Chapter 15 - Keira

The moon hangs low, a half circle casting a soft light over the trees surrounding the pack center. Wind moves through them like soft pockets of breath, sweeping across the leafy tops, which seem to shine, half-iridescent in the glow. I stare out over Rosecreek below me, trying to find some peace in its stillness, but my mind won’t settle. Everything is in motion—inside and out.

The pack center is a hive of anxiety and activity tonight. The mission tomorrow has everyone on edge, prepping and checking gear, mapping out strategies. I hear voices echoing down the hallway, the low hum of conversation punctuated by the occasional bark of orders or bleat laughter that sounds a little too forced.

Everyone’s trying to pretend this is just another mission, but we all know better. They’ve been chasing these auctioneers for months—it’s why I’m here at all—and now, we’re finally close to something big. I feel the pressure like a vice. Every time I move, it gets tighter.

Even here, in my room, it’s pressing in on me. The walls are too narrow, the air too thin. I’ve been pacing for the past hour, trying to shake off the nerves and find some clarity. It’s not working.

I considered approaching Aris earlier. The thought of asking him to take me off the mission tomorrow crossed my mind more than once. I could tell him I’m not ready, I thought, or that I need more time, that this was too much after everything that happened to me when we last knew each other. But I haven’t asked, and I won’t. I know that. I’ve never backed out on a job before and won’t start now.

Noise layers itself on top of the noise outside. I hear footsteps in the hall, slow and deliberate, and my heart skips a beat. There’s only one person who would come here tonight. Only one who’s been orbiting me like a plane about to crash into a planet.

There’s a soft knock at the door. I take a deep breath, steadying myself, and walk to open it.

Ado stands there in the dim light of the hallway, his face half-shadowed. He looks just as wrecked as I feel, energy radiating off him in waves. There’s something in his eyes—desperation, guilt, maybe both—and it twists something inside me like a knife.

“Keira,” he says quietly, his voice rough. “We need to talk.”

I cross my arms, leaning against the doorframe, trying to put up a wall between us. Instinctually, I don’t want him in my room. I don’t want him in my room, because then, he might defeat the few trembling reservations I have left. “About what? You’ve had plenty of chances to talk, Ado. It’s not my fault you never do.”

He flinches at that, but I don’t soften. I can’t. If I let him in, everything I’ve been holding back will come crashing down on me, and I can’t afford that. Not now. Not when everything is on the line.

“I never wanted to leave you,” he blurts out, the words tumbling out in a rush. “Back then… when they took you. I tried to come back, but… I couldn’t. Not with the injury. But if I could go back in time, I—”

I cut him off, my voice more forceful than I want it to sound. “You didn’t try hard enough, Ado. You left me to rot in that place. For weeks. You never came back. Do you have any idea what that was like?”

“I didn’t have a choice!” he snaps, his frustration spilling over. “I was out of my mind with that head injury, barely able to think straight, let alone find you. I would’ve come back for you if I could, but nobody knew where you were, or if you’d even survived—”

His words hit me like a sucker punch to the jaw, but I’m so angry, too hurt to let them sink in.

“You could’ve found a way,” I say bitterly. “You could’ve tried harder. But you didn’t. And I was the one who paid for it.”

In Ado’s eyes, I see the truth. I know he isn’t lying to me at that moment. Implicitly, I know that he couldn’t if he tried. But it’s not enough. It’s too late.

“Keira, please,” he whispers, stepping closer. “You have to believe me. I never stopped thinking about you. I never stopped wanting to—”

But the words die in his throat, and I can see the frustration in his eyes. He’s trying so hard to explain, but it’s not enough. It can’t be.

“I can’t do this, Ado,” I say, shaking my head. “I can’t go back to that place. Not with you.”

I turn away, ready to close the door on him, on everything, but he grabs my arm. His touch is electric. It almost sends me out of my body.

I look up at him. He stares into my eyes and into me, and he sees me somehow as something nobody has seen me as for a very, very long time. It skewers through me, the truth of how he knows me, how badly he wants me. He’d kill to have me. I see it all.

Before I can stop myself, I step toward him, closing the distance between us. His breath hitches, and as if frozen, we just stand there, staring at each other, the air between us unbearably tight.

He grabs my face in his hands and kisses me.

I close my eyes and sink like a stone in a river. It’s desperate, raw—a fraying knot of need and frustration comes apart in our hands, enmeshing and then releasing everything we haven’t said and everything we’ve been holding back all this time. In the heat of his lips, the taste of his musk, I remember a thousand things I had forgotten. The warmth of his hand on my leg in the barracks. The fear in his eyes in the dark as he fought to protect me before I was taken. The flare of his nostrils at some joke I told what feels like a million years ago now, lifetimes away from us, but somehow, it never left.

I grasp Ado’s neck, threading my fingers up through the back of his hair. His fingers come around my waist, tugging the small of my back, pulling me closer, and I let myself get lost in it, in the heat of him, in the way his lips move against mine like he’s trying to make up for every second we lost.

We stagger backward into my room. I kick the door closed behind us with one foot as Ado snags an arm tighter around my back and pulls my body against his, my hips flush against the side of his leg. I feel his hardness against me.

He kisses down the side of my mouth to my throat. I hear myself gasp his name but don’t remember consciously deciding to.

“Oh God,” I hear myself moaning. “Oh, God.”

Ado sweeps me off my feet—literally. He staggers to the bed, and we land, his body on top of mine, on the rumpled covers.

“You’re certain?” he asks. And I know Ado well enough to know that even though I can stop at any time—that with a single word, I can end this—he will only ask me this one time.

I nod. I kiss him hard. He bites my lip, and I feel his tongue flush against my teeth while his other hand wrestles with my button-down shirt, until he gives up, pulling away and tearing it open.

In my right mind, I might have told him off for that. But I don’t. I’m so wet. I’ve never been this aroused in my life; I’m sure of it.

Ado’s large, warm hand skitters down my front. He looks up at me one last time. His eyes are so dark with arousal that he’s halfway to wolf, transforming without transforming. He’s pure instinct, a live wire. He’d devour me if he could.

I reach behind to unclip my bra. Straddling me, Ado whips off his t-shirt in one smooth motion. His torso shines with perspiration in the faint golden light of the bedside lamp on its lowest setting. As he pants, I see the warm glow ripple over the tight muscles of his stomach, corded like rope, running hot with anticipation.

“Ado,” I groan. “Ado, please …”

I arch up off the bed as he touches my chest with one hand. With the other, Ado throws his shirt aside. When did he take his pants off? My head is hazy with lust. I fumble with the front of his boxers, feeling his excitement pressing against the black fabric.

He squeezes my breast hard, and I keen. The danger in his eyes makes me feel more wanted than I can ever remember feeling.

“You’re still mine?” he asks me.

I nod desperately. “Yours.” I don’t know if it’s even true. I just say it because I need him and think I’d say anything he wanted me to.

Ado rolls my nipple between his finger and thumb viciously. Then he releases me and reaches down toward my hips, pulling me further down on the mattress, almost manhandling me. Positioning me.

He fumbles with the drawstring of my pajama pants, and I reach down to help him, our shaking hands tangling above my heat. He pulls down my pants, then my underwear.

“Mine,” he repeats. He kisses me hard enough that I see stars, consuming my being, having me whole. I realize that as I kiss him back: he has me.

His thumb circles my clit. I groan so loudly that I’d be surprised if everyone on the floor didn’t hear it. I’m going to need to wash the sheets.

He plunges a finger inside me. I wrap my arms tight around his neck and fight not to howl with need. “Ado—Ado, God, Ado… I need you, please, I need you—”

He hooks his finger, and I almost scream, hips angling up off the bed. I don’t know how he knows how to touch me like that, but he does. The thumb of the same hand flicks torturously over my clitoris, and my mouth opens wide, but no sound escapes. It’s bliss so intense that it is an inch from torment.

“Keira,” he murmurs. His finger leaves me. He rolls a condom on, and then I feel himself position his member at my entrance.

He enters me fast and fully, then seats himself there for a moment, unmoving, thumb still moving in slow circles over my clit. We’re both panting, fuzzy-eyed, mad with lust.

“I love you,” I hear him say through the mist. “Fuck, I love you.”

He kisses me and pulls out, then pushes back in, setting off his rhythm. I bare my entire self to him, back arching, chest rising. I feel my hard nipples brush his warm chest. He bites my earlobe, then bears down on my throat with his teeth as if he’d tear me apart if he could.

The pressure of his thumb increases. His thrusts speed up, and my vision whites out as the white-hot core of arousal inside me comes apart—I wrap my legs around him and wail, every muscle in my body tightening,

As if from another room, I hear my voice repeating his name like a prayer.

Ado makes me come twice that night. After, both mind-blown, sweaty, and in need of a bath, we lie side-by-side on my bed, his arm around my naked waist, my chest and core pressed to his side.

My brain feels like it still hasn’t come back to full capacity yet. When I try to string a thought together, it dissolves like wet paper, losing its shape.

One of Ado’s hands moves to sweep my sweaty hair back out of my face. He runs his thumb over the hickey blooming on my neck.

“Love you,” he says tiredly, halfway asleep. Would he say it if he was in his right mind? “Meant it.”

He falls asleep. I try not to, but an instant later, I feel the room as it seems to lose its form around us, and everything falls away from me.

I dream I’m back in New York, in my tiny apartment. Strangers on the street below, outside of my small, grimy window, seem to move in blurs, smudging into one continuous color. I don’t know any of them, and they don’t know me. I am unloved, I think, and I’ll be unloved forever if I stay here. I have to go before it’s too late, before what happened to me eats me alive. I’ve been letting it kill me slowly. Soon, it’s going to finish the job.

The skyscrapers melt into the ground like plants receding in winter. I watch stars spin up into the sky above me, sparks flying. I am in Rosecreek again, with the pack—Olivia laughs, her arm laced through mine, pulling me along. Halfmoon Lake shines in the impossible midnight glow ahead of us. The streetlights paint the town golden and I belong. I don’t know how it happened, but I belong.

My eyes flutter open, and the dim outline of the room comes into focus. Ado is still beside me, his breath slow and steady, deep in sleep.

The room is still like the gentle, persistent calm after a storm. My phone tells me it’s three in the morning. There’s something special about these hours in the middle of the night. I strain my ears and hear not a single thing moving in the entire building for the first time in days.

I shift slightly, careful not to wake him. My bare skin brushes against the cool sheets, and I realize how vulnerable I feel. He peeled me open. I am an open wound.

Ado’s profile in my periphery keeps my attention like a car crash. His face is relaxed, peaceful in sleep, but his words hang like smoke in the air of the room. He said it like it was nothing, like those words didn’t carry the power to shatter everything I’d been trying to protect. I wonder if he would have said it in the cold light of day.

A part of me wants to believe him. Wants to believe that after everything we’ve been through, maybe this is our second chance. But another part of me—the part that’s spent years building a fort around my heart—can’t help but question it. I could easily be setting myself up for another fall. And I can’t go through that again. I wouldn’t survive it.

I roll onto my side and dig the side of my face into my pillow, studying Ado’s profile. The soft rise and fall of his chest, the way his brow furrows ever so slightly even in sleep. It’s hard to reconcile this man with the one who stormed into and then out of my life so many years ago, with his silent, fierce loyalty, his eyes holding that unspoken promise that he would never allow me to forget him for all my days.