Broken Bond, Burning Vow

Chapter 5: The hunt turns

(Kaelen)

Three nights since the hot spring.

Three nights of him vanishing before I could look him in the eye. Three nights of lying awake with my thoughts eating me alive, replaying those words over and over.

You don't need to pretend with me.

He knows. All of it. And he didn't throw me out, didn't drag me to the pack elders, didn't do a single thing I'd prepared myself for. He just walked away and left me standing there in the steam, soaking wet and completely undone.

I can't keep waiting.

Tonight I push.

Midnight, and the house has finally gone still. I slip into the hallway barefoot, the floor cold under my feet. Under my arm I carry a silk robe I found tucked in the guest room closet — deep red, indecently short, belt already loose. Someone left it behind. A former lover, probably. Doesn't matter. It's exactly what I need.

His study door is closed but there's a thin line of gold underneath it.

He's still up.

I don't knock. I just turn the handle and push.

(Theron)

I hear her before she appears. Soft footsteps, the whisper of fabric, and then my door swings open.

Red silk. Bare legs. Hair down around her shoulders and eyes that are trying very hard to look like they know exactly what they're doing.

She came here on purpose.

I lean back in my chair and say nothing.

(Kaelen)

He doesn't ask why I'm here. Doesn't tell me to get out. Just watches me with that half-shadowed face and those eyes that catch the lamplight like embers.

I step inside. The door clicks shut behind me — loud in all that quiet — and I make myself walk toward him. My hands are shaking. I press them flat against my thighs so he won't see.

I stop at the edge of his desk.

"Alpha." My voice comes out softer than I mean it to. "I couldn't sleep."

His gaze drops to the robe. To where the fabric falls open at my chest. I left the belt loose on purpose and we both know it.

"I see," he says.

Two words. Nothing else.

My whole plan was to let him make the first move — but he just sits there, completely still, watching me like I'm something he's already figured out. So I go around the desk. His chair turns as I move, tracking me, and then I'm standing right in front of him, close enough that the hem of my robe brushes his knees.

I look down at him. His face is tilted up toward mine.

My breath snags in my throat.

(Theron)

She's close enough that I could count her eyelashes.

The robe stops mid-thigh. Her pulse is going wild — I can see it, that small desperate flutter at the base of her throat — and beneath all the performance, beneath the silk and the loose belt and the deliberate way she walked toward me, she's terrified. Not of me. Of the fact that she wants this.

She thinks she's the one running this.

I reach up and grab her wrist.

She gasps. I pull her forward and she stumbles, her knees catching the sides of my chair, and I'm already standing, lifting her, setting her on the edge of the desk. Papers go everywhere. Something tips over. She ends up sitting with her thighs bare and her chest heaving and her eyes enormous.

I step between her legs. Pin her wrists above her head.

She doesn't fight me at all.

(Kaelen)

Oh god.

His chest is solid against mine, his hips pushed hard between my thighs, and I can feel him — *all* of him — even through his pants. He's not hiding it. He's not pretending this isn't happening.

His face is an inch from mine. His eyes have gone completely black.

Then he growls. Low, from somewhere deep in his chest, and it moves through my whole body like a current.

"You want revenge," he says.

Everything in me goes cold and hot at once.

He knew. He's *always* known.

"I want a Luna." His voice is rough now, stripped of the usual control. "So let's make a deal. Before I lose my mind entirely."

His hips press harder and I feel exactly what that means. No ambiguity. No pretending.

He wants me.

But he's not giving me anything for free.

(Theron)

Her mouth falls open. She looks, for just a second, like herself — not the version she performs, just her, caught completely off guard.

I dip my head. My nose drags along her jaw and her skin is warm and she smells like honey and something like rain, and I can't help it — I turn my mouth against her throat and taste her.

Salt. Want. Heat.

The moan she makes is tiny and completely unguarded, the kind of sound that slips out before a person can stop it.

I pull back. Look at her. Cheeks flushed, lips parted, hands still exactly where I pinned them like she forgot she could move.

I let her wrists go and step back, putting cold air between us.

"Think carefully," I say. "I want your answer tomorrow."

(Kaelen)

He holds the door open and waits.

I'm still half-sitting on his desk with my robe twisted and my thighs pressed together and my body absolutely furious with me. I make myself slide down. Make myself walk. I keep my eyes on the floor because I know if I look at his face right now I'll do something I can't come back from.

I step into the hallway. The door closes at my back.

I flatten myself against the wall and just breathe.

He's using me the same way I was trying to use him. Of course he is. I should have seen it coming. But he still wants me, that much was obvious, and that means I still have leverage and I can still —

My wolf is silent.

Not the comfortable kind of silence. The kind that means she's heard me lying and doesn't have the heart to argue.

"I can use him harder than he can use me," I whisper into the dark hallway.

She still doesn't answer.

Because we already know what I'm not saying out loud.