Primal Instinct

20-WAKING UP

The first thing I knew was scent.

Not light, not sound—scent. Cedar. Smoke. Steel. A clean heat that clung to the sheets, the pillows, the air in my lungs. It wrapped around me before the rest of the world came into focus, heavy and grounding and so familiar now that my chest ached with it.

My eyes opened slowly. The ceiling above me wasn’t the one from my suite. This room was bigger, darker, the ceiling higher. Thick beams crossed overhead, carved with faint, looping symbols that caught the first thin strokes of dawn. The light coming in wasn’t the soft, gray wash from my narrow window. It was warmer, gold, spilling across a wall of glass that faced the mountains.

His room. I realized it in pieces. The sheets under me weren’t hotel cotton. They were a deep, matte charcoal, smooth as water, cool against the bare skin of my thighs. The mattress didn’t dip the way mine did; it held me, firm and steady, like it had never known cheap springs. The air was warmer than the hallways outside, but not stuffy; it carried a faint current of night wind and something wilder threaded through the cedar and smoke.

I shifted and everything in my body protested at once. Not sharp pain—just a deep, full-body ache, like every muscle had been clenched for days and finally let go. My limbs felt heavy, my nerves too awake. I was tired and wired all at once.

The heat fever was gone.

That realization hit as I cautiously took stock. No more wildfire in my veins. No more crawling, desperate need that made the world blur at the edges. The burn that had taken over my body, that made my skin feel too tight and my bones too small, had receded.

What was left was…strange. Not empty, not really. Something hummed quietly under my skin, softer but constant. Like a bass line under a song, easy to miss until you listened for it.

I rolled onto my back slowly, wincing as tight muscles stretched. The sheet slid over my stomach, my hip, cool where my skin still held phantom heat. My fingers brushed a sore spot high on my side. I looked down.

A faint shadow marked my hip. Not purple-black like a bruise from impact—more like the echo of pressure, his hand-shaped. Right where he’d held me when he’d murmured in my ear to be still. I swallowed, my throat going dry.

The memories came not as clear snapshots but in flashes, cold air and hot skin. His body behind mine, his arm a band around my waist. His voice, ragged and too deep, telling me to stop moving because he couldn’t. The way the heat had broken in sharp, electric relief when his control finally did.

I squeezed my eyes shut, my stomach flipping between shame, relief, and something I refused to name. We hadn’t gone all the way. I knew that. Whoever I was now, I still knew where that line was and that we hadn’t crossed it. But we had crossed something else, something invisible and much more dangerous.

I could feel it humming now, right under my sternum. Little rabbit. Mine. The words hadn’t been spoken out loud in this quiet room, but they replayed anyway, layered with two voices that were only one. Trenton, restrained and furious. And the other thing inside him—Remus—older and hungrier, whose possessiveness had made the walls seem to bend.

I lifted my hand.

The inside of my wrist was tender, the skin faintly flushed where his fingers had wrapped around it last night—not to hurt, but to hold me in place when my body tried to steal more of him than he wanted to give. I ran my thumb over that spot, testing.

Tingle. A shiver ran up my arm and into the place in my chest where the quiet hum lived. For a second, it intensified—just a notch higher, like someone turning up a dimmer on low light.

“What is going on?” I whispered.

The room didn’t answer. But something else did. A single, heavy beat thudded low inside me—not my own heartbeat. Mine was quick and stuttering against my ribs. This was slower, deeper, like it had come from somewhere far away and echoed through me by mistake.

Ba-thump.

Silence.

My breath caught. “Nope,” I told the empty room, voice too shaky to sound confident. “Absolutely not. We are not doing weird phantom cardio right now.”

No answer. Just the slow pale light climbing the wall, painting everything in softer gold. The sky outside the glass wall was bruised-purple fading into early blue. The mountains rose in their dark, jagged lines, the trees nothing but black shadow and mist.

Somewhere far below, a howl rose—the sound distant but clear in the quiet morning. It wasn’t the theatrical horror-movie kind. It was real. Long, controlled, rolling over the valley with a weight that made the hairs on my arms stand up.

My skin prickled in answer. Great. Add that to the growing list of things I couldn’t explain.

I pushed the sheet away and swung my legs over the edge of the bed. The floor was cool, polished dark wood that didn’t creak under my weight. The movement made every muscle in my thighs remind me about last night, pulling tight then releasing. My hips felt looser, my lower back sore in that pulled-muscle way, my core exhausted from fighting against something my body clearly hadn’t wanted to resist.

“Not thinking about it,” I muttered. “Not doing that to myself.”

Because if I thought about it, I’d have to admit that the worst of the pain—the agonizing, choking ache that had made breathing feel like punishment—had only stopped when he’d touched me. When he’d given in. When I’d begged.

The air in here smelled so much like him that it was hard to think straight. The room itself made it worse.

It was dark and sleek like the rest of the estate—stone and glass and expensive lines—but there were pieces of him everywhere once I knew to look. A row of cufflinks laid out neatly on a tray. A watch on the nightstand, heavy and masculine, the face turned face-down. A folded jacket on the back of a leather chair. A low bookshelf with worn spines that I wouldn’t in a million years have guessed for him, some titles underlined, corners folded.

His chain was gone. His pinky ring, too. He’d left nothing of himself behind but scent and the impression of his weight in the mattress beside me.

He hadn’t crawled into bed and held me while I slept. He’d held me until the worst of the fever broke, until my body softened under his hand instead of trying to climb his, and then at some point—quietly, efficiently—he’d left. Of course he had.

I stood carefully, waiting a second to see if the world would tilt. It did, a little. My head felt light, my muscles loose and shaky like I’d worked out too hard after not working out at all. The shirt I wore wasn’t mine. It was his.

One of his soft black long-sleeve tees, thinner than the usual dress shirts, smelling like him so strongly it made my stomach flutter. I pushed the sleeves up my arms and tried to ignore how safe it made me feel.

Don’t get attached, Nai. He couldn’t have made it clearer.