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1222 Words
Zephyr
Something was wrong with me.
I had comforted injured warriors before. I had carried men off battlefields with their blood soaking through my shirt. I had sat with young wolves after their first kill, hand on their shoulder, telling them the shaking would pass. It was part of the job. You did it, and then you let it go.
So why couldn't I let this go?
Wren walked beside me up the long drive to the Alpha Mansion, drowning in my jacket, her arms wrapped around herself like she was trying to hold her own ribs together. And every single step, my body kept angling toward her without my permission. Shielding her from the wind. From the dark. From nothing at all.
She's Darius's little sister, I told myself. You've known her since she was sixteen. Of course you want to protect her. That's loyalty. Nothing more.
It was a reasonable explanation. It was also a lie, and some quiet part of me knew it.
Because when she had buried her face in my chest back on that street corner, something inside me had shifted. I felt it happen. Like a lock turning in a door I didn't know I had.
She fit.
That was the thought that kept circling back no matter how many times I killed it. She fit in my arms. Not almost. Not close enough. Perfectly. Her softness against me, her head tucked under my chin like the space had been measured for her, her scent, rain and warm honey, sinking into my skin like it planned to stay.
I had always noticed Wren. I never let myself say it, not even in my own head, but I noticed. The way her curves filled out a sweater. The way she moved, soft and unhurried, in a pack full of hard, sharp people. Other men looked past her. I never understood how. Looking past Wren was like looking past the moon.
But she belonged to someone else. So I had spent years keeping my eyes to myself and my distance wide, and it had worked fine.
Until tonight.
Protect her.
My wolf had been pacing since the moment she crashed into me. Back and forth, back and forth, claws dragging against the inside of my chest. He had never behaved like this. Not before a battle. Not during one.
Protect her. Protect her. Protect.
Quiet, I told him. She's not ours to protect.
He snarled at me. My own wolf snarled at me.
I was still arguing with him when we reached the mansion steps and the front door swung open before I could touch it.
Darius stood in the doorway, and I watched my Alpha and best friend take one look at his sister and change. His easy grin died. His gray eyes went from her swollen face, to my jacket on her shoulders, to me, and turned to steel.
"What happened."
Not a question. A demand.
"Darius." Wren's voice wobbled. "Can we... inside. Please."
He stepped back and let us in. The entry hall was warm and gold, and it made her look worse. Under the lights I could see everything the dark had hidden. Eyes rubbed raw. Lips bitten. The tremor she was still fighting in her hands.
My wolf pressed against my ribs so hard it ached.
Darius guided her to the sitting room, sat her down, and knelt in front of her the way he used to when they were kids and she scraped a knee. "Talk to me, Wrennie."
And she did.
She told him everything, in a small, flat voice that hurt worse than crying would have. The surprise visit. The unlocked door. Selene's laughter through the bedroom door. I stood by the wall with my arms crossed, and I made myself into stone, because that is what I am good at.
Then she said, "He called me that fat girl."
Stone cracked.
"He said he only accepted the bond because I'm your sister. For status. Connections." Her fingers twisted in the hem of my jacket. "He said once he makes Elite warrior, he'll reject me anyway. In front of everyone if he has to. He said..." Her breath hitched. "He said desperate girls believe anything."
Silence.
The kind of silence that comes right before an avalanche.
I heard the fire crackle. I heard the clock on the mantel. I heard Wren's shaky breathing. And then I felt it, rolling off Darius in a slow, rising tide.
His aura exploded.
The lights flickered. The windows rattled in their frames. Pressure slammed through the room, thick and suffocating, the full weight of an Alpha's rage let off its chain. Somewhere upstairs, a door banged. Any other wolf would have been on their knees.
I didn't move. Partly because I was the only one in this pack strong enough not to.
Mostly because my own rage was worse.
It sat in me cold and quiet and patient, and that has always been the dangerous kind. Kellan's face hung in my mind. Two years of that smug smile at the head table. Two years of him sitting in the seat beside her, harvesting everything she gave him and calling her that behind a door he didn't even bother to lock.
Wren paid for the house. My hands curled slowly into fists. She skipped meals. She practiced a speech about forever.
"Darius." My voice came out level. Almost gentle. "Rein it in. You're scaring her."
He blinked. Looked at Wren, who had gone pale and small in the corner of the couch. The pressure vanished so fast the room seemed to inhale. He gathered her into his arms, and over her shoulder, his eyes found mine.
I pushed off the wall.
"I'll deal with Kellan," I said.
Simple. Calm. The way I say most true things.
Darius held my stare, and behind the gray of his eyes I saw his wolf rise up to meet mine, and there was nothing civilized in either of them.
"No," he said. "We will."
I nodded once. That was the whole negotiation. Twenty years of friendship makes some conversations very short.
What neither of us said out loud, and what neither of us fully understood yet, was that the decision had already been made somewhere deeper than words. In the oldest part of us, in the place where instinct keeps its ledgers, our wolves had already written Kellan's name on a very short list.
Enemy.
Not rival. Not problem. Enemy. The kind of marking that does not wash off, and does not end with a warning.
Wren shifted in her brother's arms, and her eyes drifted over his shoulder and found me across the room. Tired. Red-rimmed. Beautiful in a way that had no business hitting me as hard as it did in that moment.
"Thank you, Zephyr," she whispered. "For tonight."
My wolf went still. Then he said something to me, clear as a bell, in a voice I had never heard him use before.
She is not saying goodbye to us. Ever.
And standing in my best friend's house, with his heartbroken sister in his arms and my jacket still wrapped around her body, I realized something that should have sent me straight out that door and never coming back.
I didn't want to argue with him.
- Writer
