Carolina Moon

The Perimeter of the Heart: Tess

The truck was full of the scent of the marshland, old upholstery, and K.C.’s feverish heat. The smell of pine and clove radiated off him in waves. Outside the truck, Cypress Hollow was a wall of black, the Spanish moss hanging off the trees like tattered ghosts in the headlights.

I watched K.C. drive. His jaw was so tight, I could see the muscle jumping. I realized that while I had been looking for hidden cameras, he’d been looking for threats. Neither one of us had fully left the war behind. I couldn’t stop thinking about the note or the coin. The message was clear: there was no such thing as retirement. K.C. was either a leader or a loose end.

K.C. pulled into my driveway, and we just sat there for a long minute, the truck engine idling. He had taken his seatbelt off, but he hadn’t moved to open his door or even shut off the engine. Instead, his eyes tracked the perimeter of my front yard. He looked like a soldier returning to the trenches.

After a long moment, he finally shut off the engine, then slid out of the truck. He came around to my side, and opened the door, then walked me up to the front porch. As we climbed the front steps, I got that skin-crawling feeling again that we were being watched. “K.C.,” I started as I unlocked my door. I turned to look at him. “Don’t go back to the cabin tonight. Please, not with that car out there. Stay here.”

He lifted his hand to tuck a stray hair behind my ear. “Okay,” he murmured, his voice so low, I almost couldn’t hear it.

I let him in and immediately locked the door behind us. My bungalow was small and cozy. I had filled it with old books and dried flowers, making it a point to look nothing like the cold penthouse at the top of the Whitmore Building. There was a very distinct lack of high-security.

K.C. collapsed onto my velvet sofa. His breath was ragged, his eyes closed. I brought him water and a cold cloth for his forehead. He laid back and I pulled a throw blanket over him. I sat on the edge of the coffee table, my eyes tracing the silvered scars that lined his neck from the war I’d helped him end.

“K.C.,” I said softly, my fingers trailing through his hair.

He trembled at my touch. “Tess…”

“You’re sick,” it wasn’t a question, but a statement he could no longer deny.

“I don’t have a pack. I’m dying of my own power, like a heart trying to pump without a body.”

I felt a cold shock go through me. I was still an auditor. I understood systems. I understood that energy had to go somewhere or else the vessel shattered. “The Alpha energy,” I whispered. “It’s supposed to flow out to the Pack and back to you, but there’s no one to catch it.”

“It just… builds,” he admitted. His eyes were bloodshot. “Like a fever that never breaks. I thought I could handle it. I thought if I worked hard enough, if I stayed away from the politics, it would just fade. But my wolf… he doesn’t understand retirement. He thinks we’re being buried alive.”

He looked so small on my sofa, this man who had once commanded a small army from the shadows of a warehouse. He had given up a throne for a timber yard and a chance to sit across from me at a diner, and it was literally killing him.

“You’re not going back to that cabin,” I said, my voice hardening into that tone I used when I found a billion dollar discrepancy. “And you’re not sleeping on the couch. I’m not letting you out of my sight tonight.”

I helped him up, his body heat radiating through his flannel like a furnace. We moved into my bedroom, a space he hadn’t seen before. It was small, smelling of lavender and the old paper of the books that were stacked on my nightstand. I didn’t care about the propriety of it.

I sat him on the edge of my bed and kicked off my combat boots. “Lie down.”

He obeyed, lying on top of the covers. His movements were sluggish. I laid down beside him, fully dressed, staring up at the shadows the ceiling fan cast on the walls. I could hear his heart, fast and frantic.

“Tess,” he breathed in the dark. “I’m sorry. I wanted to give you a normal life. I wanted to be the guy who just…existed. Without the teeth.”

“I don’t need a normal life, K.C.,” I said, turning onto my side to face him. The moonlight through the blinds striped his face like bars. “I just need you alive. We’re going to beat this sickness. There has to be a way to bleed off this energy without a pack. A ground wire. I’ll find it.”

He reached out, his hand finding mine in the space between us. His grip was weak, but his skin was finally starting to cool as the tension of the day broke. “You always were the smartest person in the room.”

“I just knew the right numbers to look at,” I corrected softly.

Silence settled over the room, the kind of heavy, humid quiet that only exists in the south. I watched his chest rise and fall, waiting for his breathing to even out into sleep. I was almost there myself, drifting on the scent of pine and the sound of the cicadas outside.

Then I heard it.

A heavy thud on the planks of my front porch outside. Not the sound of a stray cat or a shifting branch. It was the sound of a footstep.

K.C.’s eyes snapped open in the dark, the amber glowing like twin embers. He didn’t move, but I felt his entire body go rigid. Someone wasn’t just watching us anymore. They were on the doorstep.