The Alpha's Forbidden Pact

CHAPTER 16: CLOSER QUARTERS

The lockdown started before I even went back inside.

By the time I crossed the threshold, Kade was already in the front hallway checking the locks on every window. Theo passed me with a radio in his hand and a look that said the conversation in the yard had reached everyone. No one asked me how I was. They only moved around me like the walls themselves had gotten thinner.

Damaris’s orders were simple, two of them with me at all times. No exceptions. No short trips. No closed doors unless one of them was on the other side of it.

Kade drew the first shift.

He did not speak when he followed me upstairs. He only waited in the doorway of my room while I washed my face and changed into clean clothes. When I came back out, he was still there, arms crossed, eyes on the hallway behind me instead of on my face.

“You do not have to stand by the door,” I said.

“Yes, I do.”

I sat on the edge of the bed. He stayed where he was. The silence between us had a new weight now that both of us knew exactly what one wrong step would cost.

After a while, the quiet became too loud.

“I am going downstairs,” I said. “I need water.”

He stepped aside to let me pass, then followed two paces behind. The kitchen was empty. Theo had moved to the front room. The house felt staged, every light on, every shadow checked.

I opened the cupboard for a glass. Kade reached for the same shelf at the same time.

Our hands met on the cool edge of the plate stack.

Neither of us pulled away.

The contact was light. Barely there. The side of his thumb against the side of my finger. Heat moved up my wrist so fast it made my breath catch. I felt the exact second he noticed it too. His hand tensed, but he did not lift it.

We stood like that, frozen over an open cupboard, while the refrigerator hummed and the clock on the stove ticked once, twice, three times.

I turned my head. He was already looking at me. The careful distance he had worn for years was gone. In its place was something rawer, something that had been waiting under the surface since the night he first stepped back from me and every night after.

“Kade,” I said, very quietly.

His name came out unsteady.

He still did not move his hand. His voice, when it came, was low and rough.

“I know.”

The air between us felt charged enough to spark. I could smell the soap on his skin and the faint scent of the outdoors he always carried. I could see the pulse moving in his throat. My own heart was beating so hard I was sure he could feel it through the slight press of our hands.

Somewhere in the house a door closed. The sound broke the moment without ending it.

Kade’s eyes dropped to where our hands still touched. He looked at the contact like a man staring at a live wire. Then, slowly, he shifted his fingers, not away, but along mine until his thumb rested against the inside of my wrist. Right over the place he had grabbed me days ago.

The pact did not break.

The world did not end.

But something in his face changed, as if he had just tested a boundary he had never allowed himself to test and found it still holding, for now.

He held the touch one second longer. Then another.

My breath had gone shallow. I did not pull away. I could not. The warmth of his skin against the thin skin of my wrist felt like the first honest thing that had happened in days.

Footsteps sounded in the hallway, coming closer.

Kade’s hand finally left mine. The loss of contact was sharp. He stepped back just as Theo appeared in the kitchen doorway, radio still in hand.

Theo looked at both of us. Whatever he saw made him pause.

“Everything all right?” he asked.

Kade’s voice came out even. “Fine. Just getting water.”

Theo’s gaze lingered a moment longer, then he nodded and moved on.

Kade reached past me, careful not to touch this time, and took a glass down from the shelf. He filled it and set it on the counter beside my hand without looking at me.

“Drink,” he said.

I picked up the glass. My fingers still tingled where his had been.

He leaned against the opposite counter, arms folded, eyes on the floor. The space between us was only a few feet, but it felt measured now, deliberate, as if both of us were counting the cost of every inch.

I drank the water without tasting it.

Outside, the night pressed against the windows. Inside, the new rules of the house settled around us like a second set of walls. Closer. Tighter. Leaving less and less room to pretend the distance had ever been easy.