LOGINDOMINIC’S POVI go straight to The Grind House because I know it’s where Ivy goes when she needs to remember who she was before we disassembled the architecture of her safe boring life.She’s behind the counter wiping down the espresso machine with mechanical focus while her mind runs calculations it can’t solve. The dark circles under her eyes tell me she slept as poorly as my son did last night, which means the bond is transmitting his fear into her nervous system on a frequency that doesn’t have an off switch.I don’t sit in my son’s booth. I sit at the counter where customers sit, where the interaction is transactional and public and carries none of the energy that has defined every other conversation we’ve had since the first Thursday.“I’m not here for that,” I say, because I saw the slight lean forward and the breath change that mean her nervous system has registered my proximity and begun the arousal cascade that my voice triggers in her, and the cascade needs to stop because
Knox drives past the apartment and past every familiar turn until the roads get narrow and the streetlights thin out and we’re climbing a hill that I’ve been on once before.He parks the bike at the top and kills the engine, and the silence that replaces the motor is the specific silence of altitude. The skyline spreads out beneath the ledge in a grid of lights that looks like something a person designed to feel permanent, but the permanence is now a lie because the tribunal that ended two hours ago has the authority to erase every memory I’ve built since the engagement dinner, and the city below me would still be there and I wouldn’t know why I was looking at it.Knox sits on the concrete ledge with his legs hanging over the edge and his hands gripping the lip and his body is doing the thing it does when the wolf is pressing close enough to the surface that the human shape starts to blur. His shoulders are broader than they were at dinner, with his hands gripping the concrete with a
Knox’s hand tightens on my neck and the bond floods with something that feels like a growl being suppressed through the connection. I put my hand on his thigh under the table because the last thing we need right now is Knox shifting in a tribunal chamber and proving Viktor’s point about humans destabilising pack wolves.The elders deliberate. I can’t hear them – they’ve moved to the far end of the room and the conversation is conducted in voices low enough that even Knox’s wolf ears are straining – and the waiting is its own form of torture, because the people discussing whether to erase me are standing twenty feet away. They're just standing there making a decision that will determine whether I wake up tomorrow knowing that Knox Voss exists or wondering why there’s a silver scar on my neck that I can’t explain.Viktor raises his hand, and the deliberation stops.“The tribunal is split,” he says, and his voice carries the authority of a man who expected the split and engineered it. “I
IVY’S POVThe days between the pack meeting and the tribunal are the longest of my life, and I measure them in the many different ways Knox’s body changes as the countdown progresses. His sleep gets shorter, his grip tighter, his wolf pressing closer to the surface until the gold in his eyes stops flickering and starts STAYING, a permanent amber ring around the grey that he can’t retract even when my mom asks him at breakfast if he’s feeling okay because his eyes look “different.”He isn’t getting enough sleep.He’s getting approximately ninety minutes a night, and I can always feel him awake through the bond because it sends a low constant hum of alertness that pulses against my spine in the cage-grip while I lie there pretending to sleep.My mom makes him soup – the same chicken noodle she made me when I was twelve and had the flu – standing at the stove with her wooden spoon and her concerned face and her belief that warm broth can fix anything.She sets the bowl in front of the ma
KNOX’S POVEvery wolf in the Black Fang compound is staring at Ivy, and every wolf in the Black Fang compound is going to lose their eyes if they don’t stop.I’m noting all the stares by proximity and intensity, and I see the specific angle of their attention on the mark on her neck that glows faintly under the bar lighting like a neon sign that reads TAKEN in a language older than speech.The prospect at the door looked too long. The enforcer by the pool table looked longer. The she-wolf at the bar – one of Mara’s friends, the one with the jaw scar and the attitude problem – looked at Ivy’s throat and then at me and then back at Ivy’s throat with an expression that I filed under “deal with later,” because I can only dismantle one threat at a time, and the threat sitting at the head of the long table in the back room is the one that requires my full attention.Viktor Voss looks like what he is – the assumed Alpha of a bloodline that includes my father and myself.He is a man in his la
“You lied to me,” I say, and my hips slam down hard enough that his head tips back against the couch. “You said you didn’t touch him.”“I didn’t hit him–”“You grabbed his FACE.” Another slam. His jaw clenches and his hips buck upward meeting my downstroke and the collision sends a spike through my pelvis that makes my teeth clench. “You left a bruise on my best friend’s cheekbone and LIED about it.”“He kissed you–”“And I pushed him away.” I release one of his wrists and my hand fists in his hair and PULLS – hard enough that his neck stretches and his throat is exposed. “I pushed him away and brushed my teeth and washed my face for you, and you STILL came home and fucked me through the mattress like I was the one who needed punishing.”His freed hand grabs my hip and tries to take control of the pace, but I slap it away sharply.The slap makes his eyes go FULL gold and his grin widens into something feral and delighted because the aggression is doing to him what his aggression does
IVY’S POVI wake up to Knox standing in my doorway and I know from the way his body is filling the frame – vibrating, his hands clenched at his sides with the tendons in his forearms standing out like cables – that the alley wasn’t enough.He’s shirtless and his eyes are gold-ringed in the morning
KNOX’S POVI smell him on her from ten feet away and my vision goes gold before she rounds the corner.She’s walking home from campus in the dark with her bag over one shoulder and her hair still messed up from being pressed against a desk – I know this because the bond has been sending me data for
IVY’S POVHis thumb traces a single line down my spine, and he still hasn’t taken off a single piece of his own clothing.I’m bent over his desk with my shirt pushed to my shoulder blades and my skirt around my waist and he’s standing behind me in a full suit with his tie straight and his sleeves r
The mark on my neck glows faintly in the bathroom mirror when I tilt my head, and in certain light it pulses in rhythm with the double heartbeat in my chest – Knox’s heartbeat, louder, more present since last night, a permanent broadcast signal that I can’t turn off and don’t want to.Knox wants th







