LOGINIVY’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
He doesn’t ask why. The motorcycle simply starts in the background and the call ends.I drive back to the apartment with the window down because I need cold air on my face to keep the tears from starting, because if the tears start now they won’t stop until they’ve washed away every lie I’ve been maintaining since the engagement dinner.He’s in the driveway when I pull up. Helmet off. Leaning against the bike with his arms crossed and his eyes already scanning me.I walk to him and my hand closes around his belt buckle – the piece of metal that started everything on that first night.His eyebrows rise. The gold flickers at the edges of his grey eyes and his mouth opens to say something, but I don’t let him say it.I pull the buckle and he follows the momentum forward, so I push him through the front door and down the hallway and onto the couch – my mom’s couch, the couch that has absorbed more of my sins than any piece of furniture in this apartment – and Knox drops onto the cushions
Theo’s apartment smells like whiskey and unwashed laundry and like he hasn’t opened a window in days.I know something is wrong before I’m fully through the door because Theo Gallagher has kept his apartment clean since we were fifteen, and the boy who alphabetised his spice rack during a study break would not voluntarily live in a room that smells like a bar floor unless something fundamental had been broken.He’s on the couch with a bottle between his knees and his laptop open on the coffee table showing what appears to be a research document about – I lean closer – domestic abuse warning signs?The search history visible in the tab bar includes “signs someone is being controlled by a partner” and “how to report a professor-student relationship,” and the thoroughness of his research makes my chest constrict because Theo doesn’t do anything halfway, which means he is currently most likely applying his specific methodical energy to dismantling my life.Then he turns his head and I see
IVY'S POVHe pushes inside me without warning and the first stroke is hard enough that my bound hands twist in the belt leather and my face turns into the mattress.The sound that comes out of me is a LAUGH - breathless and surprised because the force of him is so excessive and so Knox that the absurdity of it all is hitting me as comedy before it hits me as pleasure, and the comedy makes the pleasure better because nothing in my life makes sense anymore and the not-making-sense has become the thing I crave.He fucks me with the belt around my wrists and his hand on the back of my neck and with his hips driving forward at a pace that my body meets on every stroke - pushing back against him, CHASING the impact instead of absorbing it.The way I feel it, I am not being punished right now, I am being WANTED with a desperation that tastes like the best drug I’ve ever taken.I cum hard and the orgasm breaks through me like sunlight through glass. I feel GOOD. Not guilty or conflicted, not
Knox has been a shadow all week.He walks me to every class and picks me up after every shift and texts me so constantly that my phone battery dies by 3 PM, and the possessiveness that used to feel like a game has sharpened into something that feels like a perimeter check.He stands closer. He hold
IVY’S POVI’ve never seen Knox afraid.I’ve seen him possessive and aggressive and feral and half-shifted with his claws buried in plaster, but I have never seen the colour leave his face the way it does when his eyes land on the silver-haired man in the corner booth.His entire body changes in a s
KNOX’S POVI smell the blood before she comes out of the bathroom.One drop. Less than a drop. But I smell it, and underneath the blood I smell Mara – her fury and her desperation and her half-bond agony coating Ivy’s skin like a second layer of perfume that makes my vision go gold so fast the bart
Mara’s gold eyes are two feet from my face and the heat coming off her body is the same wrong-temperature heat that Knox runs at, which means she’s the same thing he is, which means the woman standing between me and the only exit is a werewolf who has just told me she could kill me faster than I co