Chapter 15 #3
My second offers his hand, palm up. Grey’s jaw tightens as a partial shift takes him over. Fur sprouts along his throat and face. His hand transforms to a giant paw, sharpened claws protruding. He rakes a claw across Marcus’ hand, drawing a thin line of blood.
Marcus clenches his jaw.
I know from experience this kind of blood draw from another alpha hurts like a bitch, but to his credit, Marcus doesn’t make a sound.
Grey’s form becomes fully human again. He watches Marcus with a solemn attention that tells me he’s feeling his way through the connection carefully. Reading without ransacking. It’s the mark of a wolf who understands that what he’s been given is a privilege, not a weapon.
After a long moment, Grey exhales. Steps back.
“Clean,” he says simply.
Marcus flexes his hand once. The cut is already closing—wolf healing doing its work. He returns to his seat without ceremony and picks up his notebook like he didn't just let an alpha he met a few days ago rifle through his head for the greater good.
That’s Marcus.
Grey turns to me.
I step forward and offer my hand palm up without waiting to be asked. Grey holds my gaze for a moment, assessing, and then the partial shift takes him again. The claw rakes across my palm.
It does hurt like a bitch.
I keep my face neutral.
The connection opens like a door swinging wide; not violent but sure as hell invasive.
I feel Grey moving through it with the careful precision of someone who knows he’s been given access to something sacred and intends to honor that.
I don’t resist. Don’t manage what he finds. That would defeat the purpose entirely.
Instead, I let him see it all.
Crossvale. The war college. How hard I had to fight for its survival. Memories flash by like a movie on fast-forward. Soon, my own memories begin to mix with Grey’s as our shared connection offers glimpses into his head just as much as my own.
I see the abuse his old man put him through.
The way he always tried to protect his mother.
His time with the Black Moon pack. Our mutual friend Levi.
Then his homecoming. Meeting Lexi. When I see the way he stuffed her into his car, I don’t know what to think, but then the memories between them shift, and I realize it’s all water under the bridge. They’re the real deal.
They have what I want with Mia.
And I know he’s seeing that too.
With more strength than I expect it to take, I shove aside all the extraneous shit from my life and work to show him what he came for.
The night Ramsey came to me with his pitch and the specific quality of wrong I felt from his wolf.
My reasons for saying yes to this alliance and what I believe about Grey and Lexi’s capacity to lead this pack into something better than what it was.
Lena Voss at the base of the tree. Ramsey stepping out of the tree line.
But then Mia’s there again, and this time, I don’t hide what’s between us.
Not just today but the first night we met.
It's there, which means Grey already found it, and I'm not going to insult either of us by trying to wall it off.
Two years of thinking about her. Two nights in the woods.
The drive home this morning with the walls going up and me watching it happen from the passenger seat and deciding to stay anyway.
For a few disorienting seconds, pieces of our lives exist between us and in both of us simultaneously.
I’ve never felt anything like it. Grey’s power is more than anything I could have imagined.
Beyond anything I’ve encountered from another alpha, beyond anything I thought one wolf could hold and survive with.
It’s vast in a way that has no edges, like stepping into an ocean that has no floor and no shore and realizing too late you can’t see where you came in from or how to get out.
I lean in without meaning to. Not because I want more, but because the pull of it overrides the instinct to step back.
Grey’s power moves through the connection like a current, and I follow it one step too far, trying to understand the scope of it, the architecture of it, how one wolf contains this much—
The connection ends.
Or maybe it doesn’t end so much as I lose the thread of it.
I blink, returning to the room. To my own body. My head swims hard enough to make the room spin.
Grey steps back. His expression is unreadable for exactly one second. Then something in it settles; a decision made, a question answered.
“All clear,” he says.
The word reaches me from far away.
The room tilts. There’s a sudden wrongness in the angle of everything, the floor making a bid for my attention. I’m aware of my hand still raised between us, the cut already closing, my body doing all the correct biological things while my brain attempts to locate itself.
I don’t find it in time.
My knees buckle first. Then the rest of me follows.
The last thing I’m aware of before the floor arrives is Marcus already moving to make sure I don’t smash my head against the chair.
And then I pass the fuck out.