Ride or Die: The Alpha's Reckless Queen

Chapter 9: Mid-Transformation Crisis

There's a particular kind of humiliation in being rescued by a shirtless man mid-transformation.

It happened on a Tuesday, which felt like it should have been a more dramatic day of the week for something this absurd. I'd spent the morning learning, in bits and pieces from whichever pack member happened to be nearby, the basic shape of the rules I was now supposedly living under — don't wander past the northern tree line after dark, don't ask an unfamiliar wolf their rank directly, never touch someone mid-shift no matter how tempted you are to help. Nobody had thought to warn me about drunk brothers-in-law-to-be wandering the property line in broad daylight, which felt, in hindsight, like a significant oversight in my orientation.

Killian had gotten into the pack's private stock of something clear and terrible the night before, and by the time I found him at midday he was three sheets to the wind and wandering the edge of the property line, loud enough to be heard from the road.

I was hauling lumber toward the garage frame when I heard the voices — a hiker, lost, clearly, asking Killian in a confused, increasingly alarmed tone why his skin seemed to be "doing something weird," and Killian, drunk enough to have lost every ounce of his usual charm-based self-preservation, laughing and saying something about "just wait, it gets weirder" like this was the funniest thing that had happened to him all week.

I didn't think. I just moved.

"Hey!" I called out, jogging over before the hiker could get a clearer look at whatever Killian's skin was doing. "Sorry — my friend here's had a rough day. Ignore him, he gets a little theatrical when he's had one too many."

The hiker — mid-twenties, backpack, the kind of earnest outdoorsy look that suggested he had absolutely no context for what he'd almost witnessed — looked between us, uncertain, his eyes flicking down to Killian's forearm where the skin had gone strange and rippled for one horrifying second before smoothing back into something ordinary. "He said something about—his arm was doing something. I don't know. It looked—"

"Poison ivy," I said, before I'd fully thought it through, some instinct for cover stories apparently kicking in faster than my conscious brain could keep up with. "Bad reaction. He gets these welts sometimes, it's genuinely disgusting to look at, I keep telling him to see a doctor and he never listens."

"He says a lot of things," I said, steering Killian bodily away by the arm, feeling the shudder running under his skin like something alive and separate from him, fighting for control he was too drunk to hold onto properly. "Trust me, you don't want the whole story. Have a good hike."

The hiker left, unconvinced but unwilling to argue, and the second he was out of sight Killian's laughter cut off and his whole body convulsed, fur rippling up his forearms in a wave before receding just as fast, some instinct in him clawing the shift back down by sheer force of will.

"That was close," he said, entirely too casual for a man who'd nearly exposed an entire pack's existence to a stranger with a smartphone.

"That was reckless," I snapped, dragging him the rest of the way back toward the compound, adrenaline and fury finally catching up with me now that the danger had passed. "What is wrong with you?"

"You could have exposed the entire pack," I said, once the hiker was well out of earshot, dragging Killian the rest of the way toward the compound with considerably less gentleness than the situation probably called for. "Do you understand that? One phone video, one lucky angle, and forty-three lives change overnight, and none of them get a say in it because you decided drinking and wandering the property line sounded like a fun Tuesday."

"Reckless is my whole personality," Killian said, entirely unbothered, wiping sweat from his brow with the back of one hand. "You should see me on a good day."

"I don't want to see you on a good day if this is what a bad one looks like."

"That's fair," he admitted, and had the decency to look at least somewhat sheepish about it, though the effect was undercut by the fact that he was still swaying slightly on his feet. "In my defense, the whiskey seemed like an excellent idea about four hours ago, and nobody's told me yet at what point exactly that stopped being true."

"Somewhere around the part where you told a stranger his skin was 'about to get weirder.'"

"Yeah," he said, wincing. "In hindsight, that probably wasn't my finest moment."

I didn't get an answer, because that's when I noticed Ronan standing at the edge of the tree line, arms crossed, watching the whole thing unfold with an expression I couldn't quite place.

He'd seen all of it. The cover story. The instinct that had kicked in before I'd even had time to think it through, some part of me already treating this pack's secret as something worth protecting instead of exposing.

Killian, sensing the shift in temperature, muttered something about needing water and beat a hasty, still-swaying retreat, leaving me alone with Ronan in the cold afternoon light.

"Why would you protect us?" he asked, quiet, and there was something rawer in his voice than I'd heard from him before, something that sounded less like the Alpha and more like the man underneath it. "You could have let that go badly. You could have let the truth out and made this a lot simpler for yourself."

"I don't know," I admitted, and it was the truth, plain and uncomfortable. "It just felt like the right thing to do."

He stepped closer, close enough that I could feel the heat coming off him despite the cold, close enough that the air between us went thin and charged in a way that had nothing to do with the wolf business and everything to do with the way he was looking at my mouth like it was a question he badly wanted to answer.

He leaned in.

I felt my own breath catch, every nerve in my body suddenly, embarrassingly aware of exactly how close his mouth was to mine, the warmth radiating off him despite the cold afternoon, the particular way his eyes had darkened like something in him had stopped deciding and started simply wanting.

And then, at the very last second, he stopped himself — jaw tight, eyes shut for one long breath — and stepped back like he'd caught himself walking toward the edge of something he wasn't ready to fall off of yet.

"I should go check on my brother," he said, voice rough, already turning away before I could say anything at all. "Make sure he hasn't wandered off and started this whole mess over again with a different hiker."

"Ronan."

He stopped, back still to me, shoulders tense like he was bracing for whatever I was about to say.

"You don't have to run every time this happens," I said, quieter now, some of my earlier frustration draining out of me. "Whatever this is. You could just — tell me. Instead of almost-kissing me and then sprinting off like the ground's on fire."

"It's not that simple," he said, and there was real weight behind it, the kind that told me this wasn't stubbornness so much as fear, though fear of exactly what I still didn't understand. "Not yet. Maybe not for a while."

He left before I could push further. I stood there in the cold, watching him go, my pulse still hammering from a kiss that had never actually happened, and understood, with a sinking, unwelcome clarity, that whatever this pull between us was, it wasn't something either of us had any intention of naming out loud yet.