Yes.Go in.Comfort her.She needs us.
The wolf didn’t understand why I hesitated.Didn’t understand that my comfort was the last thing she wanted.That my presence in her room would be an invasion, not a kindness.That even if I held her while she wept, even if I dried her tears and stroked her hair and whispered that everything would be all right, she would hate me more for it in the morning.
She would feel violated.Not comforted.Not safe.
Because I was the reason she was crying.
My knuckles hovered an inch from the wood.
On the other side of the door, her breathing hitched.A sob, quickly muffled.She was trying to cry quietly, trying not to let the household hear her break.Trying to maintain whatever shred of dignity she had left.
She’s crying.She’s alone.Why won’t you help her?
Because I’m the one who broke her.
The wolf went quiet.Not satisfied, not convinced, but momentarily stymied by a logic he couldn’t refute.
I lowered my hand.
My father’s face surfaced in my memory, the way it always did when I was near the edge.When the wolf’s voice grew too loud and my control stretched too thin.
I didn’t have many clear images of him.I had been three when his wolf lost control during a fight with my mother, and the shift took him, and the claws came out, and then there was so much blood.So much screaming.I had hidden in the closet with my hands over my ears, wedged between winter coats that smelled like mothballs and fear, trying not to hear her die.
He had loved her too much.That’s what the pack said afterward, when they tried to explain why a wolf would murder his human mate.He had loved her so fiercely that when the wolf felt threatened, it couldn’t distinguish between protecting and destroying.Between holding and crushing.Between love and death.
Too much love.Too little control.And a wife dead on the kitchen floor while her three-year-old son listened from the closet and learned what monsters looked like from the inside.
I pressed my palm flat against Lena’s door.The wood was cool.Solid.A barrier I could break through in seconds if I chose to.On the other side, she had gone quiet.Either the tears had stopped or she was holding her breath, listening for sounds in the hallway.
Could she sense me out here?Could she feel the weight of my attention through the door?
Go in.Take her in your arms.Show her we would never hurt her.
But I had hurt her.I had engineered her ruin and taken her virginity and pushed her away with words designed to wound.I had done everything my father had done except the killing, and I had only avoided that because the Pakhan had offered me an alternative.
If I went in there now, if I forced comfort on her, if I used my size and strength and legal authority to take what she wasn’t offering, I became him.The monster who loved so hard he killed.
Better she hated me from a distance than feared me up close.
If she doesn’t choose me freely, she hasn’t chosen me at all.
The wolf whimpered.A sound of pure grief, not anger.He understood now, even if he didn’t like it.Even if the need to break down this door and claim what was ours burned through every nerve.
This was the only path.The only way to earn rather than take.
I stepped back.One step.Then another.
Then I turned and walked away, every muscle in my body screaming to turn around.
Every step was wrong.Every step took me further from her, from the mate my wolf had recognized the moment I had scented her in that hotel lobby.The bond we had never completed howled at the distance, a raw wound that would not heal, that could not heal without her.Two months of this agony and it only grew worse.The near-claim from that night, when I had had my teeth at her throat and my cock buried inside her and everything in me had screamed to bite down and mark her as mine forever…
The master bedroom was emptier than it ever had been.A mausoleum for a life I had killed with my own hands.
The king-sized bed dominated the space, all dark wood and white linens that still held the ghost of her warmth.The bed where I had held her after taking her virginity, where I had buried my face in her hair and breathed her in and listened to her heartbeat slow into sleep against my chest.Where I had been happier than I had ever been in my miserable life for exactly six hours before I had destroyed everything with my own cruelty.
Her scent was still in the sheets.
Not really.Alice had changed them weeks ago, when it became clear Lena wouldn’t be coming back.But the wolf insisted he could smell her anyway, that phantom perfume that haunted every corner of this room.