Chapter 141: The Unfolding Truth XXI

Third Person POV

He closed his mouth. She held his gaze and did not blink and waited.

He looked at the set of her jaw and the way she was standing and apparently decided that whatever he had been about to say was not the right call.

"Okay," he said carefully. "What do you want to talk about my love?"

"Don’t." Her voice was even. Flat. "Don’t do the soft voice. Don’t try to smooth it before I’ve even said it."

He blinked. "Okay."

"How can you be thinking of making me your Luna without speaking to me first?"

The easy, careful expression on his face changed. Something dropped out of it. He set the sword against the nearest tree, slowly, without looking away from her.

"How do you know about that?" he said.

"What is your plan?" She stepped closer. One step, then another, until there was enough space between them to be polite but not enough to be comfortable. "Why did you bring me here? Why are you making decisions that involve me without letting me know?" Her voice was steady but her hands were not. She could feel them shaking slightly at her sides and she pressed them against her legs to stop it. "I matter in this situation. Or did you forget that?"

He ran one hand back through his wet hair and looked at the ground for a second.

"I know," he said. "I know I overdid it. I just... I wanted to get things sorted first. Before I came to you with it."

"Sorted." She said the word back to him and let him hear how it sounded. "You are going to be made Alpha in two days. You brought me into a house full of people I don’t know, in a place I have never been, and then you disappeared. Two days, Kai. I haven’t seen you in two days. You didn’t check if I was eating. You didn’t check if I was sleeping. You didn’t come to the door once to see if I was okay." Her voice was rising slightly, not into shouting, just into the upper register of someone who had been patient for longer than was comfortable. "What kind of man does that?"

He was looking at her now. Fully. Not at the ground, not at the sword, not at anything else. Just at her.

"You’re right," he said.

"I know I’m right."

"Helen..."

"You are..." She stopped. She was looking for the right word and not finding it. The right word kept sliding away from her every time she reached for it.

She knew what she wanted to say. She wanted to say something sharp and exact that would land the way his silence had landed on her over the past two days.

Something that would make him understand the precise shape of how it had felt to be left alone in a strange building with people she had only just met while he went somewhere and handled things.

She could not find the word.

"You dog," she said.

He stared at her.

"You lying pig," she added, for completeness.

Something moved across his face. She expected him to look wounded. She expected something defensive.

He smiled.

Not a smirk. Not the teasing kind. A real one, soft at the corners, spreading slowly like he hadn’t meant to let it out and it came anyway.

"You know," he said, "I’ve never seen you angry before." He raised one hand toward her face. "It’s kind of..."

She slapped his hand sideways before it reached her. Clean and quick.

"Don’t touch me," she said. "I want an answer. A real one."

He held both hands up. Not retreating. Just giving her space. His eyes were still warm even with his palms in the air.

"Yes," he said. "I was going to make you my Luna."

Simple. Direct. No qualification attached to it, no softening around the edges.

He took a step toward her. She held her ground.

"And I am not going to change my mind about it." Another step. The space between them narrowing. "I should have told you first. I should have come to you before I made any plans, before I talked to anyone, before I did anything. You are right about that and I am not going to argue with it." His voice dropped. "But the decision itself, that one I stand by."

He was close now. Close enough that she had to tilt her head to keep her eyes on his properly. Close enough to feel the warmth coming off his bare skin, the heat of someone who had been working for an hour in the morning sun.

"Helen," he said. Low. Her name in his voice the way he said it when they were the only two people in the room.

She opened her mouth to say something.

But he closed his over hers.

She had meant to push him back.

The intention was there. She had been holding it in her hands the entire walk from the door to this clearing, the decision to stay angry, to hold the line, to not let him smooth it over with one well-timed kiss the way people like him always tried to smooth things over.

But his mouth was warm.

And his hand came up to the back of her neck, fingers spreading into her hair, and the warmth of his palm against the skin there did something to her spine that the intention could not survive.

Her hands found his shoulders.

Not pushing. Just finding them. Her palms against bare skin, warm and damp from the morning’s work, the muscle underneath shifting slightly when he moved.

He kissed her the way he had been building toward for two days of absence, not gently, not testing, but with the certainty of someone who had thought about this specifically and had a very clear idea of how he wanted it to go.

She kissed him back.

His other hand found her waist and pulled her in and she let it, her fingers curling against his shoulders, her chin tilting up to meet him better.

The kiss deepened on its own, naturally, the way things deepened when neither person involved was trying to stop it. She felt the warmth of him all the way through her, settling in places that had no business being warm in the middle of a garden in the morning.

A sound came out of her throat that she had not intended.

Small. Involuntary. The kind of sound that happens when a person stops monitoring themselves completely.

His mouth left hers.

She almost reached for him to bring it back.

Then she felt it.

His lips on her jaw. Her neck. Moving slowly, unhurried, like he was learning the route by feel and was in absolutely no rush to reach the destination.

His hand at her waist shifted, moving around to the small of her back, pressing her closer. The other hand was still in her hair, fingers threading deeper, a grip that was gentle but complete.

She let her eyes close.

His mouth on her neck was soft at first. Then it changed. The softness gave way to something more deliberate, a pressure that was not quite kissing anymore, that was moving toward something else, something she could feel gathering underneath his stillness.

"Kai," she said.

He kept going.

The pressure on her neck increased. His breathing had changed too, she noticed, deepening and slowing at the same time, becoming something more like focused than relaxed. His hands had gone still on her body but the grip of them was tighter. She could feel all ten of his fingers through her clothes.

"Kai."

Nothing.

He was not answering her. Was not responding to his own name the way he usually responded to it, the small acknowledgment, the shift of his attention.

His face was against her neck and his hands were holding her and his breathing was deep and rhythmic and somewhere inside it, underneath it, she could hear something she did not fully recognize. Low. Almost inaudible.

A sound that did not belong to the man who had given her a kitten and sung badly in her bedroom and held her while she cried.

"Kai."

She put her hands flat against his chest and pushed.

He stumbled back one step. She had not pushed hard, she did not have the leverage to push hard, but the surprise of it moved him.

She looked at his face.

His eyes were not green.

They were red. Not the soft bleed of color that happened when emotions ran high in wolves. This was deeper. The red of something that had been dormant and had just woken up. His fangs pressed against his lower lip, longer than she had ever seen them, and his chest was rising and falling much faster than it had been when he was swinging the sword.

He was looking at her.

He was seeing her. She could tell he was seeing her. But something else was seeing her too, something that had moved up behind his eyes and was looking at the side of her neck and the pulse running under the skin there.

Her hand went up and touched that spot. She felt the warmth of it. She felt what his mouth had been working toward.

"Are you trying to mark me?" she asked. Her voice came out steady. She was surprised it came out steady.

He did not answer.

He stood there breathing, red-eyed, fangs out, his hands at his sides now, the fingers of them slightly curled, and he did not move toward her and he did not answer her.

The fountain kept going in the corner. The flowers moved in a small wind she had not noticed until now. The sky above the enclosed garden was open and bright and completely indifferent.

Helen stood in the clearing with her hand pressed to her own neck, looking at the man she had followed into this place, and waited to find out what was looking back at her.