THE MATE THE ROGUE ALPHA WAS MEANT TO KILL

Chapter 20—Heat

Ravin's POV

It started quietly and then all at once.

We were still under the shelter with the rain falling around us, her hands in my jacket and mine in her hair, and the kiss had shifted from soft into something with considerably more pull behind it, and that was when I felt it, that specific heat rising through my chest with a speed that had nothing to do with the weather and everything to do with her.

My wolf had been restless since the blood moon but this was different, this was directed and locked onto her specifically with an urgency that had no interest in being managed quietly, and for once in my life I did not immediately try to manage it.

She pulled back slightly and looked at my face, and I watched the moment she noticed, her expression shifting into something careful and curious at the same time.

"Your eyes," she said.

"I know."

She held my gaze steadily. "Are you on heat?"

There was no performance in the question, no discomfort, just a girl who had recently come into her wolf asking something direct because she recognised what she was seeing, and I looked at her for a moment before saying, "Yes."

Something moved through her expression, and then she said, "Have you been with anyone before?"

"Yes," I said.

"I haven't," she said, her voice steady and without apology, "but I would not mind you being my first," and pulled me back before I could respond, kissing me with a charge behind it that had not been there sixty seconds ago, and I felt the heat spike hard in response and stopped trying to manage it.

My hands moved through her hair and she pressed closer. I kissed her deeper, tongues sliding hot and needy, then trailed my mouth down her neck, sucking and licking until she shivered and moaned softly.

My fingers worked open the buttons of her shirt one by one, parting the fabric to expose her breasts. I cupped one in my hand, thumb brushing the stiff peak, then lowered my head and sucked it into my mouth, tongue swirling slow and wet around her n****e while she arched into me with a gasp.

She moaned louder, her fingers tightening in my hair. I switched to the other breast, sucking harder, greedy for the way her body responded. My free hand slipped lower, under her skirt, finding her soaked panties. I rubbed her c**t gently through the thin fabric at first, then pushed them aside to stroke the slick, swollen little bud directly with my fingertips, slow teasing circles that made her hips twitch and her moans come quicker.

"f**k, you are so wet," I murmured against her breast before sucking again, pulling her n****e deep while my fingers kept teasing her c**t, light and deliberate, building the tension without pushing inside. She trembled, breathing ragged, her moans filling the quiet shelter.

I pulled my hand back, brought my fingers to my mouth, and tasted her. Sweet and addictive. "You taste so good," I told her, voice rough with need, then slid my hand back down to tease her c**t again, rubbing a little firmer now, loving how she rocked against my touch, slick and desperate.

The heat pounded in me, my c**k straining, every instinct screaming to take her right there. But I forced myself to stop, pulling my hand away and lifting my head from her breasts.

Not because I wanted to, every part of me wanted to keep going, but I pulled back enough to see her face and she looked at me with an expression that was question and trust in equal measure, and that expression was precisely why I stopped.

Not the heat, not the rain, not the shelter or the empty grounds around us. Just her face and the way she was looking at me like she had already decided she trusted me completely and was simply waiting to see what I would do with that.

"Not here," I said quietly, and she started to say my name but I held her gaze and meant it. "Not here, not like this. You deserve more than a shelter in the rain on school grounds, and when it happens I want it to be right for both of us."

She studied me carefully, reading my face the way she had learned to do over the last few weeks, and I could see her deciding something behind her eyes before she said, "You are not saying no."

"I am saying not yet," I said, and reached up and began buttoning her shirt back slowly, deliberately, each button a conscious decision, and she let me without argument but her eyes never left my face, and there was something in the way she watched me do it that made the whole thing considerably harder than it should have been.

When I was done I rested my forehead briefly against hers and breathed through the heat until it pulled back into something I could hold, which took longer than I would have liked and required more discipline than almost anything else I had done recently, and she stayed still and let me find my way back to steady without filling the silence with anything.

"Go inside," I said quietly, and she looked at me for one more long moment, something warm and patient in her expression, before stepping back and turning and walking through the rain toward the dormitory entrance, and I stood under the shelter and watched her go until the door closed behind her.

The rain continued falling and I stood there in the quiet of it with the heat slowly pulling back now that she was gone, and in the space it left behind something else settled with the weight of a realisation I had been approaching for weeks and had finally arrived at completely.

Every day with her made the thought of losing her more terrifying than anything the curse had ever threatened me with, and the curse had threatened me with everything, my wolf, my pack, my authority and everything I had built from nothing after being cast out and left to find my own way in a world that had decided I did not belong in it, and I had carried that threat since childhood without flinching because I had decided early that fear was not something I would let govern how I moved through the world.

But this was different from any of that, this was not the fear of losing power or position or the life I had built, this was the fear of losing her specifically, this girl who arrived early to a garden and laughed before the funny part and held her ground against people twice her confidence and looked at me like I was worth trusting before I had given her nearly enough reason to, and standing in the rain with the door closed between us I understood for the first time what it would actually cost me to lose her.

Losing my wolf would take everything I had built.

Losing her would take something I had not known I was building until it was already there, something that had no name yet but that sat in my chest with the weight of something permanent, and the rain kept falling and I stood in it and let that realisation settle all the way down.