Chapter 23 #2
"And if I am?" I add, holding her gaze. "What are you going to do about it?"
Her smirk widens.
Dangerous.
Playful.
Absolutely fucking beautiful.
"Well," she says, and her voice drops into something lower, more intimate. "I don't know. Because I'm not sure if I'm allowed to be bold and just kiss my Alpha when he's not feeling loved."
My Alpha.
The possessive makes my stomach clench.
"I want to actually respect your boundaries," she continues, and there's something almost earnest underneath the teasing now. "This is all new to me too. I don't know the rules. Don't know what's okay and what isn't. So..."
She reaches up.
Her fingers—small, callused, stained with blood that's still drying—brush against my jaw.
Gentle.
Exploratory.
Like she's touching something precious and doesn't want to break it.
"Jett. What do you want from your Omega?"
Your Omega.
The words hit me like a physical blow.
Your Omega.
She's offering herself.
Asking what I want.
Giving me permission to want things I've never let myself want before.
Heat floods my cheeks.
I'm blushing.
Actually blushing, like some untouched teenager instead of a trained killer who's taken more lives than he can count.
But I can't help it.
Because she's standing there—small and fierce and wearing another man's shirt while offering herself to me—and my brain is short-circuiting on the input.
The shirt hangs off one shoulder, exposing the curve of her collarbone and the beginning swell of her breast. Her pink hair is messy, clearly sex-tousled, falling around her face in disheveled waves.
Her mismatched eyes are bright in the moonlight, watching me with an intensity that feels like being pinned to a specimen board.
Beautiful.
Deadly.
Mine.
"I'd rather you be out of that shirt."
The words escape before I can filter them.
Stupid.
Impulsive.
Completely unlike me.
Her smirk transforms into something else.
Delight.
Surprise.
The particular kind of satisfaction that comes from getting exactly what you wanted.
"Okay."
She says it simply.
Casually.
Like I've just asked her to pass the salt instead of strip naked in a garden full of dead bodies.
Then she sets her blades down on the grass—careful, deliberate, treating them with the reverence they deserve—and reaches for the hem of Sage's shirt.
"Wait—"
Too late.
The shirt comes off in one fluid motion, up and over her head, fabric pooling on the ground at her feet.
And she's naked.
Completely naked.
Standing in the moonlight surrounded by corpses, blood drying on her skin, absolutely bare except for the pendant at her throat and the confidence she wears like armor.
I stop breathing.
Literally stop breathing.
Because—
Fuck.
She's...
I don't have words.
My training gave me vocabulary for violence, for strategy, for the hundreds of ways to kill a person efficiently.
But it didn't prepare me for this. For the way moonlight traces the curves of her body.
For the lean muscle beneath soft skin, the dancer's form that's been honed into a weapon.
For the scars that mark her—the badges of survival she wears without shame.
The corset bruises along her ribs.
The blade marks across her stomach.
The constellation of old wounds that tell the story of a girl who's survived things that should have destroyed her.
Beautiful.
Devastating.
Everything I never knew I wanted.
My eyes trace down—I can't help it, can't stop myself—taking in the flat plane of her stomach, the curve of her hips, the junction of her thighs where...
I curse.
The sound is rough, strangled, completely undone.
"You—" I'm already pulling at my own shirt, yanking it over my head. "Stop being naked."
Her giggle is immediate.
Bright.
Delighted.
"But you said—"
"Don't listen to me." I shove the shirt toward her, face burning, trying desperately not to look at the parts of her body that are currently making me question every choice I've ever made. "Just—put this on—please—"
She takes the shirt.
But she doesn't put it on immediately.
Instead, she holds it in her hands—my shirt, still warm from my body, carrying my scent—and looks at me with an expression I can't quite read.
Tender.
Amused.
Something that might be affection, buried beneath the madness.
Then she slips the shirt over her head.
The fabric is too big on her—just like Sage's was—but somehow that makes it worse. Somehow seeing her swim in my clothes, wearing my scent, does things to my chest that I don't have names for.
She steps closer.
My body goes rigid—not with fear, not with violence, but with anticipation. The particular tension of someone who doesn't know what's coming but desperately wants to find out.
Her hands find my chest.
Palms flat against bare skin, because I gave her my shirt and now I'm the one who's partially undressed.
She rises onto her toes.
Dancer's instinct.
And kisses me.
Soft.
Gentle.
Nothing like the violence we're both capable of.
Her lips are warm against mine—tentative at first, exploring, like she's testing the waters. There's no urgency in it. No demand. Just... connection. The simple press of mouth to mouth, the sharing of breath and space and something that feels terrifyingly like intimacy.
When she pulls back, her eyes are bright.
Vulnerable.
Real.
"All of this is really new," she admits, voice quiet. "And scary. I don't want to make any mistakes. Don't want to do something wrong and mess up the only good thing that's happened to me in years."
The only good thing.
She means us.
She means this pack, this impossible arrangement, this alliance that stopped being just strategy somewhere along the way.
"But," she continues, and now there's a spark of mischief returning to her expression, "if you want to fuck like wild monkeys, we most certainly can."
The whiplash from vulnerable confession to sexual invitation makes my head spin.
That's her, I realize.
That's who she is.
Chaos and tenderness and violence and softness, all wrapped up in a package that doesn't make sense but somehow works perfectly.
"Be more bold about it, though," she adds, finger poking my chest. "Or Sage is going to have all the fun."
A wink.
Teasing.
Challenging.
She bends down to retrieve her blades—the motion displaying the curve of her ass beneath my too-large shirt—and scoops up Sage's discarded garment as well.
"I'm keeping these, by the way," she announces, holding up the fabric. "Both of them. I'm going to build a nest."
A nest.
Omega behavior.
The instinct to surround yourself with the scents of your pack, to create a space that feels safe and claimed and irrevocably yours.
She's building a nest.
With our clothes.
With our scents.
She's making this permanent in the small ways available to her, even while we all pretend this might still be temporary.
"Goodnight, Jett."
She's already walking away—barefoot, blood-stained, wearing my shirt and carrying evidence of her violence like trophies.
"Thanks for the clothes. And for not dying before I could save you."
She pauses at the threshold of the house.
Looks back over her shoulder.
And her smile—god, her smile—is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
Warm.
Genuine.
The expression of someone who's starting to believe she might actually be happy.
Then she's gone.
Disappeared into the house, leaving me alone in the garden surrounded by corpses and the lingering echo of her scent.
I stand there.
Processing.
My heart is racing.
Actually racing—a physiological response I'm not accustomed to, a betrayal of the carefully controlled calm I've spent years cultivating.
She saved me.
She stripped naked because I accidentally asked her to.
She kissed me—soft and sweet and nothing like the violence we're both capable of.
She's building a nest with our clothes.
The implications crash over me in waves.
She's not just playing along anymore.
She's not just following strategy.
She wants this. Wants us. Is actively choosing to make this feel permanent even though none of us have promised anything beyond the immediate threat.
My hand rises to my lips.
I can still feel the ghost of her kiss there.
Warm.
Real.
Something I didn't know I was capable of wanting until I had it.
We're going to keep her.
The certainty settles into my chest like a stone—heavy, permanent, absolutely immovable.
We're going to keep her.
Not because of strategy.
Not because of the alliance.
Not because of any of the careful justifications we've been using to explain why this makes sense.
We're going to keep her because she's ours.
Because she fits into the broken spaces between us like she was designed for it.
Because none of us—not Sage, not Blaze, not Kai, and certainly not me—can imagine going back to a world where she doesn't exist in our orbit.
But to keep her...
We have to survive.
She has to survive.
This thing between us has to survive long enough to become something real.
Which means dealing with the threat.
Which means ending the man who's been sending assassins to our door, who's been trying to eliminate his own son, who represents everything that stands between us and the future we're starting to want.
I look down at the bodies scattered across the lawn.
Four more dead.
Four more failed attempts.
But they'll keep coming.
They'll keep coming until there's nothing left to protect, until the threat is dealt with permanently, until Kai's father understands that he's not facing a pack of obedient soldiers anymore.
He's facing a pack that has something to lose.
Someone to lose.
And that makes us more dangerous than he could possibly imagine.
I turn toward the house.
Toward the warmth of light bleeding through windows.
Toward the scent of cotton candy and violence and the girl who just rewrote everything I thought I knew about myself.
Tomorrow, I'll talk to Kai.
Tomorrow, we'll finalize the plan.
Tomorrow, we'll set in motion the events that will either save us all or destroy us trying.
But tonight...
Tonight, I let myself feel this.
The hope.
The want.
The terrifying, exhilarating possibility that maybe—just maybe—I get to have something good.
My fingers brush against my lips one more time.
Still warm.
Still real.
Still the best thing that's happened to me in years.
We're going to keep her.
Which means taking Kai's dad down.