Chapter Seventeen #2
I let him. The leather was soft, worn in the way expensive leather gets when someone has been sitting in the same spot for years, and the fire’s warmth reached the chair with the patient certainty of something that had all night to do its job.
My ribs settled into a dull, persistent ache that lived somewhere between discomfort and actual pain, and I decided, somewhere in the last several hours of blood and gravel and scotch and firelight, that fighting every single thing Braham Wolfe did was an exhausting way to live and I was officially retiring from the practice.
He sat across from me. Not beside me. Across. The kind of positioning that said he wanted to look at me, not just be near me, and the distinction landed somewhere specific in my chest.
Two glasses appeared from somewhere—Macallan again, the good stuff, the kind that cost more than my monthly rent and tasted like it—and he passed one over without comment. Our fingers brushed. His were warm. Mine were not, and I didn’t want to think about why.
Then he looked at me. Really looked. Thirty seconds of thorough, unhurried visual inventory that started at my split lip and worked its way down: the butterfly closures Reyes had applied with the brisk efficiency of someone who had heard every excuse for why a wound wasn’t that bad, the bruising along my jaw where Declan’s fist had connected, the bandaging on my shoulder visible through the torn fabric of what had once been a serviceable jacket and was now evidence in someone’s eventual crime scene photos.
I let him look. Didn’t crack a joke. Didn’t deflect.
Just sat there with scotch warming my palm and fire warming my left side and let Braham Wolfe catalogue the damage someone had done to me, because the set of his jaw said he was filing each item in a place I didn’t want to examine too closely, and I had spent enough time around dangerous men to know when the silence was doing more work than words.
“My shoulder hurts more than I let on to Reyes,” I said.
His jaw went tight. A fraction. The muscle below his ear flexed once, hard, and then settled into something controlled that looked like it cost him.
He didn’t say he knew. Didn’t say he’d seen it. Just gave one short nod, the kind that meant the information had been received and processed and filed under a heading I wasn’t allowed to read.
“Declan believed he was right,” I said. “Not misguided. Not confused. Right. That’s the most dangerous kind of wrong.”
“I know.”
Neither of us said what that meant for what came next. Declan’s remaining people. The Morrow line’s claim. The investigation Ashe was already running. The calculus of territory and blood and the fact that Grace’s ability made her valuable in ways neither of us had fully processed yet.
We didn’t say it because we both already knew, and the fire was warm, and the scotch was good, and for five minutes I wanted to exist in a version of the world where the only math that mattered was the distance between two leather chairs and the man sitting in one of them.
We talked about Grace. Not the logistics, not the security, not the pack structure, not the thousand practical questions that would need answers by morning.
The other version.
What “adopting her together” actually looked like when one party was a Prime Alpha wolf who commanded a territory spanning three states and the other was a gay romance novelist who had found a newborn in a cardboard box beside a dumpster and decided, against every instinct for self-preservation, to keep her.
“The paperwork is going to be creative,” I said. “I’m envisioning a section where they ask ‘relationship to child’ and I have to write ‘found her in an alley, stabbed a man for her, currently being claimed by a wolf.’ That’s going to require its own font.”
“I have lawyers.”
“I bet you do.” I drank. The scotch burned clean, warming a path from my throat to my chest that had nothing to do with alcohol and everything to do with the way Braham was looking at me across the firelight.
“Good ones, I assume. The kind who don’t blink when you hand them a file labeled ‘infant shifter adoption, complicated.’”
“The best.”
“Of course they are.” I set my glass on the armrest. The crystal caught the firelight and held it, amber turning the liquid the color of the gate lights on the gravel road. “Nothing but the best for the man who bench-presses buildings and adopts babies on weeknights.”
The fire popped. A log settled in the grate, sending a shower of embers up the chimney, and the sound carried through the room and faded into the particular quiet that only exists in places where the walls are thick enough to hold silence properly.
Outside, something moved through the tree line.
A dark shape against darker dark, too large for a deer, too purposeful for anything that wasn’t pack—one of Braham’s wolves on a night run, patrolling the perimeter with the focused attention of someone who had been told the territory was secure but was checking anyway.
The sound of paws on wet earth carried through the open French doors and then faded, swallowed by distance and trees.
Braham set his glass down on the side table. The crystal made a soft click against the wood, deliberate, final, and he looked at me with those gold eyes—steady and specific in a way that made the air between us go very still.
“You said I’d have to claim you first,” he said.
“I did say that.”
“I said yes.”
“You did.”
“I meant it.”
The words landed between us with the weight of something that had been true since the study, since the kitchen, since the moment I’d walked into his office with a baby and a mouth that couldn’t shut up, and hearing him say it out loud in a room with a fire and two chairs and a bed the size of a small aircraft turned the truth into something I could feel in my ribs, in my throat, in the backs of my hands.
I knew what it cost him to wait. A Prime Alpha.
A wolf in his position, with his instincts, who had found his mate and had been told no, and had stood in that no for weeks without pushing, without demanding, without doing any of the things his biology and his position had every right to make him do.
The restraint lived in the set of his shoulders and the careful control in his voice, and I had been cataloguing it since we met and categorically refusing to name it because naming it meant admitting I noticed, and admitting I noticed meant admitting I cared, and caring meant I was in considerably deeper than I’d planned to be when I picked up a baby from a cardboard box in an alley and decided to be stupid about it.
“I know you meant it,” I said. The words came out quieter than I’d intended. The fire murmured. The scotch sat warm in my palm. “That’s the part I’m still getting used to.”
Braham said nothing. Didn’t move. Didn’t reach.
Just sat there in the leather chair with the firelight catching the gold in his eyes and the corded muscle along his forearms, and waited with the patience of a man who had already decided how this ended and was willing to let me arrive there at my own pace.
I set my glass down. The crystal clicked against the side table, and the sound felt final in a way that had nothing to do with alcohol and everything to do with the fact that I was done pretending.
“Okay,” I said.
The same way I’d said it in the kitchen. Flat. Even. Like it was small, knowing it wasn’t, knowing it was the largest thing I’d said to anyone in years.
I stood up. My ribs protested—a sharp, specific ache that lived in the left side of my chest and made my vision gray at the edges for half a second—and I ignored it because some pains were worth the cost and this one qualified.
Braham stood up. Six-foot-three of pure alpha muscle unfolding from the leather chair with the unhurried certainty of a man who had been thinking about this moment since the study, since the kitchen, since the elevator doors closed behind us in a parking garage full of blood and broken men.
The distance between us closed. Not fast. Not slow. Just the pace of two people who had already decided and were no longer interested in hesitating.
The kiss started careful. Braham’s mouth against mine with the particular caution of a man who had registered the butterfly closures and the split underneath and decided that gentleness, however briefly, was non-negotiable.
His lips were warm, slightly chapped, and he held himself there for exactly two seconds before something gave way.
He made a low sound against my mouth. The kind that lived somewhere between a groan and a growl, something primal and hungry that traveled from his chest into mine and settled somewhere below my belt.
His hands found my waist—large, warm, fingers pressing into the dip above my hip bones with a grip that was firm and certain and exactly what I wanted.
I decided, with the absolute conviction of a man who had just stopped pretending, that my lip was fine.
My lip had never been better. My lip was a concept invented by people who had never been kissed by Braham Wolfe in a timber bedroom with a fire burning low and a bed the size of a small country waiting behind them.
I got my fingers into the front of his shirt. Crisp cotton, probably cost more than my monthly grocery budget, and I pulled. Hard. The kind of pull that said I was done with careful and interested exclusively in what happened next.
He walked me backward toward the bed. Not fast. Unhurried.
The particular pace of a man who had been thinking about this since the moment I walked out of the study, since the kitchen, since the elevator doors closed behind us in a parking garage full of blood and broken men, and who had decided that the middle was worth savoring.
His steps were measured.
Mine were less so.