway.
Then a hand touches my face.
Fingers trace the unbandaged side of my jaw, the pads of fingertips following the exposed muscle and the line of my teeth.
The pinhole opens.
Ivy is standing in front of me, close enough that I have to look down to see her, her eyes searching my face. The tie around her neck has shifted, and I see more of Thane's mark now, the clean silvered arcs of his bite already healed beautifully against the older scar.
"Hey." Her voice is soft. "You okay?"
I blink. The static recedes. The entryway comes back into focus around me. Whiskey has Thane in a bear hug and is rocking him back and forth like a baby while Thane snarls and struggles in vain, his dark eyes wild with exasperation always reserved solely for Whiskey.
"brO!" Whiskey bellows, squeezing tighter. "You look like a whole new man! What happened on that date? Was it the tie thing? Is the tie thing a move? Teach me the tie thing—"
"There's no tie thing, Whiskey, she just—"
"Let him go," Plague snaps, yanking fruitlessly at Whiskey's arm. "You're going to suffocate him, and then I'll have to perform CPR, and I do not want to perform CPR on Thane."
"You'd let him die?"
Valek barks out a harsh laugh.
"Wraith." Ivy's thumb strokes my cheekbone. "Come back to me."
I nod.
I'm okay, I sign stiffly.
Her eyes narrow just a fraction, that assessing look she gets when she's figured out something I haven't said and is deciding how hard to push.
She turns to the group.
"Hey." Her voice carries easily over the chaos, cutting through even Whiskey's bellowing with the effortless authority of an omega who's figured out how to manage her pack of beasts. "I need a few minutes. I'll be right back."
She doesn't wait for a response. She's already going toward the window we usually use to reach the fire escape.
I catch up with her in just two steps and tap her shoulder.
Wait, I sign. We fixed the door.
"You did?" she asks, blinking. "Wait, the door Whiskey sent me that legal jargon over?"
I manage a huffing laugh and nod again, motioning to her to follow me.
When we reach the second-floor hallway, I stop at the hatch and push it up, letting it swing open on the newly freed hinges. The wood is rough where we peeled away the joint compound, and there's still plaster dust coating the frame, but it works.
I gesture at it and manage something that probably reads as ta-da if you're being generous and here's a door if you're not.
Ivy grins up at it. "Wow. You really did fix it."
We all did. So you don't have to use the fire escape.
"I liked the fire escape." But she's already climbing the ladder, and her smile as she looks back at me is warm and real and I want to bottle it and keep it forever. "Well… okay. I liked when you carried me on the fire escape. That's why I always made sure my shoes were off."
I tilt my head, blinking. That was on purpose?
"Of course," she says, bending down to kiss my cheek.
Or where it would be if it wasn't… teeth.
It stuns me momentarily, as always. I reach up and brush my fingers against the spot where her lips just were.
She climbs the ladder into the loft and I follow, pulling myself up through the hatch. The space is exactly as we left it. Her nest on my bed—our bed—a tangle of stolen blankets and pillows and team merchandise.
Ivy turns, puts both hands flat against my chest, and pushes.
Actually moving an alpha my size is impossible.
But I go wherever she wants.
The backs of my legs hit the edge of the bed and she's already climbing into my lap, pushing me back and down. Her legs bracket my hips, her green dress riding up her thighs as she settles against me.
My hands hover uselessly at her sides before resting on her waist.
She's so close.
Close enough that I know the light we left on next to my bed is catching every detail of my uncovered face, and her eyes are roaming all of it.
My eyes slide away from hers.