Chapter 45: A Careless Thought

Kai stood at the window of his private room long after the formal work of the day had ended and watched the light leave the grounds.

He had reviewed the border reports, had answered two messages from the northern packs regarding the mating schedule, and had spoken to the household steward about the adjusted assignments Flora had demanded—Levi was no longer to be rostered anywhere near the first heir’s wing.

He had clearly kept himself busy all day, but none of it had quieted the noise underneath.

Jealousy.

The word itself irritated him. It was imprecise, emotional, and unsuited to the first son of the territory. He had no claim on the omega. He had actively refused the one that had been offered in that absurd, shaking request. He was bound by agreement and political necessity to Flora. The suppressants were working, the bonds were supposed to be thinning. There was no rational space in which jealousy toward a blood-debt omega, already claimed by Dexter, and already circling Aaron, should exist inside him.

And yet it sat under his ribs like a stone he could not dislodge.

He kept returning to the moment in this very room: Levi’s voice steady despite the fear in his eyes, the impossible sentence landing between them. Iwant you to mark me. Kai had spent the hours since then turning the request over with the same methodical attention he gave to succession questions and border disputes.

Why? What calculation had driven an omega already carrying one brother’s claim, to walk into the first heir’s private chambers and ask for a second mark? Freedom was the obvious answer. A claim from the future Alpha of the territory would be harder for their father to ignore. Levi had said as much.

Kai did not fully believe it was only that.

There had been something else under the request—desperation, yes, but also a thin, reckless courage that did not match the carefully self-erasing servant the household had been trying to turn him into. Something had pushed the omega past the ordinary calculus of survival. Kai wanted to know what. The wanting itself was a problem. Curiosity about Levi’s motives sat too close to the pull he had been starving since the full moon, and too close to the raw, complicated disturbance that had moved through him when the request was first spoken.

Then there was Aaron.

If Kai had not grown up watching his middle brother burn through tempers and temporary beds with equal commitment, he might have concluded that Aaron was forming an attachment. The private outing to the fields. The way Aaron had stood too close in the stable yard. The refusal to immediately step away when challenged. It looked, from the outside, like interest. Like care. Like the beginning of something that had nothing to do with the Goddess’s joke and everything to do with the man himself.

But this was Aaron.

Aaron did not like people. Aaron brought different women to his rooms on different nights and left the evidence for the morning staff to clear. Aaron solved restlessness with training posts and temporary bodies. Whatever was happening with the Hill omega was more likely another form of competition with Dexter’s completed claim. It was not affection. It could not be. Kai refused to reorganize his understanding of his brother just because of a few gestures.

Still.

The image of Aaron’s hand at Levi’s neck in the stable yard returned with inconvenient clarity. Kai pushed it aside and stared at his own reflection in the darkening glass.

He should not go to the supervised wing.

Flora’s warning had been explicit. The household instructions had already been updated. Their father’s standing orders remained in force regardless of his temporary absence. Walking into Levi’s rooms now would make Kai a hypocrite of the most precise kind—the first heir who enforced boundaries on his brothers while quietly stepping over them himself. It would also risk discovery, and discovery would hand Flora exactly the evidence she needed to escalate.

Curiosity did not care about any of that.

By the time the sun had fully dropped behind the western tree line and the household’s evening rhythms had softened into fewer footsteps and lower voices, Kai had stopped arguing with himself. He changed into darker, less formal clothing that would draw less attention in the corridors. He did not take a servant. He did not announce the visit to anyone. He simply left his room, took the longer route that avoided the main halls, and walked toward the supervised wing with the same controlled silence he used for conversations he did not want overheard.

The corridors near Levi’s rooms were quiet.

A single guard at the far junction glanced at the first heir, registered rank, and found somewhere else to rest his attention. Kai stopped outside the correct door and listened to make sure Levi didn’t already gave visitors. When he was certain the omega was alone, he entered the room.

He did not knock, that would only attract unnecessary attention.

Kai was ready to start his interrogative session the moment the door closed behind him, but he never even managed to get a word out. The sight before him had simply left him speechless.

Levi lay on the narrow bed in the center of the room, completely naked.

The sheet had been pushed down to his hips and then further, as if he had grown too warm and discarded it without thinking. One arm was bent above his head. The other rested across his stomach. Dark hair spilled against the pillow. The claim mark on the side of his throat showed livid against pale skin. Residual moisture from a recent wash still clung to his collarbones and the line of his chest. And the silver light from the crescent moon seemed to make his pale body glow in a way Kai could only describe as seductively.

Kai stopped moving.

For a stretched second his mind performed a thought it never should have. He wondered how that pale skin would feel, how it would taste, and how his mark would look on it.